If Music Could Talk

Dr. Medulla wrote:http://www.mojo4music.com/23985/mojo-ce ... on-blonde/

Dr. Medulla wrote:Hey, Dylan dorks, I'm teaching Marcus' Old Weird America tomorrow evening, and I'm curious whether any of you have read it, and, if so, any thoughts about it.

Flex wrote:

Dr. Medulla wrote:Hey, Dylan dorks, I'm teaching Marcus' Old Weird America tomorrow evening, and I'm curious whether any of you have read it, and, if so, any thoughts about it.

I read it in college and don't remember much about it. I remember I thought it was neat, but wasn't really totally sure what the hell most of it had to do with the music being ostensibly discussed.

Dr. Medulla wrote:

Flex wrote:

Dr. Medulla wrote:Hey, Dylan dorks, I'm teaching Marcus' Old Weird America tomorrow evening, and I'm curious whether any of you have read it, and, if so, any thoughts about it.

I read it in college and don't remember much about it. I remember I thought it was neat, but wasn't really totally sure what the hell most of it had to do with the music being ostensibly discussed.

If I actually read this thread, I'd see I'd asked the question on the previous page.

The gist of it is whether folk music is all the community and common cause of the early folk revival scene or conflict and betrayal and disaster, as the Basement Tapes suggest. Put another way, did Dylan betray folk music or did he get to its true essence? Is folk about a more ennobled but simple folk or of the disasters visited upon them, often by each other? More intriguingly, which I'll be asking students to consider, is this latter version of folk actually punk?

gkbill wrote:

Dr. Medulla wrote:

Flex wrote:

Dr. Medulla wrote:Hey, Dylan dorks, I'm teaching Marcus' Old Weird America tomorrow evening, and I'm curious whether any of you have read it, and, if so, any thoughts about it.

I read it in college and don't remember much about it. I remember I thought it was neat, but wasn't really totally sure what the hell most of it had to do with the music being ostensibly discussed.

If I actually read this thread, I'd see I'd asked the question on the previous page.

The gist of it is whether folk music is all the community and common cause of the early folk revival scene or conflict and betrayal and disaster, as the Basement Tapes suggest. Put another way, did Dylan betray folk music or did he get to its true essence? Is folk about a more ennobled but simple folk or of the disasters visited upon them, often by each other? More intriguingly, which I'll be asking students to consider, is this latter version of folk actually punk?

Hello,

Or rap/early hip-hop?

Flex wrote: ↑

09 Apr 2017, 12:50am

This has been posted for a few weeks, but here's a decently lengthy interview Bob did in advance of his new record: http://bobdylan.com/news/qa-with-bill-flanagan/

The new record is great. The best of his American Songbook albums to date. He's totally captured the inflections and intonations of the classic crooners, and his four piece band rules the material.

For The New Basement Tapes, T Bone Burnett put together a group with Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens, Jim James, Marcus Mumford and Taylor Goldsmith, to finish songs based on old lyrics of yours. Did you hear any of those songs and say, “I don’t remember writing that?”

Did you say Taylor Swift?

Taylor Goldsmith.

Yeah, OK. No, I don’t remember writing any of those songs.

A double and linked biography of two of the greatest songwriters, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie; a history of labor relations and socialism and big business greed in the U.S in the 20th-century; a murder mystery solved—GROWN-UP ANGER, years in the making, is a tour de force of storytelling and reimagined American history.

The book starts with a 13-year-old Daniel Wolff first listening to Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, so beginning a life-long obsession with the sneering anger of our greatest songwriter. Eventually, Wolff would hear an early Dylan song called Song to Woody, a piece dedicated to Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie. Feeling closer to finding the fuel behind Dylan’s honest anger, Wolff followed the trail further, sifting through Guthrie’s records until he found a song called 1913 Massacre. That song-the tune for which Dylan used in Song to Woody--tells the story of a union Christmas party that took place during a strike in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913. The party ended in disaster-someone yelled Fire! and in the stampede that followed, seventy-two people, mostly children, were trampled and smothered to death. The lies about what happened started almost immediately.

By following the trail from Bob Dylan to Woody Guthrie to the unsolved murder of seventy-two people 100 years ago, Wolff discovers the history of an unforgiving anger that has been passed down over decades. In Guthrie’s parents’ generation, the nation had been newly industrialized. There had been an epic battle over the country’s direction: bosses versus workers, big business versus the labor movement. Industry won, and, as Guthrie saw it, proceeded to cover up all evidence of the struggle. The 1913 tragedy in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was just one example of a larger, lost history, and the truth of what really happened there was buried.

Until now. In Grown-Up Anger, Daniel Wolff unveils what happened in Calumet, and in this literary high-wire act, pulls the strings of the seemingly unrelated strands—socialism, Guthrie, Dylan, Calumet—until, breathtakingly, at the end he lets them all fall into place to tell a new history of twentieth-century America. These interconnected mysteries come together to chronicle the effects changing labor relations had on industrial America, and the way two musicians have used their resulting anger to try and expose injustice.