If Bob Dylan isn't the greatest living songwriter in the English language, then who is?

I don't know who else to offer up at the moment, because I'd need to think about it--but I don't think Bob's the man for the job. He's got great ideas but tends to wallow in them and produce generic, boring crap before moving on to the next idea. (Folk to country/western to rock n' roll to pop to god knows what)...

Tom Waits. You can argue that he has the same problem Dylan does--that he has had a few distinct career phases, and has run them all into the ground. I just don't see Waits producing anywhere in his career songs as bad as the worst of Dylan's.

By the way, I'm using an 'unreliable narrator' answering this question too, so I might mean it or I might not. The answers, my friends, are blowing in the wind.

I'm often inclined to agree w/ Jesse, as I'm a full-on Dylan fanatic (and there is no way that charlatan Waits even comes close to Dylan). Agree with Ian that his symbolist period was astonishing. Synapses firing at a blinding rate. But I also want to ask Ian if he's actually listened to all those other Dylan records, or just read the Rolling Stone record guide coventional wisdom? To call it rote "blues" or whatever is missing the point. Are we talking pure pop pleasure or lyrics here?

We have to define terms a bit. Songwriter refers to a bunch of disparate modes of production. Writers like Porter and Berlin, when music was as likely to be consumed as sheet music as recording? Office wonks like the Brill Building stable? Auteurs like Dylan, writing for "albums"? Writer-producers like Lindsay Buckingham and Prince, who write with a conception of melody/line/layered-sound/kick-ass-piano-and-guitar-breakdowns (like in "Hold Me")?

Tom Waits, I'd put him somewhere in there with Lou and Leonard. I mean, I love all these guys, or at least bits and pieces of them. Lou's problem is and will forever remain the inevitable genius/less-than-genius split between his Velvet self and the ever-after (and I say that as someone who's looking forward to seeing him next week). Leonard Cohen averages about one great song a year, 10 per decade, a completely respectable pace. Waits is solid, which is both good and bad -- more than anyone else on this short-list, he has a shtick, and he shticks to it. I won't go all the way to arguing that Dylan's horrendous stuff is part of what makes him great, because that would imply that you have to listen to the horrendous stuff to get the great stuff, which isn't true at all. But the horrendous stuff (and all the mediocre stuff too) does provide interesting context.

But Dylan 1964-68, plus Blood on the Tracks, plus Dylan 1990-onward, plus the half-zillion great individual things you can pick off any of the other stuff... I just can't see anyone else in the arena. There aren't many people around that make me think, oh, that's what it was like living while Beethoven was alive and kicking. In fact, there's no one but Dylan that makes me think that. And it's not like when Beethoven was alive everyone spent all their time thinking about Beethoven. He was just there, looming over everything else.

1. Religious imagery (missionary, prayers, cross, chimes. prophet, hymns, angels, holy medallion, saintlike, soul)
2. Bohemian-bourgeois imagery (lace, deck of cards, basement, jack and ace, gypsy, thief)
3. Faraway storybook imagery (Kings of Tyrus, Spanish manners, Arabian drums)
4. Socialist-realist imagery (farmers, businessmen, sheet-metal, Cannery Row, drugs, employ, parole)

Now, although I like the way he unexepectedly collides these different lexes to make startling images here and there ('the farmers and the businessmen they all did decide to show you the dead angels...'), it's, to my mind, a rather suspicious mixture of the overly portentous (way too much religious imagery) with the surrealistic and random (too many drugs?) The song is too long. You see him in 'Don't Look Back' just hammering this stuff out on typewriters on tour by the yard. It's trying too hard to be 'poetry' to be poetry. It's trying too hard to be 'weighty' to actually weigh much.

He's much better when he's being funny, in 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' or 'Rainy Day Women' or 'Ballad of a Thin Man', where the religiose nonsense is jettisoned.

And, within each lexis, cliche rules. (Though, like reading Hamlet and finding it full of saws, it's hard to know whether these are cliches Dylan created or adopted.) Gypsies and thieves, tarot and decks of cards, pur-lease! Comparing girls to the Madonna and sprinkling odes to them with all the Christian cliches you can find, pur-lease! Faraway storybook imagery, pur-lease! Acid-tinged 60s folk surrealism... well, better. But by now that's become a cliche too. Gimme something fresh. (Caetano Veloso, Dylan's contemporary, oddly enough has not dated and gone stale at all in the succeeding decades.)

A REALLY good songwriter wouldn't even need an entire album, hazel. If Lou Reed had only quit after "Do the Ostrich" he'd be the greatest songwriter who ever lived.

ABSOFUCKINLUTELY NOT

A) this "level" of which you speak where one artist is "above" another
B) why Bob Dylan is the only one on this "level"

Also, Mr. Diamond, I hope you're sitting down when I tell you that Cole Porter is dead.

