TS: Bob Dylan vs. Jandek

Trying to imagine what Jandek backed the Dead would have been like.

Popularity aside, there are many similarities between these fellas.

such as?

penises

lol beaten to the penisunch

That would be a bad thing to serve at a party.

talk about cocktail weenies

ok ill just get the "not good guitar players not good singers" thing out of the way, not because i agree with it at, but this way no one else gets to be smug about it.

Dylan sings just as good as Caruso

both Dylan and Jandek's first albums are named Penis Punch

I thought it had already been established that Bob Dylan IS Jandek

Dylan once punched Jandek in the penis

^^^^ best 90210 episode ever, btw

such as?

Both play music rooted in a solo acoustic blues style; have taken notable stylistic detours (e.g., “going electric”) in their careers; have been relatively prolific during the past 25+ years; are associated with their cultish, obsessive fan bases; and are subject to an endless number of myths that contribute to their personas and their fans’ obsessions with their music.

J0hn, you of all people I can’t imagine not seeing the similarities. They are all obvious. In fact, your career I would think is somewhat comparable in the above areas (minus the last point, perhaps)... but that’s a different discussion!

Scanned this too quickly as Bob Dylan vs. Jakob.

(secret: Jakob Dylan really is Jandek)

yeah, most of those are pretty cosmetic similarities imo - Jandek plays music that appeals to a very, very small group of people who've tabled a lot of the basic assumptions about what people want when they listen to music. Bob Dylan is a singer-songwriter in an extant historical mode whose contributions to the genre became canonical shifts and whose name is a near-universal referent at this point/ Jandek is practically the definition of outsider art; Dylan is a popular artist. I have a real fondness for both, but one doesn't listen to Jandek for really any of the qualities one listens to Dylan for, unless one is being willfully perverse. It's like comparing Gary Panter to Raphael: I have love for both; taking sides between the two seems a pretty pointless exercise. TS: the Whispers vs. Caruso. Both sing, both made music which was released commercially, both achieved popularity in their fields, both are available on iTunes.

dylan vs yakov smirnoff

Corwood On The Tracks

So basically, you're touching on popularity as the defining factor:

Jandek plays music that appeals to a very, very small group of people who've tabled a lot of the basic assumptions about what people want when they listen to music. Bob Dylan is a singer-songwriter in an extant historical mode whose contributions to the genre became canonical shifts and whose name is a near-universal referent at this point/ Jandek is practically the definition of outsider art; Dylan is a popular artist.

I addressed this (briefly) in my initial post:

Popularity aside,

I think most of the cosmetic similarities are still valid. No doubt, Jandek's listened to a lot of Dylan over the years; you can hear the reference points (however fragmented) in his music, and I think he's made a Dylan lyrical reference or two as well. I wouldn't be surprised if Dylan has listened to Jandek as well. So you're right, one is a hugely praised, relatively conventional singer/songwriter; the other is a niche artist; but I think both of them operate in the same realm of popular music.

Never heard Jandek, so Bob wins <----------- so speaks 99.999999999% of the population of the Earth

... oh, hold on, that would mean 99.999999999% of the population of the Earth had heard Bob Dylan, which I seriously doubt

lol I read this whole thread and was all...fuckin' kshighway, and then I read the names under the posts

TS: Bob Dylan cover art vs. Jandek cover art!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51glkxbSL6L._SL500_AA280_.jpg http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/22/b7/26c89330dca0fad913114010.L._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Yeah I mean for one thing, "blues-based" has always seemed a huge red herring in discussing Jandek, to me - a term people who like his work have used for so long that it's accepted among heads, but I've always thought it was kinda bullshit tbh. Jandek plays "blues" only in a post-free-jazz sense of the term - play some Jandek for blues heads and call them conservative if you want, but most of them are going to say "shitty guitar, shitty singing, zero blues structure to the lyrics" - which, I mean, cite exceptions all you want, but most blues is going to be branching outward from I-IV-V 12-bar progressions with lyrics that go line/repeat line/rhyme line, and the variations are based on that model. Lots of room for variation for "You Painted Your Teeth" isn't blues imo. There are a lot of interesting points of comparison between hugely disparate artists but (for example) "going electric"? Ready for the House is an electric album, Jandek doesn't have a "gone electric" moment where his fans go "oh shit he's changed up his game now!"

Agree to disagree I guess - I don't think there are any useful points of comparison between these artists or their bodies of work, which says nothing qualitatively about either of them.

xpost vs. 10,000 other portrait covers - there's pieces of toast with images of the Virgin Mary on 'em, too, if you look hard enough

"going electric"? Ready for the House is an electric album, Jandek doesn't have a "gone electric" moment where his fans go "oh shit he's changed up his game now!"

