joni vs. zimmy

http://30.media.tumblr.com/2v3e0iSWensjrklmDpBS6slQo1_400.jpg
what the hell tuning you in, joni?

i love joni mitchell but bob dylan. sounds like a dylan/gaga vs. MIA/joni cage match is coming up...

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/713575/80597851.gif

Bob towers over everybody of his generation except maybe James Brown and the Beatles. sorry Joni

dylan/gaga vs. MIA/joni cage

are you saying that gaga is a man

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

don't understand how anyone can not vote mitchell. dylan is basically a talentless hippie tramp, mitchell is a genius.

Dylan basically invented the first-person-narrative for rock n roll - the idea that a musician's work expresses a personal point of view - so, no he is not "basically a talentless hippie tramp"

did bob dylan ever manage to hit a note in his career?

he hit all of them

Mitchell's criticism of Dylan there functions equally well as an explanation of how/why he's succeeded.

In terms of whose best stuff I like more, I'd vote Dylan by a nose; in terms of percentage of work I like, Mitchell; in terms of quantity of work I like, well, Dylan. Not sure what that adds up to.

Haha to be fair to Dylan, he tends to hit each note for at least 30% of the note's total duration; he just happens to spend the bulk of each note's length scooping up to it.

Dylan basically invented the first-person-narrative for rock n roll - the idea that a musician's work expresses a personal point of view

HANG ON idk who came "first" but joni also did this

don't understand how anyone can not vote mitchell. dylan is basically a talentless hippie tramp, mitchell is a genius.

voted dylan just for this bullshit

i mean, i love joni, but this "don't understand" front business needs to die

Unfortunately for Joni she came 5 years after Dylan's career took off.

Anyway -- really tough choice. Both really important, personal artists to me and have staked huge claims on my relationship to music. Think I'm gonna go Dylan in the end tho, by a hair.

Bob towers over everybody of his generation except maybe James Brown

^^in a nutshell, this^^

bobby d. and i'm a fuckin faggot.

Dylan. Nuff. Said.

The poll where every side is the challops side.

I couldn't love Joni Mitchell's music more, but wow is she insufferable in every other way...have you ever seen her talking about her terrible paintings? Oh. my. god.

Talentless. Lol.

I mean, fucking hell. There's challops, then there's mental fucking illness...

hahaha what does she say about her paintings

xp I don't want to sound presumptuous, and I'm sure Lex's distaste seems totally authentic and real, but you have to imagine that some of it comes from not appreciating the paradigm shift in music that Dylan inaugurated. It's like trying to appreciate Ghiberti's innovations in perspective, it's hard to imagine a world where art wasn't actually that way. (Which isn't to say that Dylan was as innovative as starting a tradition of using perspective in your art -- but that the same effect is at play.)

Mitchell's criticism of Dylan there functions equally well as an explanation of how/why he's succeeded.

yeah i was thinking "that's why he's great." and anyway, joni mitchell calling anyone else a poseur is a serious pot-kettle situation. i love her plenty, but this one's not remotely close for me.

Mordy otm

(not that that makes Lex's POV any more defensible, just noting that its rooted in ignorance of history)

man this is a hard poll

probably i just wont vote

have you ever seen her talking about her terrible paintings? Oh. my. god.

I dunno, a bunch of her sleeve paintings are awesome imho (Song to a Seagull, Ladies of the Canyon, Hissing of Summer Lawns especially)

hahaha what does she say about her paintings
― i fake it so real, i am beyonce (surm), Wednesday, May 12, 2010

I saw a documentary on public TV where she strolled around a dramatically lit presentation of her awful paintings...kind of like when Billy Bob Thornton talks about how his shitty music is his true calling--yech

yes, her cover art is good, especially for CSNY Deja Vu, but her "art" art--so awful

the key word here is "awful" (before the wolves get me)