I was just saying to my wife the other night that, as far as I know, my favorite line in any song in English is "Just like Pagliacci, baby." It doesn't really mean anything on its own, I guess, but I just love it.

I can think of lots of reasons to listen to Dylan's first, "Song For Woody" being one. Woody Guthrie, then, pops to mind as a candidate. Sly Stone, too. Seems unanswerable, this one, though a strong Top 10 could be constructed. To revise Momus, re pro-funny Dylan, I think Dylan is best when really mean or really sweet. The story songs are dicey--some are great ("Isis"), and others bend under all the SYMBOLISM. Jacks, queens, kings, generals. He was right about Smokey Robinson, insofar as Dylan has never written a song I enjoy as much as "Tears Of A Clown" or "Cruisin'".

Depends where the goalposts are. Both Lennon/McCartney and Dylan had near unbroken runs, as did Prince. If you take the whole body of work, and run percentages, they all drop precipitously. If you're going for raw numbers, then Dylan would almost certainly win. Lou Reed I love to death but doesn't do well in either raw score or percenttges. Steely Dan I have mixed feelings about, but as Joshua Clover points out, you have a pretty amazing chance of hitting a good song on any pre-reformation S Dan album. Lucinda Williams also has pretty high percentages, though she's pushing those down. And Elvis Costello had a run that might even supercede some of the above.

I'd put Jack White in the percentages game, too. (Sidebar: Why does the discussion around the WS return so often to "authenticity"? Pareles was right to kick that to the curb, though he ended up hating. [Good time to hate on them, though I disagree, but a rhetorically refreshing thing to do.] What I want from White is completely traditional: voice and songs. The trappings seemed wildly arch from day one, but arch is one of many fine delivery vehicles.

I would agree that Dylan had a very strong run back there, but so did some other guys who are still kicking around, such as Smokey, Paul McCartney, Stevie, and Prince. And let's not kid ourselves, Love and Theft is a very good album, but Dylan's peak period ended over thirty years ago, with the notable exception of Blood on the Tracks. Someone mentioned Leonard Cohen up-thread. While he can't compare with Dylan in raw numbers, his I'm Your Man is better than anything Dylan produced in the 80s.

Did Stevie really write the music? Hm. Lyrics and melody still beyond belief, but it does change things.

Yes, so says the liner notes to the recent Smokey & the Miracles anthology. See also this web page:

http://www.superseventies.com/sw_tearsofaclown.html

Smokey Robinson, yeah (didn't Bob call him the greatest living "poet," not "songwriter"? I thought it was his way of deflecting all the "poet" stuff). I understand the reservations about gypsies, thieves, ragmen, etc. I don't think anyone else could get away with that shit; but I think Dylan mostly does, and it creates all sorts of subtexts. Case in point: "Desolation Row," 10 verses long. The first 9 are classic Kubla Khan-ish thumbnail sketches -- politics, history, literature, the girl down on the corner, etc., full of great throwaway lines ("they're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown," "the superhuman crews round up everyone who knows more than they do," "her profession's her religion, her sin is her lifelessness,") and so on. All good as far as it goes. But the 10th verse is completely different, and it pulls the rest of the song into focus. The omniscient narrator dripping sarcasm on the world around him is unmasked as just some guy in his apartment who's pissed off at the girl who ditched him (i.e. Dylan the mythologizer is demythologized, and much of art and the artistic impulse along with him -- the artist ranting in the garrett is mostly just a heartbroken schmo). I don't have any idea if that's how he started the song -- maybe he had to write the first 9 verses before he could get to the 10th one -- but it's where he ended up. And the thing is, I listened to and enjoyed the song for years before I "got" it.

I guess the "level" I'm talking about partly has to do with the effortless glide between text and subtexts, awareness that (mostly) doesn't spill over into self-consciousness.

Of course, there's also the melody side. Dylan writes tunes like nobody's business. And yeah, I think volume matters, percentage matters, longevity matters, all those things figure in. And by post-90 Dylan, I really mean the two trad albums plus the last two studio albums, which together constitute a pretty great run.

Mostly, I can't with a straight face say there's anyone around who's "better" than Dylan. Of course, the whole conceit of "greatest living songwriter in the English language" isn't worth much anyway except to have arguments about.

(Good point on Jack White -- I got into an argument last year about him, basically saying that what set the Stripes apart was plain old songwriting. I thought Pareles kinda missed that. But hell, he didn't understand "White America" either.)

If I could second this, please. Thanks, I'll be here all day.

um, no? my head hurts. not as bad as, oh say, jim morrison, but lots of rambling Bad Poetry in there.

Jandek

we mean it man.

If I could second this, please. Thanks, I'll be here all day.

You people. I swear. Can we do a little side-by side comparison?

A vocalise. (I'm having a pedantic moment here.)

By "living," do you mean "not actually dead"? or "still writing great songs"? If the former, probably Chuck Berry (or Bryan Ferry or McCartney). If the latter, um . . . Freelance Hellraiser?