Ready for the House wasn't originally a Jandek album, though... it was credited to The Units, then later reissued under the Jandek moniker. His first proper album, Six and Six, is pretty much all solo acoustic guitar (as far as I recall).

I agree, Jandek doesn't have an "oh shit" moment in terms of changing styles, but Dylan's moment wouldn't have been so prominent had he not been a hugely popular artist at the time. Consider if he'd had a Jandek-sized fan base, then made the switch... I don't think anyone would have cared, obsessive fans aside, and it certainly wouldn't have been a well-known and -documented event in pop culture with the same effect on music, so to speak.

xpost This is a stupid thread idea, but

"Message to the Clerk," "Sadie" and other sound like blues to me.

And several years ago I made a Jandek tape for a friend of mine in his early sixties who listens mostly to classic rock (Dylan, James Gang, Poco), a little cool jazz (Miles Davis & some contemporary stuff), some blues (has the old Robert Johnson box and I don't know what else) and adult contemporary, and he said that Jandek sounded to him like very old blues.

But regardless of that anecdote, I was listening to the blues before I was listening to Jandek, and I thought some of the two Jandek records I got sounded bluesy the first time I heard them. I mean, I trust my own ears.

Isn't going a capella an oh shit moment? Or doing a side of solo piano? And we've sort of had oh shit moment ruined for us. Seth Tisue's website gave a rundown of all of the albums long before I heard almost all of them, so I knew what to expect. But the difference between Six and Six and One Foot in the North is pretty huge. And there are house party romps and ambient pieces in between.

Plus: Oh shit: that time Jandek decided to play live. WTF was up with that? I think I made some phone calls.

I dropped s's off of words in two successive posts!

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/9728/palacebrothersdaysinthe.jpg

We could have a thread for fake Jandek covers.

JANDEK: OVERPOWERED BY FUNK

Results 1 - 10 of about 396,000 for jandek christmas. (0.11 seconds)

yeah I mean as I say there are some cosmetic similarities - the atmosphere of Jandek records compares to that lonesome claustrophobic in-vivo atmosphere of old blues records. The music kind of doesn't. There are exceptions throughout the catalog - whichever album it is that has "Quinn Boys II" on it, that's a pretty rockin' album, and he covers "House of the Rising Sun" at some point, doesn't he? But still - I don't know. Comparing Jandek to Dylan seems like a college entrance-essay sort of challenge: "make the case for similarities between these artists who aren't really very similar at all."

they both have rabidly dumb fanbases ;)

dylan recorded the basement tapes, jandek lived in a basement

Comparing Jandek to Dylan seems like a college entrance-essay sort of challenge: "make the case for similarities between these artists who aren't really very similar at all."

J0hn, out of curiosity -- who would you suggest as a more valid point of comparison to Dylan and/or Jandek?

I mean, at least this isn't TS: Bob Dylan vs. Sufjan Stevens or some shit.

It's just that to compare and contrast them is not useful for a discussion of either.

Huh, I say that, but it's only partly true.

kind of tired of the "lets compare two random artists" poll/thread trend that i thought had gone away around here

xpost But it should be true.

Comparing Jandek to Dylan seems like a college entrance-essay sort of challenge:

Or a writing prompt for creative writing class. You shouldn't need that kind of stuff to stimulate discussion.

You shouldn't need that kind of stuff to stimulate discussion.

Regardless of whether the comparison is "valid" or not, it's obvious that polls like these are a great way to stimulate discussion on ILX. Controversy/debate leads to discussion. If I just revived an old Jandek thread and compared him to Dylan, we wouldn't be looking at 40+ new answers, would we?

how many of these answers have been substantive as opposed to "lol @ this thread" and "lol @ my clever joek"

In jazz terms, this is essentially like TS: Duke Ellington vs. Albert Ayler. Whether that would be a fruitful discussion, I dunno.

xpost (and sort of xxpost)- But honestly I don't care that he made a new thread for this. Noise on ilx is just digital noise. It's not even there. It never, ever bothers me. It's not like when people make personal attacks or are rude or whatever.

xpost that would be kind of interesting. Sometimes Albert Ayler reminds me of Quincy Jones, and sometimes Quincy Jones reminds me of Duke Ellington, so, distantly, sometimes Albert Ayler would remind me of Duke Ellington.

Crap. Did I just post that for real.

J0hn, out of curiosity -- who would you suggest as a more valid point of comparison to Dylan and/or Jandek?

for the former: Leonard Cohen; Joni Mitchell; Bobby Womack (who, looking at his story one way, also was a guitar-and-voice guy who branched out a lot); or going back to Dylan's presumed roots - Woody Guthrie; Furry Lewis; Brecht & Weill, maybe? for Jandek, I mean, kind of the whole point of Jandek is to be an artist whose work doesn't compare the work of other artists. That is his function as an artist: to be Jandek, to refuse to take part in a whole lot of traditions, to frustrate expectations. Dylan has a lot of stylistic shifts, but they're not "I'm going to make an album of voice and de-tuned bass, and then make two other albums more or less just like it."

