What does Sup Forums think of Bob Dylan?

What does Sup Forums think of Bob Dylan?

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You would know if you have been here more than 2 hours

blonde on blonde is an untouchable masterpiece

Overrated campfire music

campfires are comfy though

nice dubs too

No he wouldn't you fuckingodipt.

garbage for the masses.
listen to nick drake.

One of the GOATs

A stone-cold musical genius, and anyone who says otherwise is either a troll or an idiot (probably both).

garbage for hipsters
listen to bob dylan

better hipster than normie

Still garbage

What is this stupid idea on here that artists are mutually exclusive? I fucking love Bob Dylan and Nick Drake, why is it one or the other? They don't even sound anything alike.

>being a hipster
>good

Mediocre, Kanye west is a better songwriter

god-tier and my favorite artist

nobody on Sup Forums ever discusses bob dylan.

>garbage for the masses.
Bob dylan is a better song writer and musician you faglord.

Shit lyricist
Shit singer
Shit musician
Shit music

your next MEAAAAAAAal

What instrument does he play again?

...

Oh is that a bass?

>Shit lyricist
I really wonder if you some of you people actually listen to the lyrics when you call somebodies lyrics good or bad.

>Nick Drake
>garbage
O I'm laffin

I actually do
His lyrics are pretentious and psuedopoetic
Bob Dylan is far from a gifted writer, he seems to think using obtuse and dated metaphors makes him a deep lyricist or something
Complete overrated trash

there would be no Nick Drake without Bob Dylan

Literally how new are both of you? Dylan has 3 Sup Forumscore albums

I love both of them but Nick Drake isn't a guy you wouldn't hate easily

Fuck, he has even more than that. I'd consider Freewheelin', Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and Blood On The Tracks to all be Sup Forumscore, and essential. Bob has many more good albums than those too.

I was strictly speaking of the big Sup Forumscore essentials chart but he definitely has at least 4 or 5 that are frequently discussed here

Hope you are baiting.
Im not new nobody ever discusses anything besides blonde on blonde.

I don't think much of him, thought he was dead til I just googled it

...

>I'd consider Freewheelin'

Eh, just listened to it, and even if some tracks had great imagery in it's lyrics (Blowin' in the Wind, Girl from the North Country, and Bob Dylan's Dream) some humorous (Talking World War III Blues and I Shall Be Free), most of them were didactic in their execution.
Sure, this is music, not poetry, but even then, there's nothing special in the guitar playing or harmonica (unlike a Nick Drake), and while his voice is interesting, again it's not that melodic or harmonious enough to justify what would be consider for the most part, preachy, and even pretentious, lyrics, it just has a harsh texture, and that's it, texture, he doesn't even do something novel with it.

Also, take for example, the anti-war song by the Zombies, Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914),
youtube.com/watch?v=7KcIu3pIzWI
and Dylan's Masters of War,
youtube.com/watch?v=exm7FN-t3PY
See, the difference in not only music, but the subtly in lyrics.

>hair folk

Poor Man's Mumford and Sons

Extremely overrated.

He plays piano but it's one of the easiest instruments to play.

Those two songs are taking totally different approaches to the anti-war subject though. The Zombies is about the weight it has on the soldier, Dylan is attacking the people who propagate war

Subtlety really isn't the point, lines like "And I hope that you die" are meant to be inflammatory and up front with his intentions

None of Drake's lyrics stand up on paper the same way Dylan's do. Townes is better than both of them.

Of course they're two different approaches, and you're right about one being about a soldier, and the other attacking the powers that be.

But by execution, the Zombies are clearly ahead, take for example

And I
And I can't stop shaking
My hands won't stop shaking
My arms won't stop shaking
My mind won't stop shaking

Considering the context of war, one can assume he's describing shell shock, and while not really subtle when put against poetry, it's all more affecting in the way it's sung, and much more interesting than the finger-pointing of Dylan.

Btw I don't dislike Dylan, but I do think Freewheelin' is not as great as they say, however historically important it is.

Agree on the latter, but Drake's music is leagues ahead Dylan in execution. He did more with less, and Dylan needed more for just a slight step ahead.

He clearly had a lot of great lyrical ideas, but that doesnt translate to great music for a lot of his songs.

