if bob dylan had played a synth instead of acoustic guitar ...

This is an odd position, since Numan's complaint when he got bad reviews was "don't review the instruments we play: review what we do with those instruments!" Which seems sound to me.

It's sort of an interesting strawman, but it skirts the question of intent: I'm having as hard a time naming a synth player who doesn't want people to shake their asses to the music (other than, say, John Tesh) as I am conjuring an earnest young folksinger who does. Maybe that's overstating it, but what's the groove-driven protest template? "Living For The City"? "99 Luftbaloons"? Or would he just have played crotchety "I Am The Walrus"-style chords on a square wave and left the songs in situ?

(Related question: did Dylan ever have a disco period? If so, was it born-again disco? Please tell me it was born-again disco.)

..oh, it's just Magazine too

dylan had a vega$ period, see live at budokan--but not a disco period, alas.

Boys you should be dancing
Paint the James Brown
The disco's filled with sailors
Whoo! All right! Get down!
Here comes the construction worker
He's got me in a trance
One hand points at the ceiling
The other is in his pants
And the macho policeman is restless
I'd give that whistle a blow
I wanna hear you rattle your 'bunch of keys'
On Disco Nation Row

('Disco Nation Row', 1977)

jess: oh yeah. new morning is great, planet waves very good (occasionally better than great), street legal better than ok.

that was not a mark s-quality response but it's dinnertime.

Neil Young...I dunno, that might work as long as he had someone programming bigger beats than those on Trans. "Cowgirl in the Sand" might might sound pretty good with some Detroit techno production.

but why would he have abandoned his lyrical approach ("Tom Joadish," as someone upthread said) or his musical approach? sure, a synth isn't as "rootsy"-sounding as an acoustic guitar (though isn't this as much a societal shaped impression? i mean, 100 years from now synths or neptunes/nashville-type production might be seen as sufficiently "rootsy" to a 2103 audience as an acoustic guitar seemed to a 1963 audience or currently seems to a 2003 audience. but i digress).

the idea that dylan might have taken on some sort of electro-avatar lyrical/musical approach is an interesting one. this view is also kind of conceptually troublesome in that it presupposes that one's choice of musical instrument predetermines one's lyrical concerns. (for example, it didn't necessarily determine Gary Numan's, insofar as the first tubeway army and the stuff that appeared on the plan recording are reliable guide to his lyrical and thematic obsessions -- they were there beforehand [and were as much influenced by ziggy/alladin sane-era bowie as anything else], they just weren't as obviously fleshed out as they would be on his stuff from replicas onwards.) to put it another way -- maybe someone with dylan's lyrical obsessions and musical arrangements circa "like a rolling stone" and blonde on blonde would have sounded a little more weird and/or interesting if he used a synth instead of a guitar. and considering that it was seen in some circles as heretical for dylan to use an electric guitar, it wasn't as if one could automatically dismiss the notion that Dylan would have been willing to monkey with a synth had the technology been available.

I honestly don't know -- though someone here must -- but it seems easier to answer that question than one based on... well, I'm not sure what: I still don't really know whether we're postulating a Dylan who *invented* synth-pop, or just a Dylan who listened to Roxy Music in '72 and said "Aha! There's my next move!"

a desolate and discouraging line-up/row, seemingly rainy day people from the last shower, granny dylan fans (cf: tina turner)

fela, for starters

And another alternate-universe Dylan is suggested. Techno-Dylan and Afro-Dylan are all well and good, but I want Turntablist-Dylan in *my* world -- that way, he can just do his thing with the Folkways source materials, and we can skip this roots/authenticity business altogether...

But I think there's *something* at the heart of this question, other than the "what if" game: can lyrical social realism (not to say that's Dylan's one and only game) and glossy musical artifice coexist? Personally, I think all you have to do is look to hip-hop to find your answer, but in the singer-songwriter tradition I get the sense there's less universal agreement. Beck got mentioned, but even there we've got irony (synth- and sampling-heavy) and post-irony (fewer electronics? I actually haven't heard all of Sea Change) models, and I don't see a lot of middle ground being discussed.

So maybe the question is, can synthetic music be the vessel for *effective* social commentary, or is there something about that format that makes it seem condescending or insincere?

um ... he changed the very way words *sound* in pop music (i.e. not just their meaning). he lengthened pop/rock singles as startlingly as mark mcguire and bobby bonds lengthened the home run record (see "like a rolling stone"). i'm not sure whether we should thank him or blame him for that, but we do owe him the credit. and there was that whole going-electric thing, which might not seem innovative in 2003 but it did kind of change the world. if "highway 61 revisited" and "blonde and blonde" weren't musical innovation, then neither was anything else produced in the pop/rock era.

But, honestly, this is one thing I've never really understood: "going electric." Now, surely none of us are saying that *all* music was acoustic coffeehouse folk before Bob flipped a switch, and there were a number of bands playing electric versions of Bob's tunes before he himself started... so, uh, what's the big deal? What changed when Dylan did it too? That people realized he had broader musical horizons than they'd given him credit for? That he was willing to piss off some of his fans to achieve his own artistic vision? That just seems like such a hagiographic Bob-centric view that I'm not sure how to give it the actual historical credence it may well deserve -- so, help!

magazine combined punk social absurdism (thatchers british reality ?) with nuanced new synth-tech production sound values. this is true for the sound and scope of the bass player as for the synth player, and to me, in that band the bass playing was so imporant to that overall modern sound that it could have been synth-programmed bass (if very well programmed synth bass with synchopated timbre and weight and backup keyboards PWM malevolence)

of course Vdgg re-hashed Edgar Allen Poe for a more real-world than hippy cop-out fantasy (more of that Richard III decrying the loathsome social plagues of recent british times, as did Rotten and Devoto) than JRR Tolkien and followers, and they used customised organ pre-synth bass and treble sound manipulation, and they had no bass player at all as all the modulation, rotation of phasing and synth bass-esque presence put their hacked-electric organ bass sound into a post-electric-bass paradigm, again providing (et. al.) that malevolence that PWM is all about

and a very large chunk of rock and roll that came afterward was hugely influenced by that sound. a very large chunk of rock and roll can be directly traced back to dylan plugging in.