Is Bob Dylan a demented old fogey?

Bahahahahaha, put that in your pipe and smoke it, RIAA.

I don't entirely agree, because I've heard cds here and there that sound incredibly warm and full regardless of the stereo set-up. For the most part, though, Shakey Mo is right. It's the studio end of things that has screwed up modern music. Engineers read manuals and press buttons now, ready to move on to the next high paying client. Taking the time to mic rooms right and let the music dictate the techniques used to record it died out a while back.

Looking at this from a "kids today...and their music!" perspective, and not one that is judging modern radio production, I can't really blame him, or any older person, for saying things like this. If you don't pay the price for certain kinds of knowledge (either because you don't know how or it's too high a cost or you don't want to) you're going to be in the dark about it.

Back in the 1950 and 1960s Bob Dylan probably didn't even need to look hard for new music or music that interested him personally, he probably had about a zillion friends or wannabe friends who were hip to every scene and wanted to point him in the direction of "new good music" that he would like. I would imagine that Bob Dylan in 2006 would have a harder time finding out where to get information on new music that he would like. There are probably all sorts of bands and music that have come out this year that Bob Dylan would love, the problem is it is no longer easy for him to get access to it.

When people get older they may not know where to find new good music, they may find it too bothersome and costly find new good music, or they may not even want to look for new good music. They've often fallen out of the culture and find it hard to get back in. It happens to most people as they age on a wide variety of subjects, not just pop music.

That, and obviously there's been a shifting cultural taste since 1965 that's probably moved away from certain things Bob Dylan happened to like. But the shifting cost of knowledge is one of the reasons people are prone to saying things like Bob Dylan is saying about "today's music."

Um...huh?

Back in the 1950 and 1960s Bob Dylan probably didn't even need to look hard for new music or music that interested him personally, he probably had about a zillion friends or wannabe friends who were hip to every scene and wanted to point him in the direction of "new good music" that he would like.

xpost. aye.

that might not be true, though.

One reason magazines like Mojo are so successful is that they essentially say to older people "Do you like Classic Rock? Has pop music made no sense to you since 1975? Don't worry! We love the same music you like and we might even be able to point you in the direction of some other music you've never heard of that you'll like!" These Baby Boomers probably have no other cheap way of discovering music and Mojo capitalizes on that. They stick the Beatles on the cover and get their audience hooked on the familiar before they slip them more and more obscure stuff. People in their 40s, 50s and 60s can be quite busy and generally can't afford to spend as much time and energy looking for new pop music. It's much easier for them if there's an article on the Super Furry Animals located inbetween articles on Beach Boys and the Beatles. The internet is too intimidating and most of the other avenues are even more difficult to navigate.

The cost of finding new pop that you like can be very high as you get older, (especially if you are clueless on the internet). Unless Bob Dylan has a prescription to Mojo I doubt he is going to be in contact with anything that he likes and that will expose him to new music that he likes, hence his dislike for everything from the past twenty years.

Quote of the year.

He's had Jack White come onstage with him, and they played a White Stripes song. And he clearly loves hip hop, based on Chronicles.

He's probably referring to ProTools and all the digital production techniques that make most records sound the same.

Post grunge, ie Nickelback, Fuel, Creed, etc, all in dropped D tuning and protooled to death so every raw bit is taken out.

Plus every emo band. I will not name them.

You're getting all excited to start calling me a rockist, aren't you?

Bob Dylan's comments are sad, and quite surprising for an artist of his comparative vision and depth.

xpost

TCB, 'most records' != 'most emo/grunge records', a scene(s) I hold little interest in regardless.

An accusation of rockism is the Godwin's Law of ILM.

It's simply a fact which can be proved with science. Digital technology is founded on bit-rate sampling. A CD is recorded and mastered at 16-bit. Sampling has A LONG way to go before it can emulate the full frequency spectrum and warmth of analog.

For example, digital vs. analog in the effect pedal world:

http://www.skreddypedals.com/digital_sucks/index.htm

He's not talking about the MUSIC he's talking about the MEDIUMS that contain the music and the technologies favored over the past 20 years to capture music.

