Results for “bob dylan” 59 found
Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate!
I had heard the rumors for years, but I didn’t think it actually would happen. My takes on a few Dylan albums:
FreeWheelin’ Bob Dylan: One of his most listenable and underrated albums, the same is true for Another Side of Bob Dylan.
Bringing It All Back Home: The album I fell in love with as a kid. Some of it is overwrought but mostly still amazing, perhaps his highest peaks.
Highway 61 Revisited: Half of it is wonderful, but it contains excess and some so-so judgment.
Blonde on Blonde: Many see this as Dylan’s peak, but I don’t listen to it much. Somehow the sound is a little harsh for my taste.
The Basement Tapes: The most overrated, too much murky slush and slosh.
Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, vol.II: The perfect medley.
Blood on the Tracks: Maybe the most consistent and listenable album, though it’s not pathbreaking in the way that the mid-sixties work was.
Time Out of Mind: An amazing “late career” work.
Dylan’s memoir is excellent, and his most underrated contribution outside of creating music is the CDs he edited for satellite radio, many hours of Dylan selecting and playing classics from early American musical history, blues, country, mixed styles, perhaps the single best look at the early evolution of American popular music. Many hours of listening pleasure. Bob Dylan Radio Hour. And the Martin Scorsese four-hour bio-documentary on Dylan is one of the better movies ever made, No Direction Home it is called.
If I recall correctly, three of the Conversations with Tyler turned to the topic of Bob Dylan. Camille Paglia loves the song “Desolation Row,” Cass Sunstein is a big fan, especially of some of the early period work, and Ezra Klein feels he is overrated, I guess that means especially overrated now.
Here are my earlier posts on Bob Dylan. Complain all you want, I say Bob Dylan is a better and more important artist than say Philip Roth. It’s not even close.
Congratulations to Bob Dylan, polymath!
Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday
It is today, here are a few underrated highlights of his career:
1. No Direction Home, the biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s one of the best documentaries on American music more generally, and a superb albeit hagiographic portrait of Dylan and his music.
2. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks and most of all Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits volume II are the albums I listen to most often. The last one sounds horrible from its name, but it was conceived conceptually, avoids the traditional problems of greatest hits albums (unlike Vol. I), and has some not otherwise available tracks; highly recommended. Then comes Time Out of Mind. I think of Bringing it All Back Home as the “best” Dylan album, but I enjoyed it so much at age fifteen that I don’t listen to it much today. Blonde on Blonde is overreaching and Highway 61 Revisited is half wonderful, half embarrassment in the lyrics.
3. Dylan as disc jockey is first-rate, and you can buy his XM Satellite Radio selections of early American music. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the period.
4. As a singer Dylan is influenced by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, as an acoustic guitarist he remains underrated.
5. Dylan once said that Barry Goldwater was his favorite politician.
Bob Dylan *Radio Hour*
Also known as German markets in everything, or alternatively why oh why can't we have a better U.S. copyright law?
Remember when Bob Dylan was DJ for those XM satellite radio shows, spinning a melange of blues, folk songs, vaudeville, gospel, and general bizarreness, with generally American themes, in the process proving himself one of the world's great musical infovres? Some of those shows are collected on CD, in Germany, vol. I, II, and III, four discs a box, twelve discs in total. The Amazon.de listings are here (they will ship to the US), or in German stores for about six dollars a disc, thank you Greece.
I own thousands of CDs, but these are among the very best and the song selection compares favorably to other collections of American music. The sound quality and transfers are first-rate.
Here is a Bach box, his major choral works and some of the major cantatas, MP3, and CD, 42 euros, 22 discs, John Eliot Gardiner conducting, these are some of the best recordings of the chosen pieces and even with shipping costs this is an extremely favorable purchase.
Have I mentioned there are many outrageous bargains in Berlin, not just my apartment?
For five or six euros, you can buy an excellent spaghetti bolognese, better than almost anything in WDC or Virginia. Apartments are cheaper, you don't need a car, mineral water and good bread is cheaper, gelato is cheaper, and in most social circles you're not expected to dress extraordinarily well. I'm not sure books are cheaper but they're not outrageously priced either, even many English-language editions. It's a strange feeling to come to Europe and have most things be cheaper, which still is not the case in Paris.
Here Angus recommends five CDs for Germany, good picks but the Dylan and the Bach round out some Alvin Curran and some gospel in my living room.
Bob Dylan’s XM broadcasts, as DJ
Too good to be true. I wish to rebel against the Staffan Linder theorem; maybe I’ll have my head frozen after all. Note: the downloads are not quick.
Dylan movie. Sort of.
The new Dylan biopic, starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw – all as Bob Dylan – is starting to get some coverage. As a lifelong Dylan fan, I’m excited to see the movie. The film is currently doing the rounds of the film festivals, and is going into wider release slowly from September through March (depending on your country).
