[Bob Dylan] is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.
—Joni Mitchell, giving me a soundbite that I can use to stir up the FT Dylan Lovers Club.
I find it fascinating that the leftist progressives say, “Well, what’s the big deal if the whole world become Muslim? What would be wrong with that?” The response to that is, “Well look, what Muslim city would you want to live in?” I like the Muslim world – I spend a lot of time there. I love Amman, I love Cairo, I love visiting. But would I want to raise a family in Cairo? Would I want to try to do business there? Would I want to try to exercise my right to free speech in Jordan, which is supposedly a moderate Muslim state?
— Mark Steyn on what it would be like if the whole world were Muslim.
He knows exactly how smart he is…. He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.
—Valerie Jarrett, confidante and adviser to President Obama, securing her nomination for the Toady Hall of Fame.
Getting books back from the prisoners and letting them pick out new ones is a bit of controlled chaos. We stood outside the iron door to the house with our cart and had two prisoners come out at one time, check off their returned book, and pick out a new one. Each prisoner is allowed one book and one magazine. The most popular books are by far James Patterson’s novels, so popular in fact that we have to lock them up after book service because they tend to disappear. I wonder if James Patterson has any idea. National Geographic is the magazine of choice, and there is an entire box of them to choose from, some as far back as the early 80′s.
Jamie Niehof on “A Day Working the Rikers Island Book Cart.”
I just want to take this opportunity to point out that there is no such thing as “spirituality.” Doesn’t exist, has no meaning. It’s just a name for “doing what I want to do and feeling that the universe somehow smiles on me for doing it.
—Alan Jacobs doesn’t think much of spirituality.
The telephone was an aberation in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else’s life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone’s living room and start shouting. it was never okay. It’s less okay now. Telephone calls are rude.
—Rick Webb, telling the truth about the evils of telephony. Preach on, brother.
Additional sources: Boing Boing, The Browser
April 30th, 2010 | 12:08 pm
I don’t mean to offend the Dylan fans. Really. But, to paraphrase that 2-faced joke about Abe Lincoln, if he had a better voice (any voice) wouldn’t he use it?
Why am I reading this while I should be working? I’m bored to death. I’m simply too talented to do what ordinary people do. (Seriously, that Jarrett quote is the funniest thing I’ve read this week!)
April 30th, 2010 | 1:30 pm
What Joni Mitchell said about Bob Dylan couldn’t be any closer to the truth. If you carefully study his career/background, you will find that he stole from all the folk greats that went before him with total disregard for giving anyone credit but himself. He is and always has been the consumate flim flam man.
Joni, on the other hand couldn’t be more authentic, genuine, and gifted.
April 30th, 2010 | 1:36 pm
“He knows exactly how smart he is”
And that shows, as was known by the Greeks thousands of years ago and famously stated by Socrates, just how far from being truly intelligent he really is.
April 30th, 2010 | 2:02 pm
I like the Joni Mitchell quote. To be she only got around to saying that now. It would have been priceless if someone like her had said that back in the 1960′s when people like Dylan were swooned over for their counterculture authenticity.
I have always thought that Dylan was a fraud, a man who blows with the wind. He changed his name to suit the times and his profession, changed his religion and then changed back again, changed to electric guitar, to LA over NY, etc.
He once commented, wistfully, that he would have been better off being like his brother who never left Minnesota, never changed his name and never changed his religion once, let alone twice. I guess, Joni Mitchell agrees with that comment.
April 30th, 2010 | 3:12 pm
Is Roberta Joan Anderson (aka Joni Mitchell) claiming that every single song and lyric penned by Dylan is stolen?
I have no doubt that “Mitchell” wrote “rows and rows of angels’ air; ice cream castles in the air,” and that I too have looked at love that way. But, c’mon, does Roberta seriously believe that Dylan stole the entirety of this:
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying
Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be one more
Person crying
So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing
As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked
An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it
Advertising signs they con
You into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you
You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to
Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something they invest in
While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in
But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed
Graveyards, false gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough, what else can you show me?
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
April 30th, 2010 | 5:11 pm
Whatever, Joni. In many ways, Bob Dylan is a mensch. You’re not.
April 30th, 2010 | 6:01 pm
Watch Scorsese’s documentary of him. Listen to more of his music. There is way more to the man than his detractors recognize at superficial glance. And why not start writing off every musician who has had moments of overly blatant borrowing? The Rolling Stones credited Robert Johnson’s songs as their own, because his music wasn’t yet copyrighted. They have since ‘fessed up, paid royalties to Johson’s widow, and have been very generous towards blues musicians who never get their due like rock stars do. But people don’t write them off as frauds.
