“That Thin Wild Mercurial Sound…”

“That Thin Wild Mercurial Sound…”

By: Ghost Writer

That unusual voice and the sometimes raw and naked instrumentation prompted many questions launched at me as a very young guy, Who's this guy? Why do you listen to him? Well, to me,  "the answer was not blowin' in the wind", it was always clear and close to me, Bob Dylan was "rock music's big bang", every piece of respectable rock music took Dylan as an influence or as a reference, of course there were other references, the Delta blues, folk protest songs, the Beat generation of writers and Jaques Brel, but rock n roll wise, Dylan was the man who made rock n roll music respectable, as Alan Moore made comics an adult's art, Dylan took rock n roll from novelty into art, he made rock n roll wise, respectable and forward thinking, he paved the path from trailblazers like Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits down and dirty songwriters who could easily made songs into art and song lyrics into respectable literature all these while taking us into cerebral stuff and a walk on the wild side. 

My father was a big Beatles fan from day one, honestly, I'm not a lot into those early records by them, to me the early Beatles were nothing more than a boy bad, without Dylan, I'm sure today's pop music would be nothing more than N Sync and the Backstreet Boys, Dylan ignited ambitious in rock music, but when they and the Stones got close to the music (and chemistry of...) Dylan, it was truly when rock music became something transcendental, it tore apart what was expected from rock music (nothing more than a teenage concept) turned it into something else, and just as Dylan's music it gave you something to think, something to take home with you, just listen to Rubber Soul to understand how Dylan changed the Beatles forever, listen to Cohen to understand poets taking the guitar and making dark sound poetry, listen to Bowie to understand drama and theater taking to rock, listen to Lou Reed to understand how street wise, complex, heavy and obnoxious it could get, listen to Syd Barrett to understand how hallucinating and cosmic it could be, to punk rock to understand how angry and rebellious it could be, and Dylan's fingerprint was over all that music, that was how big was Dylan contributing to pop culture, Bruce Springsteen said it best: "Elvis made us move, but Dylan made us think", Dylan took us from Elvis' teenage dream into adulthood's tragedy and ambition. 

 

Some might argue against Dylan's recent nomination and winning of the Nobel's Literature Prize, Dylan might have written books, but his songs are definitely his greatest contribution, not only to the world of rock music, but to the world of song, it would be hard to argue against Dylan "literary merits", surely he has them, of course he is not Philip Rot, Joyce Carol Oates or Haruki Murakami, but something I cherish a lot about the Literature Nobel Prize is the fact that it still keeps the magic to surprise us, to give us new names to know and to read like Patrick Modiano, Alice Munro and Svetlana Alexievich, three little known writers who needed that kind of push to become well known, in the case of Dylan, the push was necessary not in the music sense, but in the literary sense, so the lyrics of his songs were better analyzed and appreciated for what they are worth. 

We are always trying to break paradigms, and when someone truly shatters them apart we complain is too much, so better adapt quick, "Cause the times they are a changing..."