Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize is a culturally revealing moment, not only about the miserable state of modern literature but the even-more-miserable state of modern music criticism. Let’s get this straight: Dylan can’t sing and can’t play. The musicians who did most to disguise these facts, the Band, were likewise uninspired players; their principle virtue was that they understood their limitations (thus their intentionally modest name) and worked within them.
And the best versions of Dylan’s tunes are those recorded by other artists. Take one example of many: “All Along the Watchtower.” From bar bands to Jimi Hendrix, there is an almost infinite number of variations, but comparing them to Dylan is like comparing a blank canvas to a Caravaggio. Listen to Hendrix and then the Dylan original. You’ll have no doubt which of them was the true laureate.
But we have to endure Dylan—and several later generations of derivatively whining “singer-songwriters”—because popular music journalists don’t write about music, they write about lyrics. Like drunks who fumble for lost keys under the lamppost, they don’t see what—for them—is in the dark.
This is especially unfortunate in trying to understand rock and roll—or what used to be called rock and roll. The power of popular music in the modern era comes from the beat and, particularly since the 1960s, the electric guitar. Curiously, Dylan himself understood this—by “going electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and thereby alienating the English lit-types who attended such things. Here again, to compare that performance to, say, that of Hendrix or the Who just two years later at the Monterey Pop Festival is to match the 98-pound weakling against Charles Atlas.
Popular music critics almost never describe sound; they analyze lyrics and thus miss the point. It’s not that Hendrix or Cream-era Eric Clapton were such technically virtuous instrumentalists—and they were “playing” their amplifiers as much as their guitars—but that what they had to communicate was conveyed aurally rather than orally. Under any circumstances, it would be a challenge to describe the phenomenon, but for decades, there have been few attempts to do so beyond, “Wow! Heavy!”
Indeed, rock writers learned early to deride instrumental composition and improvisation as “self-indulgent.” And, as always, there are more Salieris than Mozarts. But you can’t really convey the beauty of Don Giovanni or Figaro by summarizing the libretto, either. After all, there are simply too many notes in Mozart.
And too few in Dylan.