Bob Dylan would have to be put in the top 5 of musicians who influenced vocal style in popular music. Some think that he sounds the way he does because he can’t sing. Listen to Lay Lady Lay (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipnPDekLm3k) and this is proven wrong–most people probably couldn’t even recognize it’s him. I’m glad he didn’t stay with that sound. It’s not a Dylan song I like.
Dylan sang with the voice he did because he wanted to be more of a poet, and he wanted to sing in a way that emphasized the rhythms of the words. His music provided a nice contrast to overly polished studio musicians.
One of my favorite Dylan songs is Only a Pawn in Their Game (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIlykCOOBuk), which talks about the man who shot civil rights leader Medgar Evers, but Dylan sees the problem as larger than the ignorant people who end up holding racist views. Later, Dylan would come to dismiss music as a vehicle for change, disappointing fans of folk music. I think he wanted music to not be propaganda, even if for good causes. I wish other artists would pay attention to him on this point. Dylan even went so far as to point out the dangers and falseness of the romantic, gypsy hippie ideal in Like a Rolling Stone.
April 30th, 2010 | 7:00 pm
Bob Dylan might be interesting now and again, but not again and again. So I’ll take issue with Rick Webb on telephones.
Telephones were not so bad once. People also used to visit. Neighbors, family and friends would just stop by the house without notice. My parents seemed to have time for this as did their parents. What is aberrant is the way life has sped up and our relationships have changed. That the once tolerable house telephone is now intolerable marks the change.
May 1st, 2010 | 3:11 am
Hey look, Mark Steyn is beating on a man made out of straw.
May 1st, 2010 | 12:31 pm
True enough, Joni Mitchell’s given name was Roberta Joan Anderson. Mitchell was her married name and Roberta disappeared somewhere on the road from Western Canada to NY’s folk scene in the 1960′s, according to Wikipedia. I’m not sure why she got so exercised about Bob Dylan’s name change.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, and gave Roberta Anderson’s spot to Joni Mitchell, I guess.
May 1st, 2010 | 5:27 pm
i don’t think Bob Dylan is a phony,he started his singing in a more innocent era than it is today,and there was the Vietnam war and all the unrest in the nineteen sixties,he was a musician and probably had a poetic mind,and he expressed himself,so that’s it,..Peace!
May 1st, 2010 | 11:43 pm
Dylan is way, way too obnoxious to be phoney. Donny & Marie, well, that’s phoney. Bono, Angelina and Madonna campainging that’s also phoney, self absorbed exhibitionism.
Old Bob wrote, sang & got stoned. What’s phoney about that?
May 1st, 2010 | 11:55 pm
Boy oh boy what we would have missed if BD had never left Minnesota, like his brother David who btw now spends much of his time at a mansion in Scotland purchased by who none other
May 3rd, 2010 | 10:49 am
I’m not surprised at all that Joni Mitchell thingk Dylan is a phony. People in the Folk world always look down their noses at people who operate on more of a Country Music wavelength. Country singers have been lifting lyrics and tunes off of one another since before Bob and Roberta were born, and that style of music has always valued allusion, even imitation.
Bob Dylan’s work has more in common with that of William Shakespeare than it does with Ms. Mitchell’s “originals.”
May 6th, 2010 | 1:01 pm
Bob Dylan is unique as a poet and songwriter and Mitchell does not even compare to him. She should really listen to Positively 4th Street again (apparently it’s the song that ‘converted’ her into a Dylan fan back in the day) – maybe she’s that person?
Just listen to Knocking on Heaven’s Door, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row…or even ‘simple’ tracks like I Want You:
The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I should refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it’s not that way
I wasn’t born to lose you
I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you
The drunken politician leaps
Upon the street where mothers weep
And the saviors who are fast asleep, they wait for you
And I wait for them to interrupt
Me drinkin’ from my broken cup
And ask me to
Open up the gate for you
I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you
How all my fathers, they’ve gone down
True love they’ve been without it
But all their daughters put me down
’Cause I don’t think about it
Well, I return to the Queen of Spades
And talk with my chambermaid
She knows that I’m not afraid to look at her
She is good to me
And there’s nothing she doesn’t see
She knows where I’d like to be
But it doesn’t matter
I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you
Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit
He spoke to me, I took his flute
No, I wasn’t very cute to him, was I?
But I did it, though, because he lied
Because he took you for a ride
And because time was on his side
And because I . . .
I want you, I want you
I want you so bad
Honey, I want you
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