Music wise I agree but I stand by my statement that Dylan's lyrics are far beyond Drake's. I don't think Drake was that great of a lyricist tbqh. He was able to perform his words with sincerity and passion which makes them enjoyable but they're not really that impressive.

And they were reaching for different aesthetics anyway. Dylan's music has always been entrenched in southern influences, whereas Drake's works were more European.

the skinflute

Masters of War isn't really one of the songs Freewheelin's lauded for, it's odd that you're putting so much importance in it. The "great" songs are the ones you've already mentioned, Blowin in the Wind, Girl from the North Country, etc.

>But by execution, the Zombies are clearly ahead
Any other anti-war Zombies songs with excellent execution?

You have to remember that this is music, not poetry. Even if you were to judge Dylan among poets, he doesn't stand among a Walt Whitman or William Blake.

And sure, they were reaching different aesthetics, but they belong on the same medium, and more specifically, the same genre, singer-songwriter, so a comparison isn't out of the question.

No, they have other great songs that deal with other subjects.

So you're just cherrypicking here
>other subjects.
Other than love/girls, like what?

old unlikable jew

>You have to remember that this is music, not poetry
I'd honestly beg to differ. Yes, we're on a music board so I suppose that automatically makes this a music discussion (I'm not OP and my first post in this post mentioned Townes) lyrics in the subject of singer-songwriter are just as important as music when discussion quality. Lyrics are at least half of the appeal.

With your bit about Dylan not standing among Whitman or Blake, yes that's true but then at that same token Drake's music has nothing even on some of the guitarists of his day, Fahey, Basho, Reinhardt (well, close enough to his day at least) etc. There are giants that surpass everyone mentioned in this thread, there's no need to bring them up.

*when discussing quality.

>someone compares old dead British NEET version of Mark Kozelek to Dylan and gets (you)s in 2016

The texture of his voice and his vocal delivery and the musicality of the lyricism are all at an extremely high level and totally justify themselves, especially when compounded with his long-form compostions on Blonde on Blonde.

Nick Drake is, like you say, a very special guitar player (I think he's one of the best writers for acoustic guitar, and definitely the greatest writer for acoustic guitar within the context of singer-songwriting) and a very original songwriter, even more original than Bob. He also has a much better sense of melody and harmony. But Nick never wrote a song as glorious as Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and he's not even half the singer that Bob is, despite being a good singer. Nick is also a lesser lyricist musically and poetically, despite being a great lyricist. Nick's friend John Martyn wrote similar music sometimes and is probably the most comparable artist to Nick and even though he's not as good of a songwriter or guitar player as Nick, he's a much better vocalist and also a rather original guitar player (though less original).

Overall Nick and Bob are great and very different artists who are better than each other at different things.

great songwriter.
from a different era.
to judge by modern standards would be unfair

overall, 7/10

Nick Drake couldn't touch literally any composition on Highway 61. Please never refer to him as a better songwriter again.

Drake was a better musician, Dylan was a better songwriter. I think it's safe to say fans of either like them for different reasons.

True, but it's one of the longest songs in there, among It's A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall, which isn't nothing special besides a few verses, either musically or lyrically, and Talking World War III Blues, which I'll admit is one of the better war songs of the time, due to the humor and non-facile execution.

I wasn't cherry picking when it's the ONLY war song by the Zombies.

And yeah, they have some songs about love/girls, with unique executions around them, and other's not about love/girls.

Just listen Oddesey and Oracle. I just pointed to Butcher's Front, because that's the closes thing to a anti-war song when coming across Masters of War.

Your mostly right, but I was referring to Freewheelin, not Blonde on Blonde, which Nick Drake is closer to the former in music, and does it better.

>Drake was a better musician

His guitar and harmonica playing is nothing out of the ordinary, you could make argument for the latter though.

>which isn't nothing special besides a few verses, either musically or lyrically,
I'll give you musically but lyrically there had never been a song quite like it before.

And Another Side of Bob Dylan was where he perfected his acoustic/folk style. If you're going to be making a comparison you should be making it from that album.

Dylan was a great musician but he wasn't trying to be anything fancy with his music, so it's very subtle.