Dylan basically invented the first-person-narrative for rock n roll - the idea that a musician's work expresses a personal point of view

this is way overblown, like saying dylan invented talking

john lee hooker/woody guthrie/hank wms/chuck berry/johnny cash/beatles thousands of others expressed a "personal point of view" in the first person before bob

no they didn't

yes they did

all of those guys came from folk/blues traditions that are explicitly about generalized/collective experience (with the exception of the Beatles - which are a random group to throw in there considering how seriously Dylan abetted the expansion of their songwriting). while all of those performers had strong personalities, their songs were not about THEM per se, except in perhaps an oblique, sidelong way. Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice - this was one of the key reasons everyone tagged him as a "poet", because he was transforming conventional songwriting templates into a vehicle for something else, as a way for an artist to communicate his own internal experience and private symbolism to a larger audience. this is not what hooker or guthrie or hank williams or even johnny cash did (well, not till after Dylan anyway)

I was thinking more about what I wrote upthread re Lex, and I wonder where we draw the cultural lines between 'this is totally legitimate to dislike,' and 'your dislike of this indicates ignorance about it.' Like there are some things (say Joanna Newsom) that I feel totally okay dissing and saying are worthless and other things (like Philip Glass) that I take a position of: 'Well, I don't know it well enough to enjoy it. I find it a little boring, but I'm sure that's because I haven't investigated it enough.' Is this just a function of canon? Like if a student came and told you he hated Shakespeare, you'd tell him that he needs to know Shakespeare and his personal preferences don't matter. But maybe he'd have a little more personal leeway with Roberto Bolano (or whoever?), and you wouldn't immediately write off his opinion. Like even if you dislike Dylan, I expect something like, "I understand he's very canonized, but I never really understood his popularity, and it always struck me as boring." Some recognition that canon has formed in a particular way for probably good reasons.

Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice -

I don't understand this at all. Every good singer (not all of them songwriters!) presents his songs as being explicitly from his point of view.

I chose Dylan, and it wasn't close. I love Joni though.

It's best to appreciate Dylan without the mythos: he's an excellent songwriter and an exemplary singer.

xposts
Not seeing your split on songs about personal vs. collective experience at all - surely most songs (at least the ones that resonate with people) do both

I totally believe Chuck Berry really did sit around waiting for the school bell to ring and was really happy when he got back to the USA - and that those feelings were also collectively understood...

and that him singing about high school and cars and America had a "unique vocabulary and personal voice" and communicated "internal experience and private symbolism to a larger audience"

he's an excellent songwriter and an exemplary singer.

And really really funny, and had a great sense of rhythm.

Not a hard choice at all.

dunno, maybe it's more like Dylan popularized a more confessional style of songwriting? he did *something* to songwriting, right?

how funny is this

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-jonimitchell-20100422,0,5684541.story?page=1

the event that prompted the interview is this:

The renowned Obie Award-winning actor and performance artist has been belting out Mitchell's songs for more than 20 years. This weekend, the New York-based Kelly concludes the L.A. run of his acclaimed solo tribute to the iconic, iconoclastic singer-songwriter, "Paved Paradise: The Art of Joni Mitchell," at Renberg Theatre.

Blessed with an elastic voice and androgynous features, Kelly is famed for his chameleonic ability to morph into historical figures of either gender, from famous painters to first ladies. His performance as Mitchell, however, is perhaps Kelly's most enduring metamorphosis. It's downright eerie how he channels her so completely.

Even Mitchell is a fan of Kelly's show, which spans her entire career, from classic "Me Decade" albums such as 1971's "Blue" through her most recent release, 2007's "Shine." That much was made clear in a recent telephone conversation with her and Kelly.

I don't understand this at all. Every good singer (not all of them songwriters!) presents his songs as being explicitly from his point of view.

sure but most of them use a commonly shared language. They write songs about stock characters, easily recognizable figures. Dylan expanded way beyond this. No one else up to that point loaded their songs with all this obscure, deliberately impenetrable mythological imagery, no one else loaded down their songs so much that you couldn't tell if they were supposed to be jokes, political allegories, or expressions of deeply held personal feelings.

many xposts

Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice -

I don't understand this at all. Every good singer (not all of them songwriters!) presents his songs as being explicitly from his point of view.

― cool and remote like dancing girls (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 12 May 2010 16:32 (5 minutes ago)

Po-faced equivocation aside, even Joni acknowledges the way Dylan changed pop songwriting. She described her own approach as an attempt to take Dylan's long, almost prose-like lines that allowed for much more detail, and combine them with a more complex approach to melody.

