Email this article 
"Are My Songs Literature?": A Postmodern Appraisal of Bob Dylan's American Popular Music Culture
https://doi.org/10.22146/jh.32137 Marwa Essam Eldin Alkhayat(1*)
(1) MISR University for Science & Technology
(*) Corresponding Author
Abstract
The current study is a postmodern appraisal of Bob Dylan’s artistic career and vocal gestures to examine the way melody in popular music works in relation to speech and singing, the grand and the ordinary. It historicizes Bob Dylan’s protest music of the 1960s within the paradigm of folk music culture. Dylan’s music is full of riffs, blues sequences, and pentatonic melodies—all heavily part and parcel of blues, folk, gospel, and country music. It is the music that dwells on the pleasures of repetition, of circularity, and of the recurring familiar tune integrated within Dylanesque poetics of rhyme delivered with his idiosyncratic, deep and intense range of voices. Dylan is the official son of the legacies of social, communal, and ritual music-making that mirrors contemporary pop and rock back to folk and blues, street-sung broadsides and work songs, the melodies of medieval troubadours, and the blessed rhythms of Christianity and Judaism. The study is an attempt to illustrate how musicology and ethnomusicology in particular can contribute to understanding Dylan as a ‘performing artist’ within the postmodern paradigm. Thus, the study seeks to establish Dylan as a phenomenal, prolific postmodernist artist, as well as an anarchist. The power and originality of Dylan’s music constitute a prima facie case that his performances should be considered postmodernist art.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Bennett, T., Mercer, C. & Woollacott, J. (eds). (1986). Popular Culture and Social Relations. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Bennett, T. (1980). Popular Culture: A Teaching Object. Screen Education, 34, pp. 17–29
Day, A. (1988). Jokerman, Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan. Oxford: Blackwell.
Deleuz, G. & Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Dunlap, J. (2006). Through the Eyes of Tom Joad: Patterns of American Idealism, Bob Dylan, and the Folk Protest Movement. Popular Music and Society, 29(5), pp. 549–573.
Dylan, Bob (2004). Chronicles, Volume One. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Dylan, Bob (2016). Banquet Speech. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-speech. html.
Ephron, N. & Edminston, S. (1970). Bob Dylan Interview. The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, edited by Jonathan Eisen, pp. 63–71. New York: Vintage.
Eyerman, R. & Jamison, A. (1995). Social Movements and Cultural Transformation: Popular Music in the 1960s. Media, Culture & Society, SAGE 17, pp. 449–468.
Farber, D. (1994). The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s. London: Macmillan.
Friedman, J. (2013). History of Social Protest in Popular Music. London: Routledge.
Frith, S. (1996). Performing Rites, On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gray, M. (1981). Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan. London: Hamlyn.
Gray, M. (2006). The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. London, UK: Continuum.
Gray, R. (1990). American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. London–New York: Longman.
Grossberg, L., Frith, S., & Goodwin, A. (eds). (1993). Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. New York & London: Routledge.
Hall, M. (2005). Crossroads: American Popular Culture and the Vietnam Generation. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism. London: Macmillan.
Kennedy, T. (2009). Bob Dylan’s Highway Shoes: The Hobo-Hero’s Road Through Modernity. Intertexts, Vol. 12, 1/2, pp. 37–58.
Kizer, E. J. (1983). Protest Song Lyrics as Rhetoric. Popular Music & and Society, Vol. 9(1), pp. 3–11.
Larry, S. & Waterman, C. (2003). American Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Larry, S. & Waterman, C. (2010). American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3. New York: Oxford University Press.
Littlermore, J. (2015). Metonymy: Hidden Shortcuts in Language, Thought, and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lebold, C. (2007). A Face Like a Mask and a Voice that Croaks: An Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan’s Voice, Personae, and Lyrics. Oral Tradition, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 57–70.
London, Herbert I. (1984). Closing The Circle: A Cultural History of the Rock Revolution. Chicago: Nelson – Hall.
Manzella, T. (2012). How to Analyze the Music of Bob Dylan. USA: Abdo Consulting Group.
Marcus, G. (2010). Bob Dylan: Writings 1968–2010. New York: Public Affairs
Marshall, L. (2007). Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Matula, T. (2007). Pow! to the People: The Make-Up’s Reorganization of Punk Rhetoric. Popular Music and Society, 30(1), pp. 19–38.
Mattern, M. (1998). Acting in Concert: Music, Community, and Political Action. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Middleton, R. (1990). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Moore, A. (2003). Analyzing Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Murray, A. (1976). Stomping the Blues. New York: Da Capo Press.
Negus, K. (2008). Bob Dylan: Icons of Pop Music. University of California: Indiana University Press.
Polizzotti, M. (2006). Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. New York & London: Continuum.
Ricks, C. (2004). Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Viking: London.
Rosenbaum, R. (1978). Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan, a Candid Conversation with the Visionary Whose Songs Changed the Times. Playboy, pp. 61–90.
Schafer, M. (1973). The Music of the Environment. Audio culture: Reading in Modern Music, Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.). New York & London: Continuum, 2005, pp. 29–39.
Schafer, M. (1994). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester Vermont: Destiny Books.
Scobie, S. (2003). Alias Bob Dylan Revisited. Calgary: Red Deer Press.
Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation. New York, Deli: PICADOR.
Shelton, R. (1986). No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. New York: Da Capo Press.
Shumway, David R. (2009). Bob Dylan as a cultural Icon. In The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, edited by Kevin J. H. Dettmar, pp. 110–121. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Steward, S. & Denton, Jr. (1984). Persuasion and Social Movements. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Storey, J. (2009). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. London/New York: Pearson Longman.
Tagg, P. (1994). Subjectivity and Soundscape, Motorbikes and Music, in H. Järviluoma (ed) Soundscapes: Essays on Vroom and Moo. Finland: University of Tampere Press.
Turner, G. (1996). British Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Van Der Merwe, P. (1989). The Origins of the Popular Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Der Merwe, P. (2004). Roots of the Classical, The Popular Origins of Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilentz, S. (2010). Bob Dylan in America. New York–Toronto: Doubleday.
Williams, R. (1983). Keywords. London: Fontana.
Williams, P. (1990). Bob Dylan, Performing Artist 1960–1973. Xanadu: London.
Williams, P. (1992). Bob Dylan, Performing Artist 1974–1986: The Middle Years. New York: Omnibus Press.
Williams, P. (2004). Bob Dylan, Performing Artist, 1986–1990 and Beyond: Mind Out of Time. New York: Omnibus Press.
Discography
Dylan, Bob (1963). The Freewheelin’ (Music CD). Columbia Records, New York.
Dylan, Bob (1964). The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Music CD). Columbia Records, New York.
Dylan, Bob (1965). Bringing It All Back Home (Music CD). Columbia Records, New York.
Dylan, Bob (1965). Highway 61 Revisited (Music CD). Columbia Records, New York.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22146/jh.32137
Article Metrics
Abstract views : 12697
| 
views : 5615
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2018 Humaniora
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