Early reports only whet my appetite:
- A slew of trailers (both official and unofficial) on YouTube [HT: Cass Sunstein]
- This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie: a beautifully-written essay in today’s NY Times magazine
- A wrap-up of other reviews, from filmmaker Todd Haynes
- Some extremely high variance early reviews.
An aside: From many hallway conversations, I can report that Dylan is a surprisingly popular artist among the econ gliterati.
Opportunity Cost
The answer is b, $10. Your next best alternative to the Clapton concert is attending the Dylan concert which has a benefit of $50 and a cost of $40 or a net benefit of $10. The net benefit is what you give up by attending the Clapton concert.
Songs Sold for a Song
In our principles textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss securitization and give the interesting example of music securitization with the picture at right (I’m pretty proud of the caption.)
But what has happened to these big purchases of song portfolios? Ted Gioia runs the numbers and finds that the rock stars sold at the top and the financiers are taking a bath!
On Thursday, Hipgnosis announced a plan to sell almost a half billion dollars of its song portfolio. They need to do this to pay down debt. That’s an ominous sign, because the songs Hipgnosis bought were supposed to generate lots of cash. Why can’t they handle their debt load with that cash flow?
But there was even worse news. Hipgnosis admitted that they sold these songs at 17.5% below their estimated “fair market value.” This added to the already widespread suspicion that current claims of song value are inflated.
Hipgnosis’s share price actually dropped after the announcement.
Last year, I predicted the following:
“Don’t be surprised if the folks at [private equity group] Blackstone end up owning all those songs. But if it happens, they will probably acquire the music at a sharp discount to what those songs were worth just a few months ago.”
Can you guess the buyer in the deal announced on Thursday? Yes, it was a Blackstone-backed fund. And they definitely got that discount.
But there’s one part of this story that I love.…It confirms my sense that karma is at work in the universe, and everything tends towards justice and fairness—if you’re willing to wait long enough.
Here’s that element of karma. The old rock stars actually did defeat the system. They screwed the man, and did it big time.
By my measure, Bob Dylan sold out at the top, and gets to laugh at the financiers who overpaid him. The same is true of Paul Simon and Neil Young and all the rest.
When I launch my hedge fund, I’m going to invite them to join me as partners. They are shrewd operators, every one of them.
Why are folk songs such a poor guide to economics?
Oliver Anthony (perhaps he should leave his town of per capita income 13k?) is the centerpiece of the column, but I’ll excerpt the bit of Springsteen:
When singers turn to economic issues, who plays the role of victim? Very often it is people who have lost their jobs, such as in Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” about a textile mill leaving the singer’s hometown. (Springsteen is not generally considered a folk singer, but many of his songs have folk roots and channel folk vibes.) That sounds terrible, and for many former workers it was.
But in fact the mill was relocated further south, where presumably it helped to create other jobs. Was this development an egalitarian way to help spread prosperity to a poorer part of the country? Did it help spur the transition of New Jersey to a service economy? That seems to have worked out: Average household income today in Freehold, Springsteen’s hometown, is more than $133,000. Or were more sinister forces at work? Was the factory closing a form of regulatory arbitrage against trade unions that protect worker interests?
No matter what your view, the song doesn’t clarify the issue very much. Nor should it be expected to.
As a general rule, music and the arts excel at pointing attention toward the seen — that is, identifiable victims or beneficiaries. In contrast, many of the most important insights of economics concern the unseen — that is, people who benefit in non-obvious ways, and sometimes many of them actually are unidentifiable. Automation, for instance, will throw some people out of work, but economics teaches us that in the longer run it usually benefits society, through both lower consumer prices and the creation of jobs in other, less visible sectors of the economy. You don’t hear many songs about that.
Not surprisingly, Bob Dylan is the hero of the story.
Friday assorted links
1. Good profile of Merve Emre. And profile of Avi Loeb (NYT).
2. Web scraping for me but not for thee.
3. Street plans for Irish YIMBY.
4. Super-fragmentary new evidence on human origins.
5. Michael Webb podcast on AI, jobs, income, etc. with 80000 Hours. And AI gives a paralyzed woman her voice back.
6. Claims about art, against authenticity, and also concerning Bob Dylan.
My Conversation with John Adams
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the episode summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss why architects have it easier than opera composers, what drew him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, why he prefers great popular music to the classical tradition, the “memory spaces” he uses to compose, the role of Christianity in his work, the anxiety of influence, the unusual life of Charles Ives, the relationship between the availability and appreciation of music, how contemporary music got a bad rap, his favorite Bob Dylan album, why he doesn’t think San Francisco was crucial to his success, why he doesn’t believe classical music is dead or even dying, his fascination with Oppenheimer, the problem with film composing, his letter to Leonard Bernstein, what he’s doing next, and more.