This is a key point.

it actually seems like dylan has never developed much faith in himself as a producer. he seems to value, even defer to, outside input even when it fails his music.

i like when bob johnston was "producing" him in new york or nashville. much of the stuff that comes after sounds really tinny, thin, or just badly recorded/mixed in general. "planet waves" should sound a LOT better than it does. "blood on the tracks" is ok, i like the close-mic'ed guitar although it gets a bit samey. "desire" sounds crappy. most of dylan's 80s albums sound simply atrocious. and i don't like the lanois stuff much, though that's more obviously a matter of taste.

what's odd about all this is that to some extent dylan seems to know his own strengths, on those rare occasions when he's served as his own producer--the last lp, if i'm not mistaken, and those two acoustic records he cut in the 1990s. those all sound pretty nice, i like the vocals front and center.

isn't he back to working with lanois again for the new one?

strangely i think his opus maudit "live at budokan" is nicely recorded.

BILL FLANAGAN: You're famous for going into the studio and recording very quickly to catch the moment. But a couple of your recent albums, Slow Train Coming and Infidels, were more labored over.

BOB DYLAN: See, when I started to record they just turned the microphones on and you recorded. That was the way they did it back in the sixties. Whatever you got on one side of the glass was what came in on the controls on the other side of the glass. It was never any problem. What you did out front was what you got on the tape. And it always happened that way. Whether you played by yourself or played with a band didn't really matter--there'd be leakage and that stuff but you were pretty much guaranteed that whatever you did on that side of the glass as going to be perceived the same kind of way. I kept working that way through the seventies. I didn't realize that things had changed! (Laughs.) I really didn't. I don't think I knew you could do an overdub until 1978. I just didn't think about it. Maybe I was just so outside of it that I hadn't realized that. The problem is, you can't record that way anymore. If you go into the studio now, the technology is so different that you might have a live sound that you want and you'll put that live sound down, but it won't sound that way on the other side of the glass. So then you have to contrive the sound to make it sound the way you really want. In other words, if you want to sound a certain way, whatever that way is, it'll never happen in the studio.

...So he's been talking about this stuff for a long time (not that he might not have a point). And I remember another interview with Neil Young where he talked about the 44.1 kHz sampling rate and said it was a "real bummer".

But I said there were a couple of possible reasons why Bob Dylan seemingly dislikes modern music. The high cost of learning how to work new technology is just one of the costs old people have to deal with and it has a way of discouraging them in a lot of ways. It's probably a combination of a lot of things for Bob Dylan, but the high cost of learning about certain things is probably one of them.

He has also played Prince (not so modern, haha) and... The Streets.

everyone: "Eat yrself fitter!"

blimey, slow today!

Personally I'm over the fucking moon that Dylan's said this. I hope the timing isn't coincidental. I hope he's read me, or that someone he knows has, and has said to him, "Look, Bob, even some of the kids realise this, speak out about it." People listen in a very different way now to how they did 40... 30... even ten years ago. Five years ago! We don't listen as fans anymore, we listen as consumers, and that means we pay less attention. The sound of modern records is deliberately unsatisfying in order to make us buy more records!

Listen to He Poos Clouds and then listen to Keane. Listen to Muse and then listen to Siamese Dream. REALLY listen. Pay attention to the drum sounds, the timbre of the guitars, the space between instruments, the balance and dynamism. Most current mainstream music has had a huge amount of realism, of excitement, sucked out of it in the prusuit of some kind of "perfection". CDs are pretty inconsequential to the problem - if you use them properly you can get them to sound absolutely amazing (crank up Laughing Stock!) - it's hyper-driven consumer markets that are the problem, and weak engineers and stupid musicians.

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/imperfect-sound-forever-revisited.htm
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/a-diary-of-sound.htm
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/cars-football.htm
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/the-public-gets-what-the-public-wants.htm

And the old man does have a point.

thing is i think they know what they're doing -- *that's what they want*.