Nick is an artist of guitar playing and singer-songwriting. Fahey and Basho are almost completely guitar players (though Basho has a few great songs (still lesser than Nick's best songs) and is a better singer than Nick).

But yes, Basho and Fahey are in my opinion greater guitar players than Nick.

>And Another Side of Bob Dylan was where he perfected his acoustic/folk style. If you're going to be making a comparison you should be making it from that album.

More like Bringing It All Back Home, which has some of his best (mostly) acoustic/folk, but lyrically, Another Side, was a step in the right path.

>still lesser than Nick's best songs
We're just going to have to agree to disagree then. Nothing by Drake has moved me the same way Orphan's Lament or Blue Crystal Fire has.

I'd also argue that Drake and Dylan were entirely different songwriters. Dylan, while he was introspective, put forth much more of an effort to comment on the wider wold around him than Drake did. Both made introverted music, Drake slightly moreso.

>lyrics in the subject of singer-songwriter are just as important as music when discussion quality. Lyrics are at least half of the appeal.
I'm bringing this up again since it was ignored the first time.

If you're going to make the argument that Fahey and Basho were completely different in approach than Drake than you could say the same about Whitman, Blake and Dylan. Dylan's poetry on the page (published in newspapers, Tarantula, the liner notes of his albums) are quite different than the lyrics of his songs.

I never said that, I said Nick is a more original songwriter, and that's a fact.

If he is then I'd ask you to show me songs like The Chimes of Freedom, Mr. Tambourine Man, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Tangled Up in Blue, A-Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Desolation Row or It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding before any of them were composed.

Fair enough. I've actually covered both Orphan's Lament (as a saxophone player) and Blue Crystal Fire lol (as a guitar player/singer) and consider Robbie Basho among my favourite artists of all time (I even prefer him to Nick Drake overall, I think). Both of those songs are seemingly more emotionally charged than any Drake song, but in my opinion, that isn't what makes a great song. For me, the songs on Pink Moon and River Man have more powerful atmospheres conveyed through the sound of the music alone than either of those songs. Orphan's Lament is a powerful song, but that's largely because the personal plight behind it is rather strong and very concrete, but the power of the song is not quite as abstract/musical as those Drake songs. Some of Robbie's guitar compositions (e.g. Cathedrals et Fleurs de Lis or the Plumstar) are even more powerful than those songs for me though.

I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree then. For me the only that makes a great song is how much a song is able to affect me, the intricacies behind it are nice but unneeded.

It has more to do with Bob's very conventional guitar playing, arranging, and source material. The arrangements and source material are very much derived from blues and country songs in much more profound ways than Nick's material, which as has been previously mentioned, derive more from European folk and Romantic music. Nick's harmony is closer to Debussey or Satie than Howlin' Wolf or Woodie Guthrie, despite also being a little influenced by the blues and country. Nearly every rock artist derived their material country and blues, and very few did from European classical music. Bob never could have sounded as good as Nick with just his guitar and voice, despite being a much greater vocalist than Nick. Bob's originality derives almost entirely from his lyricism and vocal delivery. They're both very original songwriters though.

>agree to disagree

That's just another way of saying you're wrong.

> I prefer the Byrds covers, and maybe even argue they're better, simply because of harmonies.

Dylan is objectively better than nick drake

Drake has a perfect discography. Dylan, not so much, after John Wesley Harding.

You're just trolling now.

No, it's another way of saying you're not going to sway me and I'm not going to sway you. I think that placing anything over emotional reaction when judging a work of art is foolish, and to be blunt, pretentious.

Blues and country weren't the only sources Dylan's music was influenced by. The Beats, Rimbaud, etc all played a profound influence on him.
That's because Drake died before he could fall off his pedestal.

Sure, he has some good-great albums after, like Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Oh Mercy, and even Time Out of Mind, but most of it isn't even good.

>I think that placing anything over emotional reaction when judging a work of art is foolish, and to be blunt, pretentious.

You could put intellect above that, but then again a work of art that appeals to the mind, eventually appeals to emotion.

You forgot Nashville Skyline, New Morning, Slow Train Coming, Infidels, Good As I Been To You, World Gone Wrong, Love and Theft and Tempest, nevermind the releases from The Bootleg Series in the same time span.