And here is an excerpt:
COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?
ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.
If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.
COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?
ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”
Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.
When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.
COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?
Recommended.
Saturday assorted links
1. Be less scared of overconfidence.
2. Teaching ChatGPT to play overrated vs. underrated. And ChatGPT on the Japanese economy (Bloomberg). And more from ChatGPT.
3. On SBF and EA (New Yorker).
4. “If so, your dream job awaits: New York’s Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation.”
5. James Austin Johnson does Bob Dylan singing Jingle Bells throughout the decades.
6. Best movies of all time? Better than most such lists.
7. What went wrong with Ghana? (Bloomberg)
*The Philosophy of Modern Song*
Yes the author is Bob Dylan, and I give this one a thumbs up. You can buy it here. Here is one bit:
A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom. Little Richard was speaking in tongues across the airwaves long before anybody knew what was happening. He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio, even screamed like a holy preacher — which is what he was. Little Richard is a master of the double entendre. “Tutti Frutti” is a good example. A fruit, a male homosexual, and “tutti frutti” is “all fruit.” It’s also a sugary ice cream. A gal named Sue and a gal named Daisy and they’re both transvestites. Did you ever see Elvis singing “Tutti Frutti” on Ed Sullivan? Does he know what he’s singing about? Do you think Ed Sullivan knows? Do you think they both know? Of all the people who sing “Tutti Fruitti,” Pat Boone was probably the only one who knew what he was singing about. And Pat knows about speaking in tongues as well.
And:
The Grateful Dead are not your usual rock and roll band. They’re essentially a dance band. They have more in common with Arie Shaw and bebop than they do with the Byrds or the Stones…There is a big difference in the types of women that you see from the stage when you are with the Stones compared to the Dead. With the Stones it’s like being at a porno convention. With the Dead, it’s more like the women you see by the river in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Free floating, snaky and slithering like in a typical daydream. Thousands of them….With the Dead, the audience is part of the band — they might as well be on the stage.
Or how about this:
Bluegrass is the other side of heavy metal. Both are musical forms steeped in tradition. They are the two forms of music that visually and audibly have not changed in decades. People in their respective fields still dress like Bill Monroe and Ronnie James Dio. Both forms have a traditional instrumental lineup and a parochial adherence to form.
Bluegrass is the more direct emotional music and, though it might not be obvious to the casual listener, the more adventurous.
This is one of the better books on America, and one of the best books on American popular song. But then again, that is what you would expect from a Nobel Laureate in literature, right?
How political was 1960s music?
That question is debated at length in the comments section of this post. There are obviously political songs, such as the protest songs of Bob Dylan, or “Revolution” by The Beatles, much misunderstood at that. Still, much of 1960s music was far more political in its time than it seems to us today. The mere fact that the singer had long hair, or shook his hips in a “lewd” manner, or that white stars aped black music styles…all of that was intensely political. “I don’t want you listening to no music by no long hairs” was a common parental sentiment at the time, because people mostly did understand what was at stake, namely an overturning of a lot of societal mores. Elvis Presley sounds to us today like another early rock star, but the black vocal affectations and the grinding hips were a big deal for some period of time. Drug songs were political too, and there were lots of those. Just try “Eight Miles High,” or a big chunk of Jefferson Airplane or how about Donovan? Hippie culture also was political. Motown carried ideas of black capitalism, and was actually somewhat of a counter to the more politically radical forms of black music. The Beach Boys are an example of a significant period group who mostly were not very political (though you can find a superficial embrace of consumer culture at first, followed by a collapse into tragedy and sadness), and plenty of the “one hit wonder” songs were apolitical too. Most of the stuff that has survived in collective memory was fairly political. The Byrds album Sweetheart of the Rodeo was political too, and it is no accident that Roger McGuinn ended up as a Ben Carson supporter and a Christian. The album was mostly hated upon its release in 1968, but now is seen as a classic.
Further Monday assorted links
7. Yuan Longping, RIP (NYT).
8. Famous musicians pick their favorite Bob Dylan songs. Would mine be “Highway 61”? “Mr. Tambourine Man”? “Tangled Up in Blue”? “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”? Too many choices. Bob is today 80 years old. The most overrated is perhaps “Desolation Row”, with its pretentious lyrics?
9. Why the new Elon Musk rocket really will matter?
10. Why a new business surge in black communities during the pandemic? (NYT)
Monday assorted links
1. Steve Kirsch on current Covid-19 treatments. He is attempting to maximize expected value, coming from me that is praise.
2. Ezra Vogel has passed away.
4. Bob Dylan on Paul McCartney.
5. “Harvard University scientists plan to fly a test balloon above Sweden next year to help advance research into dimming sunlight to cool the Earth, alarming environmentalists opposed to solar geoengineering.” Link here.
6. Insights on carbon pricing (which many overrate).