But the thing is that, you know, a decent pair of headphones, an iPod, and some decet bitrate files = good sound, realistic, enjoyable, warm, involving. It's not REALLY the fault of the medium, because the medium, if used properly, is up to it. It'll never be as good as a hi-fi, but Lambchop sound a damn site better than Muse on my iPod AND on my hi-fi.

wait, which are the good ones? i will never know unless you tell me.

i do think it is probably more a case of people doing the EASY thing when recording digitally and not taking time to make allowances for the flaws in the system. in other words, a lot of people think that you can press record and turn everything up and it will sound great all by itself cuz the sound is so shiny and clear!

Scary thing is, he's meant to be producing the new Acoustic Ladyland album - they're a fucking jazz band!

My life is weighed down with weariness already.

in the case of bloc party at least, it's the desired effect. "we wanted it to sound cold, fascistic and hollow."

xpost

"Danny [Lanois] asked me what I'd been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn't have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called 'The Breaks,' had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren't standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over the cliffs. They were all poets and they knew what was going on... The kind of music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn't tell him that, but that's how I honestly felt."

Yet Dylan has grown a more cynical outer shell, from which part of the cynicism, in the corrosive form of some kind of self-contempt, some denigration of his own artistry, has seeped inside. It damages the very integrity it was meant to protect. It makes for a whole series of ways in which he appears to give less, care less and respect his own talent less, and it delivers him into demeaning situations and tawdry dullnesses his best self would avoid. Indeed it was by his avoidance of shabbiness and ennui that his best self taught us in the beginning what unfaltering nimble grace was possible for the popular artist in the marketplace.

Among the ways this decline manifests itself most damagingly for his art is in the matter of the sheer technical quality of his recordings. Bob Dylan tells Bill Flanagan (in Written in My Soul) that ‘When I hear my old stuff I just think of how badly it was recorded.’ Yet this is the opposite of the truth. Almost without exception, the work Dylan has recorded since the start of the 1980s is markedly inferior, technically, not only to what is and should be possible but to what was achieved on his own earliest work.

The deleterious effect applies all round but especially in what happens to his vocals. Listen to the way the voice is recorded on any track on the first four albums, and it’s right there: you hear the detail of the voice vividly, as it chisels out each crystalline syllable; you hear every intake of breath, and you hear how each exhalation is distributed along the lines he sings. You register every nuance, feel every surface, receive all that close-up intelligence of communication, the infinitely variable, fluid expressiveness of it. This is how it should be. This is how to bring out the genius of his singing, in which these intakes of breath, these chiseled inflections that change moment by moment, these almost silent sighs, are all integral: all alive, interdependent dynamics in his uniquely intensive vocal detailing. He wasn’t joking when he famously described his songs as ‘exercises in tonal breath control’. There’s an equivalence here to what’s meant in a remark about blues guitar playing that Stanley Booth recounts in Rythm Oil: ‘An old black Memphis musician stood one night in an alley beside a young white guitarist, pointed to the stars, and said, ‘‘You don’t plays de notes—you plays de molecules.’’’ This is how Dylan’s voice is when it gives you goosebumps. To capture it demands close attention from the vocal mike, like a diamond under a magnifying glass: and on the early albums it gets it. It more or less gets it too on the solo ‘Spanish Is the Loving Tongue’, the Folkways: A Vision Shared track ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’, on Oh Mercy tracks like ‘Ring Them Bells’ (‘we’ve recaptured some of the quality that the early records had; you can really hear him in the foreground’, said LANOIS) and some of ‘‘Love and Theft’’; but on the whole it’s absent and there’s no such care and attention on the work of the 1980s onwards. Listen to the 3-D vividness, the shining, buoyant (pretransistorised?) presence of the voice either in the studio on, say, ‘To Ramona’ or ‘North Country Blues’ (to cite two vocals that are in other ways stylistically quite different) or in concert on 1963’s ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’. And then listen to the dry, flattened out, wrong-end-of-a-megaphone recording the vocals get (incompetently tricked out with phony echo) on Empire Burlesque.