I hate musicians everyone treats as gods just because they died young while still in the peak of their career.

>but then again a work of art that appeals to the mind,
A great deal of avant-garde work disproves this.

The guy who posted is not me.

You seriously think those albums are above Nick Drake discography?

>I wasn't cherry picking when it's the ONLY war song by the Zombies.
Then pick a different Zombies song to compare it to. Should i randomly choose one?
>And yeah, they have some songs about love/girls, with unique executions around them, and other's not about love/girls.
Such as?

I wasn't commenting on the Dylan/Drake debate in this post, just that they're good albums, though I would say everything from The Bootleg Series besides The Basement Tapes and Cutting Edge (which were just non-subtle attempts to hang onto copyrights) is on the level of Drake. I'd also say all the albums I mentioned besides GAIBTY and WGW (for obvious reasons) have songs on the level of Drake.

Then how do you assess a work of art if you only use emotion? If it's just emotions and feelings then everything is subjective, and I might as well not try to make arguments.

I agreed that Dylan's originality derives from his lyricism in , I just didn't mention Rimbaud or the Beats explicitly because he was much much more influenced by a great variety of poetry than a great variety of music.

I agree that emotion/atmosphere is perhaps the greatest way to listen to music, but sometimes intellectual things should be placed over the emotional in particular pieces because a piece can be masterful on an intellectual level and insufficient on an emotional level.

Erm, let me rephrase that, since The Cutting Edge has everything from Dylan's electric period. The set has songs on the level of Drake but the reason why it was released put a bad taste in my mouth (there isn't a single Dylan album that doesn't have something from the public domain, excluding the cover albums) and so I look at it in a different way than I do the electric trilogy proper.

>Cutting Edge (which were just non-subtle attempts to hang onto copyrights)
How so?

>Just listen Oddesey and Oracle

Besides trying to banter, what's your point?

Which song on that album specifically?

You seem to be having trouble finding a Zombies song that isn't about love/girl. Poor songwriting?

The recordings were going to go into the public domain this year. Dylan/Columbia (probably Columbia) released the entirety of the studio recordings from 65-66 to cling onto the the copyrights. They'd done this before with some of his live recordings which-I-don't-remember-the-name of at the moment.

We can't really assess works beyond their objective qualities (i.e. this has a voice with much timbral breadth, this song has extremely well-developed counterpoint), but you can't convince everyone that those objective qualities are good. Not to mention that much of what makes music great cannot be quantified (e.g. how do I say that this is an objectively good melody?)

Let me rephrase yet again since I'm an idiot. The entirety of the studio recordings that weren't already released were going to enter the public domain. Everything on the electric trilogy, b-sides, other entries of the Bootleg Series were going to stay in where they were.

Hung Up on a Dream
Time of the Season
Beechwood Park
Brief Candles
Changes

And it's not troubling, but I respected your intellect to find out by yourself, anymore request, spoon-feeding sir?

>The entirety of the studio recordings that weren't already released were going to enter the public domain
[citation needed]
>Hung Up on a Dream
>Time of the Season
>Beechwood Park
>Brief Candles
>Changes
All about girls or love.

Try again.

>[citation needed]
Literally every article out there about it.

I agree, and if art is actually subjective, it wouldn't hurt for most individuals to a different "objective" qualifications, you know, some kind of standard?

vulture.com/2015/11/bob-dylans-new-bootlegs-the-cutting-edge.html
>The real reason, though, for the are you fucking nuts? model can be found on another box that Sony issued only in Europe three years ago: a four-CD-R box (not even finished CDs!) titled The 50th Anniversary Collection: The Copyright Extension Collection Vol. I. Its 87 tracks constituted every unreleased Dylan recording in the vaults from 1962 and 1963. This collection’s 100 copies existed for one reason: to exploit a loophole in European law that extends a copyrighted recording’s term from 50 to 70 years, but only if the recording sees release. Otherwise, it goes into the public domain — meaning that anyone who wanted to bootleg these recordings could potentially do so legally, without that copyright extension.
Releasing some of the better still unreleased recordings is one thing but releasing every single recording from a time span of 18 months is another.