Is Bob Dylan literature?

He is a good songwriter, but I don't think he is Veeky Forums

Kind of vague answer. What makes his work quality?

I know this sounds accusatory, but I honestly just don't know much about his work and am curious. All Along the Watchtower and Maggie's Farm is about all I know of his.

listen to mr tambourine man

then you'll get it

His novel Tarantula is aight, would be a hit here with all the avant-garde wannabees

All Along the Watchtower is a very deep song. It's about struggle and stuff. It has biblical references.

How would you know?

Only when he was young, cute and heroin-addled.
Grey-haired, mustache-having Bob Dylan is bot real art

I don't think its up for debate. He, as a person, obviously isn't.

But his lyrics, just like any other form of poetry, are literature. They're definitely art rather than just entertainment. I'm not a particularly big fan, mind you, but it would be very hard to argue that there is 0 artistic value there.

I still disagree with the Nobel tho, its such a boring and, in a way, populist choice.

What are Dylan's best albums?

He is not. What he wrote is not. Lets not beat around the fucking bush. This is why our society isn't fucking literate. Put it in a fucking book, don't play harmonica to it.

/thread. thanks.

Is that better than Butterman by Pearl Jam?

youtube.com/watch?v=gGMSfiH850o

Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, and Bringing It All Back Home.

Yeah free Mumia Abu-Jamal and OJ Simpson cuz Bob (((Dylan))) has an opinion.

mr tambourine man is nothing special dude

your'are nothing special

They used his song in a Zack Snyder film so yes.

Highway 61 (1965), Bringing it all back home (1965), Blonde on Blonde (1966), Blood on the tracks (1975)

His actual best album is probably a compilation, but that offends the historians.

I think the importance of a lot of what happened in the mid 60s is lost on modern audiences. But if they don't know the context, I don't blame them for not getting too hyped about it.

If you weren't an english-speaking idiot you would understand why dylan is shit

>go to bookstore
>bob dylan lyrics
>1000+ pages
holy shit. at least some of it should be

user is not a Nobel Prized (ib4 Llosa), you retarded.

Like any good author or poet he shows instead of tells. Maggie's farm is about the folk record industry and many of his fans trying to pigeon hole him into a single genre and his rebellion against it. His choice of symbols almost always rings true and his juxtapositions highlight this fact more so.

>Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind
>Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
>The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
>Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
>Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
>Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
>With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
>Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

sure thing buddy

Haha BTFO that poor pleb

Is this a critique thread?

The problem is that Dylan attains that sort of quality in very rare instances. He is simply a dedicated amateur who was lucky enough to be born with a natural talent for imagery.

If you read Dylan's lyrics carefully, you will find hundreds of instances which prove him to be an amateur whose work ethic was faulty and whose aesthetic sensibility was full of holes. Take one of my favorite songs of his, 'You're a big girl now', from his masterpiece Blood on the Tracks:

'Bird on the horizon
sitting on a fence
he's singing a song for me at his own expense.

I am just like that bird
singing just for you
I wish that you'd come here
help me sing it through these tears.'

The image in itself is not bad, and the feeling is one of honesty. However, there is not pleasure to be derived from the choice of words. Dylan, quite evidently, had the idea and wrote it down immediately. He did not strive to find 'le mote juste' (the right word), and this is precisely what differentiates the poet from the amateur. The poet will only stop after he has found the precise word he wants to use. In Dylan's case, the thoughts are often beautiful, but the form is not.

This is far from being his worst. Some of the stuff he makes can sound embarrassing. 'And he screams back ''you're a cow''? No poet would print that.

At his best, though, Dylan *is* a very good poet. His best doesn't come all that often and, unfortunately, he doesn't seem to strive to achieve it as much as he should.

>The poet will only stop after he has found the precise word he wants to use.

It depends on the working method. Early Surrealism used automatism, which wasn't about finding the right word but just getting all images from the subconscious.

That's why they wrote such crap.

Get this hothead outta here.

I agree with you.

'Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts' is one of my favourites.

>no poet would print that.
Rimbaud would write something like that, he was into using very simplistic imagery to accent very complicated lines in his stunningly surreal dreamscapes. Dylan is a famous admirer of Rimbaud's work. I think you underestimate him. The psychedelic rambling style of his earlier days, especially in Ballad of a Thin Man, is written to work within the Folk Rock instrumentation. Dylan has a very simplistic grasp of rhyme schemes but he makes it up with his revolutionary intonation. The imagery you picked from BOTT is absolutely stunning, it may be simplistic but most poets would kill to write something as effortlessly graceful. When the musical background is more low-key, Dylan really shines. Check out Changing of the Guards which has some of his best lyrics.

>The imagery you picked from BOTT is absolutely stunning, it may be simplistic but most poets would kill to write something as effortlessly graceful

Are you serious? I myself would be ashamed of printing something like that. It doesn't add anything. I don't enjoy surrealist imagery for surrealist imagery's sake. Dylan obviously just looked for a rhyme and found it in the word 'cow'. There was no serious thoght process behind it, only a rhyming dictionary...

i meant the line from You're a Big Girl from Blood on the Tracks. Of course "you're a cow" isn't much of anything but it does work as a breather between the more heady verses.

It's your fault for thinking poetry has to be serious or transcendental.

nice

>Literature, in its broadest sense, is any single body of written works.
>Genres: Comedy Drama Epic Erotic Nonsense **********Lyric*********** Mythopoeia Romance Satire Tragedy Tragicomedy

>Bob Dylan (/ˈdJlən/; born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American songwriter, singer, artist, and writer.

Yes.

Dylan Thomas tho

in a hegelian discourse everything can be literature. in postmodernism everything is everything and nothing is nothing. that's why trump got elected.

bob dylan is the greatest musician of all time, none of your favorite "artists" can hope to compare.
this is now a bob dylan worship thread.

Wagner was superior both as a musician and as a poet.

And the 2016 Nobel prize goes to... Wagner!

No, it's to noticieable to work as a 'breather'. It's quite simply a very bad verse, which makes the other verses around it look worse.

wu-tang clan are better than wagner

What does your taste have to do with whether something is literature or not?

you don't know and want me to tell you so you could learn something new today?

Nothing has really indicated you have a working model of what constitutes literature so no I don't think you could teach me anything new.

I don't think you even remember what you're arguing.

>a very bad verse
i love that verse so you're OBJECTIVELY wrong. fuck you moron.

Quite simply.