Or listen to ‘Maybe Someday’, a song that would be terrific if the voice weren’t half-way to sounding like a Chipmunks parody of Dylan recorded from the far side of a football field. The difference in recording quality between the vocal on a track like this (recorded in 1986) and on, say, ‘Black Crow Blues’ (1964) is simply pathetic. Or listen to the disparity between the recording quality of ARTHUR ALEXANDER’s 1959, one-track-tape-deck cut of ‘Sally Sue Brown’ and Bob Dylan’s 1987, 24-or-48-track cut of the same song. Alexander’s voice is, as Dylan’s once was, right there; Dylan’s seems to
be flailing around inside the dishwasher.

I mean, never?

"Maybe Someday" being the title of the first track on the first album by Incredible String Band, an album Dylan seems to have been familiar with... coincidence? You, the viewer, decide...

i never watch my old movies. once they are in the can, i'm outta there.

I do think he's talking about production methods, not music quality.
I find "modern" recording styles physically tiring - listened to Iron Maiden's Killers for the first time in ages and was shocked at how good it sounded. It's probably also why I think The Milk-Eyed Mender is the best album so far this decade.

It's only recently that recording engineers have started to come to terms with the rise of solid-state amps / compression / digital recording and their sum effects on the recording process.

I also think "Planet Waves" (my favorite Dylan LP) sounds great - tight, thin, quivering with energy... perfect for the songs and general vibe. Though the original CD (from the '80s) sounds muffled, and loses a lot of detail... and the remastered CD from a few years back was a lot worse - all lush and leaden, like the levels were just jacked up thoughtlessly (I sold it back right away). As much as I'm not into this line in general, "you really should get the original vinyl"... it's usually in used bins pretty cheap.

he did! he's on blow's 1986 album kingdom blow.

shut the fuck up! fer real?

True. There's nothing inherently wrong with digital recording either (especially not it's current 24-bit incarnation) or with CDs but I can see why someone very performance-focused might want to shy away from the former.

There's no reason why you can't use hard disk like tape but few engineers will - there's too much temptation to comp the 'perfect' vocal out of 45 snippets culled from 10 takes (you can just about do this with tape, and people did and perhaps still do, but it's intensely laborious). The limitations of analogue recording can foster a greater attention to getting a good sound or performance and then just leaving it be.

And then there's the infinite possibilities of digital mastering...

I do not understand this reference!

Bad production is bad, mmkay. But it's not because of CDs.

wikipedia sez so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurtis_Blow

and so does trouser press:
"Kingdom tops that in the cameo stakes: the first voice you hear belongs to Bob Dylan."
http://www.trouserpress.com/entry.php?a=kurtis_blow

That doesn't really ring true to me. I mean, overarranged compared to what?

brian eno thinks so (in a way):

"But now I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. Musicians enjoy drawing on that finesse (and audiences respond to its exercise), so when muscular activity is rendered useless, the creative process is frustrated."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.01/eno.html

i'd put the apex in the early '70s, but same basic concept. these things also reached their apex in the '60s and '70s, not at all coincidentally: electric guitar manufacturing, electric keyboard manufacturing, home stereo manufacturing, lots of other such stuff.

...IMHO

I think he's talking about compressing the dynamic range out of vocals and every note being pitch perfect...

...it's why i don't like beyonce or christina aguilera theres no character in their voices

that is one OTM and poetic soundbite! i would like matthew herbert and bob dylan to make a record together.

Although I did proceed to buy two of his other proper albums on cassette, my flirtation with his music was quite short lived, nearly 10 years ago.

But there's a particular album I realize I don't have now and I'm working on rectifying that.

But god please don't tell my good friend grimly fiendish, who absolutely hates Dylan with a passion.

This is not in any way meant to imply I have all his albums, it's just that there's one I feel a need to have right now. That would bring my Dylan album ownership to a grand total of 4. Brit self-deprecation suits me.

I just heard a some bumper music of what sounds like an AMAZINGly weird live version of Tambourine Man, sounds very recent. Strange (different?) chord changes, wild harmonica....wow

Dylan: "What's a computer?"

― Marmot (marmotwolof), Tuesday, August 22, 2006 9:45 PM (4 years ago)

Demented old fogey covers 'Eat Yrself Fitter' would be quite something.