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03-27-2020, 06:47 PM
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Simon: So do we like that new Dylan song?
Listening to it is like panning for gold. And there are some nuggets in it. The melody is sombre and I could listen to that piano all night long. The lyrics are a rambling, disjointed compendium of musical history and influences and his couplets rat-a-tat-tat like buckshot for 17 minutes.
I've got to find out more about it.
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03-27-2020, 08:43 PM
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Well what a pleasant surprise. Maybe Bob’s been reading this blog? You never know. And a reference to Warren Zevon (Gower Street) as Tim mentioned. This one will keep the Dylanologists busy for a long long time. A hypnotic piece of work with a million allusions to ...well just about everything under the sun.
Last edited by Damian Balassone; 03-31-2020 at 05:32 PM.
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03-27-2020, 08:59 PM
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"Tempest" is my favorite song on the album. A bright, brisk waltz in triple time, the upbeat music provides a nice counterpoint to the downbeat lyrics.
And Quincy Lehr lay dreaming,
His whole world now in flux,
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking,
And he said 'It fucking sucks.'
Last edited by Tim McGrath; 03-27-2020 at 09:05 PM.
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03-30-2020, 05:14 AM
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"A day that will live on in infamy...
Led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb...
Shot down like a dog...
We're gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect"
All that in the first verse. That last line was as far I got.
But then, what could the first songwriter given a Novel possibly write that wouldn't make some frickin' nobody complain?
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03-31-2020, 05:42 PM
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He's not trying to justify his Nobel with every couplet he writes.
Dylan often writes in a folk, blues, jazz cat voice.
Also, as Tim and I discussed earlier in this thread, almost everything Dylan has written since '97 is a collage of other peoples words. Lyrically, there's a lot more going on in this song than meets the ear.
But if you want me to justify his Nobel, I reckon he deserves it alone for the final verse of Mr. Tambourine Man.
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03-31-2020, 11:57 PM
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In "Murder Most Fowl," Dylan gives us a free-wheeling tour of many of the cultural touchstones of the last hundred years, including popular music and, most prominently, the Kennedy assassination. However, the assassination is just a hook for Dylan to hang his coat of many colors on. He is free associating here, a technique he uses frequently, and the song's scaffolding or spine--it's organizing principle--is rhyme. By my count, the song has 82 couplets, or 82 rhyming opportunities, and in 80 of them the rhymes are exact. That works out to a little more than 97 percent, a good percentage even for Dylan, no slouch in the rhyme department, as Damian appreciates. Besides referring to rock, jazz and blues, he also mentions Shakespeare and the "Moonlight Sonata," although he gets the key signature of the sonata wrong. "The Moonlight" is written in C-sharp minor, not F-sharp as Dylan says, although the key does include an F-sharp note. You'd think that Dylan would know such things, and he probably does. As always, it's hard to fathom his intentions.
Last edited by Tim McGrath; 04-01-2020 at 03:36 AM.
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04-01-2020, 01:05 AM
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I haven't asked for a justification of his Nobel prize. I am curious about what anyone sees in the line "We're gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect."
Last edited by Max Goodman; 04-01-2020 at 02:07 AM.
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04-01-2020, 03:13 AM
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Fair call Max. It's a rough as guts line and to say you don't respect someone after you've killed them probably goes without saying. But I think Dylan is using the idiom of the folk/blues/jazz cat tongue. It's not what he's saying, it's the way he's saying it. To my ear, he pulls it off. There's probably a thousand worse Dylan lines that don't cut the mustard on the page e.g. He sings "Whenever someone around him died and was dead" in Red River Shore. Now to my knowledge, it goes without saying that someone who dies is dead, but strangely this line works.
Interesting observation Tim about Moonlight Sonata. That's not my area of expertise, but maybe Dylan's hinting at something with that line. On the subject of the music in "Murder Most Foul", I hear the violin almost mimicking the violin in Van Morrison's "Madame George" threatening to burst out of the shadows. But it never does.
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04-01-2020, 10:39 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Damian Balassone
It's not what he's saying, it's the way he's saying it.
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The way he's saying it is what grates on my ear. He's using cliches and other empty words so he can hit his rhymes. But I appreciate knowing that others hear it differently. Thanks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim McGrath
By my count, the song has 82 couplets, or 82 rhyming opportunities, and in 80 of them the rhymes are exact. That works out to a little more than 97 percent, a good percentage even for Dylan, no slouch in the rhyme department,
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Some listeners find other kinds of rhymes more interesting. And even those who agree that exact rhyme is always best (as this calculation implies), cringe when they hear a line as baldly rhyme-driven.
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04-03-2020, 05:58 PM
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It's hard swallow John Prine's death to coronavirus. His wife is sick too.
Here's him performing "Hello In There".
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