I guess that makes Dylan more "important" but I don't really care. Maybe overall Dylan has a greater body of work. I find myself enjoying Joni Mitchell records much more than Dylan records in the last five years or so. I guess I could say the same about Neil Young, who is a lesser songwriter than either. I ultimately just don't like hearing Dylan's voice that much and I'm kind of weary of his caustic schtick.

dylan's paintings also suck & he's just as pretentious you buncha stans

not voting in this poll, both are great artists, I listen to loads more joni & think musically she's a bunch more interesting but dylan's a titan & a better rock guitarist but OTOH the claims made for him as The Inventor Of The Confessional Style are completely absurd & also not worth arguing abt because the ppl who're convinced of it won't be swayed by anything so there is not point getting into it

and that him singing about high school and cars and America had a "unique vocabulary and personal voice" and communicated "internal experience and private symbolism to a larger audience"

no see because everyone in America was familiar with high schools and cars and whatnot - these were readily available images and symbols that pretty much anyone could grasp and get with with little to no effort. And here comes Bobby Dylan, singing about talking cyclones and mad generals and drug dealing Indians or whatever. There's a huge difference here. The first set is an amalgam of images close at hand to the vast majority of the audience. The latter is something that comes across as having been developed by someone who isn't interested in talking to anybody else, who's just kinda made up their own language (of course Dylan's references go deep, and are not cut from whole cloth by any means - but they came from a different avenue and from different sets of reference points than those that had been previously available to the pop songwriter)

xp

am i right in thinking dylan and cohen are way more obviously jokey?

than neil?

in terms of laffs it goes:
cohen>dylan>neil>>>>joni

funniest singer-songwriter

to whoever called Dylan a hippie tramp

Dylan wasn't a hippie, for god's sake

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like … static… Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it." -- Bob Dylan

― in which we apologize for sobering up (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved)

dylan's quite clearly talking about the production values/sound and not claiming that modern songwriters are all talentless idiots.

oh Neil tells some jokes for sure

I voted for Raised on Robbery in the Court + Spark poll, yeah it is probably Joni's lone funny moment...

J0hn, why do you think Dylan's a better guitarist? (Or is the emphasis on "rock" in that sentence? Still want to know.)

(Also, Joni.)

Emphasis is just on "rock" - from a strictly muso standpoint, Joni'd walk this otherwise imo; her tunings used to be traded among people (here's one thing about that, but things like this were among the earliest uses of the internet for me & for other curious guitarists). Dylan used open tunings and alt tunings too, and may have learned them from jn early on, but it doesn't seem to have been a lifelong interest of his. But jm's style begins as folk and moves into something more folk-jazz pretty quickly - even by blue, theres' a restlessness, and of course by summer lawns her jazz leanings/affectations (depending on how you look at it) have pretty much taken over. Dylan OTOH, he's a strat man isn't he? i mean- his acoustic is obv where he makes his bones but part of why I think he goes electric is that his touch is pretty intensely chuck berry/early rock informed.

J0hn, I'd no idea it was you (I need to figure out how people can guess who's who around here)!

dylan can be an amazingly bad guitarist too ... there are bootlegs where he plays the same exact solo on every song. it's kinda weird, it's like he plays lead guitar as though he's playing harmonica.

there are bootlegs where he plays the same exact solo on every song

^^^comedy

Heylin's No Direction Home includes lots of snark from members of Dylan's nineties touring bands, inspired by his decision to suddenly play lead. Keith Richards once said that Mick Jagger and Dylan were the worst electric rhythm guitarists on earth -- "they play the thing like they're scrubbin' fuckin' laundry" (he says Mick has improved lots since then though).

huh, i thought Jagger was secretly supposed to be a really good guitarist? maybe I'm wrong. but i think Dylan's scrubby style can be really good if the people he's playing with can kinda go with it.

Keef's revisionism was inspired by how well Jagger plays on A Bigger Bang (on which he and Keith play most of the instruments).

I would never have called out Dylan's rock playing, have no idea what J0hn's talking about tbh

sw00ds told me recently that one of the weirder sights of his childhood was watching Jagger strap on a guitar in the late seventies. Not because Jagger was bad at it -- it just seemed incongruous to him.