I just don't think the work of these artists can profitably be compared, is all - they're not really in conversation in any but the broadest of senses, which isn't to say one can't do some acrobatics and force a comparison - note that this is the board that enjoyed a lengthy "pizza vs. sandwiches" thread.

xpost you're not serious that "there are a lot of posts" = "it's a good discussion," are you? this isn't a good discussion. it's me being boring.

btw this isn't a good discussion. it's me being boring was an aggressive play for "new ILM board description" on my part

xpost To him or to me? I don't think lots of posts = good discussion, I just don't see how a new thread on Site New Answers or ILM makes any difference to anyone.

What I really wanted to say was

^^^^ (big ups to John's post)

... Lou Reed, Neil Young, Van Morrison, etc etc etc... take yr pick of artists that could be put up against Dylan

dylan vs donovan

jandek vs wesley willis

note that this is the board that enjoyed a lengthy "pizza vs. sandwiches" thread.

Congratulations, I just choked on what I was eating (it was neither pizza nor sandwiches, btw).

jandek vs reynols

Jandek vs. Daniel Johnston

Those Jandek comparisons are as superficial as Jandek v. Dylan, though.

I still think Bob Dylan vs. Jandek is a more interesting comparison than any of those. Obviously it makes more practical sense, based on the most restrictive judgments of similar styles and levels of popularity, to compare Jandek to Daniel Johnston, or Bob Dylan to Cohen or Guthrie or Young or any of those guys. But I don't think those are interesting comparison; most have already been beaten to death in critical discourse of the last 40 years, and I'd rather compare two guys with some choice similarities in their approaches, fanbases and personas than two guys whose blues-based chord progressions are more similar.

I don't think people are going to talk much about their fans or personas on this thread.

note that this is the board that enjoyed a lengthy "pizza vs. sandwiches" thread.

haha this was my thread and it was fucking awesome iirc

How could you forget?

http://wtc.acmecargo.com/wtc-pics/eagle.tear.JPG

the real questions is pizza vs jandek imo

no sandwiches are better than pizza so it should be sandwiches vs. jandek

Hmm.

dylan delivering a pizza to yr door vs. jandek delivering a sandwich to yr door

Uhhhhh. Golly, I don't know. Dylan with the pizza, if it's hot. Are they eating with us?

blood on the crust

Jandek and Dylan are two of the finest lyricists of the 20th century imo. Sure Dylan has a more formal approach, but in many cases he goes out of his way to obfuscate just as much as Jandek does. Further, I think people make the mistake of reading too much into both artists in terms of some 'biographical authenticity.' To me they're both clearly playing with words in a way designed to walk that line between poetry & confessional lyricism in order to either confound the listener, or at least engage the listener in some critical thinking.

My two cents. Dylan gets listened to more but I really do think Jandek has released some beautiful records (mostly mid period & acappella ones imo.)

not looking forward to christmas pizza

dylan delivering a pizza to yr door

Gotta Serve Somebody

What's a penisunch?

P.S. Jandek for the myth please.

Penisunch is like a regular eunuch but they remove the penis rather than the testicles.

oh, unch. hmm.

also, i bet jandek backed by the dead would be way better than that dylan & the dead atrocity.

Yeah, I would check out Jandek and the Dead.

But honestly I don't care that he made a new thread for this. Noise on ilx is just digital noise. It's not even there.

I clicked my imaginary Opposite of Suggest Ban (Big Up?) button for this, bamcquern.

Ready for the House wasn't originally a Jandek album, though... it was credited to The Units, then later reissued under the Jandek moniker. His first proper album, Six and Six, is pretty much all solo acoustic guitar (as far as I recall).

For some reason, this line of argument reminded me of "Anything You Can Do" from Annie Get Your Gun:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY7Hh5PzELo

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Voted Jandek coz he's cooler than Dylan.

Ready for the House wasn't originally a Jandek album, though... it was credited to The Units, then later reissued under the Jandek moniker.

Again, merely cosmetic...

thread needs more Dylan pizza joeks

Sterling Smith only changed the name of his act from The Units to Jandek because another act called The Units threatened a lawsuit. He got the name Jandek from a calendar entry about meeting a friend named Deck in January. He figured the best way to have a unique name was make one up.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I thought I heard and excerpt from some rare interview where he said the name came to him when was on the phone with his friend Decker, in January. But yeah the story is somethin like that.

you can get pizza or a sandwich at Subway. Also possibly food poisoning, as one friend found out -- on a veggie sub, too. so maybe stick with the pizza since it's heated...or a meatball sub. not sure about the chicken. anyone?