The correct answer is of course Ryan Adams Stephin Merritt

Hooray!

[b]Paul Westerberg[/b]
[b]Bryan Ferry[/b]

one of those guys.

1/"greatest".

Tom Waits is a one- or two-trick pony, and I never got why he's held in such high esteem. I like the way some of his stuff *sounds* and so forth, but the songs...

Anyway, sure, Dylan, but I think Randy Newman might well be better--maybe not as prolific, but plenty of great songs. And a far less precipitous falloff in quality, overall, than Dylan.

If you study the logistics and heuristics of the mystics
You will find that their minds rarely move in a line

So it's much more realistic to abandon such ballistics
And resign to be trapped on a leaf in the vine

He didn't even try to make sense and delivered exhilarating dada gibberish with effortless aplomb.

Quantity isn't indicative of greatness. Alex Chilton wrote an album and a half of great songs amidst a lot of hackwork. So did Stevie Nicks.

I also like

Spider and I sit watching the fly in a world without sound.

We dream of the ship that sail away, a thousand miles away.

That sort of makes too, but not completely. No one else I'm aware of, not even Dylan, writes such evocative lyrics.

Go Eno!

I still say Dylan, tho.

Quantity isn't indicative of greatness. Alex Chilton wrote an album and a half of great songs amidst a lot of hackwork. So did Stevie Nicks. "

true enough. I think Newman's basically never written a bad song--some of them aren't up to the level of "I Think It's Going to Rain" or "Sail Away" or "Louisiana 1927," but they're all pretty damned good. Dylan, to my ears, quit being great in about 1967, with a few good 'uns after that, I never much liked his '70s work of what he's done recently. Nice *records* in their way, but they don't move me as songs. And true enough about Chilton--four or five on the first Big Star album, maybe the same on the second, and pretty much all of the third one. But you know, I admire his decision to be a cover artist, after that, I find that about as valuable as his songwriting. I am an appreciator of hackwork.

I guess I'm glad I don't care about these sorts of things much. Though as far as lyrics go, I tend to enjoy Costello and Mitchell more than Dylan--and I prefer the earlier, more straightforward Dylan to the overly wordy, overly lengthy later electric stuff.

As far as musicians go, or "songwriter" in the sense of one who creates a sum total song (lyrics, performance, arrangement, etc.) I would take Eno, Costello, and yes probably even Waits over Dylan, amongst many others.

But I do love Dylan as music, esp. through the early 70s. "Boots of Spanish Leather" is one of the only proper songs I've ever learned/recorded.

I dig Momus' schtick, objectivist egotism. Just wish I'd ever liked a song I'd heard.

I'm never going back to Jackson
I couldn't dare to show my face
I nearly killed you with my drinking
Wouldn't be caught dead in that place

(What great opening lines for an album!)

Someone in here should mention David Berman with the greats, too, for his American Water album alone. He's a poet!

???

given my own feelings about the importance of lyrics and how my appreciation is less in the song-in-itself and more in the arrangements, the deliveries, the twists and turns and particular signifiers in how a song is performed, then Dylan's own importance is pretty well limited in my mind. More than any other vaunted artist, his is the influence that I've enjoyed the most as it's somehow filtered through the work of others without caring a damn for his own work as such.

i agree with this and is why i enjoy tom waits more over-all. dylan to me is a great read (lyrics), but to say dylan is a great singer is questionable to me...he made do with what he had and didn't hide anything, and that comes with it's own charm. but have to say i respect tom's showmanship more and i enjoy more his conciously applied gravelly-voiced delivery, arrangements which seem a lot more creative and appealing and the over-all sense of atmosphere he creates.
but i'll take dylan as the better songwriter as i respect his vast influence and also believe you get waits only through bob, and regard him as not only important but canonical. but i'm most often more in the mood to get dirty with waits when i hit 'play'.

He's much better when he's being funny, in 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' or 'Rainy Day Women' or 'Ballad of a Thin Man', where the religiose nonsense is jettisoned. (momus)

To revise Momus, re pro-funny Dylan, I think Dylan is best when really mean or really sweet

so we can agree on Ballad of a Thin Man?

Is it just me or does Bob Dylan have absolutely no lyric-writing talent at all? It's just like he writes his songs by randomly flipping through the dictionary and picking out stuff that rhymes.

Is it just me, or does Pablo Picasso have absolutely no painting talent at all? It's like he just draws all this random stuff.

good one, and it's true:
http://www.spanisharts.com/reinasofia/picasso/primeracomunion.jpg
http://www.spanisharts.com/reinasofia/picasso/primeracomunion.jpg
pablo picasso, Picasso age 14

"Blowin' in the Wind", Dylan age 21
both prodigies that achieved more at such a young age as many may could ever hope, and went "straight to the top" as i'm sure tom would say.

Yes, I do sit in my room in front of my computer and have conversations wiht my self. You got a problem with that?!