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

I mean, where in his catalog is Dylan's electric playing even prominent/audible...? if you watch the footage from Eat the Document/Don't Look Back dude barely plays his guitar at all, and he's always seemed to prominently rely on other lead players, no?

I could be wrong and just listening to his sidemen tbqf - he's on electric on the hwy 61 album a lot ain't he, and in his maligned eighties records?

Mostly playing electric rhythm, but yes.

if you watch the footage from Eat the Document/Don't Look Back dude barely plays his guitar at all, and he's always seemed to prominently rely on other lead players, no?

I should say though, I haven't seen either of these or any Dylan footage hardly at all really & have been making auteur-based assumptions about who's playing what on his records for years; I am probably actually praising Robbie Robertson for all I know

or Mike Bloomfield or Al Kooper...

or Paul Butterfield

I mean I agree the playing on that mid-60s stuff in particular is amazing I just never thought it was Bob. but I'll defer to tyler or Alfred or whoever else is more schooled in Dylan lore.

obviously his acoustic playing is next level

respect to those guys, who have made Dylan seem to one casual Dylan listener like a better electric guitarist than he is for years

dylan is like a songwriter to me.

― plax (ico), Wednesday, 12 May 2010 17:09 (6 hours ago)

No, no -- the lead guitar work from the sixties was all Butterfield, Kooper, among others.

As far as I know, Dylan has never played lead on his recordings. He HAS played plenty of piano though: New Morning mostly, and all over Modern Times and Together Through Life, plus many tracks over the years.

You can always distinguish Dylan's piano playing: like Bryan Ferry, he concentrates on the black keys.

yeah his piano skills are pretty distinctive

Dylan really didn't start playing any lead guitar until the Rolling Thunder years, afaik. And then he *really* started playing lead during the Neverending Tour Years (though he mainly plays keys these days). Sometimes he's kinda inspired, sometimes he's awful. It's kind of exciting that way. Again, I think it sorta depends on the band -- if they can sort of weave themselves around his playing, it sounds pretty sweet. That might be the way it's always been -- he's always been a *forceful* player, it just depends on whether his band can adjust to that style.

obviously his acoustic playing is next level

Expand please? (Sincere qn. This statement is not obvious to me but you might actually be able to make me appreciate this guy. Bear in mind that I do not have a deep knowledge at all of his catalogue and virtually never listen to BD for pleasure.

I like it when other people do his songs though.

Also, boo to the results.)

pre-electric period (and some post- too, definitely) Dylan showcased a pretty remarkable aptitude for a number of different picking and tuning techniques. I'm not as technically well versed as other people here (J0hn or Dan, for instance) but I can tell you I have never been able to figure out how exactly he does "Don't Think Twice It's Allright", for example. the underlying chord progression and melody are pretty simple (it's actually very similar to These Days), but the actual tuning and picked part that he plays bewilders me.

funny, there are some people who say that the guitar on "Don't Think Twice" is actually played by Bruce Langhorne. I guess they just compare it to live versions from the same time ... and Dylan can't really play it like the record either!

lol

what a fraud!

there's other examples, that's just the first one I could think of off the top of my head

Everything about Bob is a deception.

i think it's just speculation though ... Langhorne isn't credited with doing it on the record ... I guess someone should ask him!
this is a bizarre dylanologist clusterfuck on the topic: http://dylanchords.info/professors/tt/ttch13.html

Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9CfjPN2CcUU/SiWrdbOytuI/AAAAAAAAACo/ARUYolPKtyU/s400/HeyBoDiddley.jpg

yeah I love Bo Diddley, but not what I was talking about really

kinda feel like anybody defending dylan's paintings (which i saw an exhib. of in london two summers ago) doesn't really care abt. painting or what painting is.

i like the cover of self portrait but yeah i don't really get painting :/

some nice picking on Nashville Skyline Rag fyi

listening to new morning. "if dogs run free" sounds like a joni diss track

i like that reading

how is it a joni diss track?

the tinkling piano and the female harmonies sound like a joni send up. maybe

I don't hear that - it sounds more like a deadpan whiteboy blues joke.

Oh, although when I think about it, was Joni in her jazz period yet at that point? I could see maybe the scat thing being a dig.