Bob Dylan In America

Author: Sean Wilentz
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407074113
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
A brilliantly written and groundbreaking book about Dylan's music – now the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 – and its musical, political and cultural roots in early 20th-century America Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager. Almost half a century later, now a distinguished professor of American history, he revisits Dylan's work with the critical skills of a scholar and the passion of a fan. Drawing partly on his work as the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz provides a unique blend of biography, memoir and analysis in a book which, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion demands.

All Along Bob Dylan

Author: Tymon Adamczewski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000195872
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
All Along Bob Dylan: America and the World offers an important contribution to thinking about the artist and his work. Adding European and non-English speaking contexts to the vibrant field of Dylan studies, the volume covers a wide range of topics and methodologies while dealing with the inherently complex and varied material produced or associated with the iconic artist. The chapters, organized around three broad thematic sections (Geographies, Receptions and Perspectives), address the notions of audience, performance and identity, allowing to map out the structure of feeling and authenticity, both, in the case of the artist and his audience. Taking its cue from the collapse of the so-called high-/ low culture split following from the Nobel Prize, the book explores the argument that Dylan (and all popular music) can be interpreted as literature and offers discussions in the context of literary traditions, or visual culture and music. This contributes to a nuanced and complex portrayal of the seminal cultural phenomenon called Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan

Author: Donald Brown
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810884216
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
“The book’s strength is a thorough assessment of Dylan’s career, album by album, song by song. Both longtime fans and newcomers . . . will appreciate.” —Library Journal With Bob Dylan’s receipt of the Nobel Prize in Literature, his iconic status as an American musical, cultural, and poetic giant has never been more apparent. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour is the first book to look at Dylan’s career, from his first album to his masterpiece Tempest. Donald Brown provides insightful critical commentary on Dylan’s prolific body of work, placing Dylan’s career in the context of its time in order to assess the relationship of Dylan’s music to contemporary American culture. Each chapter follows the shifting versions of Dylan, from his songs of conscientious social involvement to more personal exploratory songs; from his influential rock albums of the mid-1960s to his adaptations of country music; from his three very different tours in the 1970s to his “born again” period as a proselytizer for Christ and his frustrations as a recording and performing artist in the 1980s; from his retrospective importance in the 1990s to the refreshingly vital albums he has been producing in the 21st century. “This concise examination of the Dylan corpus is especially good for younger generations who may want to better understand how a musician in his early seventies can still be so compelling and relevant in twenty-first-century America.”. —Booklist “Fascinating . . . Highly recommended. All readers. —Choice Reviews “A nearly album by album retrospective of one of the most culturally significant and musically influential musicians in modern history.” —Examiner “A must read for Dylan enthusiasts.” —Journal of American Culture

Bob Dylan's Poetics

Author: Timothy Hampton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1942130236
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan’s songwriting Bob Dylan’s reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan’s compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan’s innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan’s earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan’s achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan’s work. Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.

The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan

Author: Kevin J. H. Dettmar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886945
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
A lively set of new essays on Dylan's work as a writer and composer and on his place in American culture.

Political Folk Music in America from Its Origins to Bob Dylan

Author: Lawrence J. Epstein
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786456019
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
Many American folk singers have tried to leave their world a better place by writing songs of social protest. Musicians like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez sang with fierce moral voices to transform what they saw as an uncaring society. But the personal tales of these guitar-toting idealists were often more tangled than the comparatively pure vision their art would suggest. Many singers produced work in the midst of personal failure and deeply troubled relationships, and under the influence of radical ideas and organizations. This provocative work examines both the long tradition of folk music in its American political context and the lives of those troubadours who wrote its most enduring songs.

Bob Dylan

Author: Lee Marshall
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745639747
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Bob Dylan’s contribution to popular music is immeasurable. Venerated as rock’s one true genius, Dylan is considered responsible for introducing a new range of topics and new lyrical complexity into popular music. Without Bob Dylan, rock critic Dave Marsh once claimed, there would be no popular music as we understand it today. As such an exalted figure, Dylan has been the subject of countless books and intricate scholarship considering various dimensions of both the man and his music. This book places new emphasis on Dylan as a rock star. Whatever else Dylan is, he is a star – iconic, charismatic, legendary, enigmatic. No one else in popular music has maintained such star status for so long a period of time. Showing how theories of stardom can help us understand both Bob Dylan and the history of rock music, Lee Marshall provides new insight into how Dylan’s songs acquire meaning and affects his relationship with his fans, his critics and the recording industry. Marshall discusses Dylan’s emergence as a star in the folk revival (the “spokesman for a generation”) and the formative role that Dylan plays in creating a new type of music – rock – and a new type of star. Bringing the book right up to date, he also sheds new light on how Dylan’s later career has been shaped by his earlier star image and how Dylan repeatedly tried to throw off the limitations and responsibilities of his stardom. The book concludes by considering the revival of Dylan over the past ten years and how Dylan’s stardom has developed in a way that contains, but is not overshadowed by, his achievements in the 1960s.

Bob Dylan

Author: David Yaffe
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300124570
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
Offers a historical look at the life and career of Bob Dylan from four perspectives: his relationship to blackness, the influence of his singing style, his image on film, and his songwriting.

Song of the North Country

Author: David Pichaske
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441197397
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
A remarkably fresh piece of Dylan scholarship, focusing on the profound impact that his Midwestern roots have had on his songs, politics, and prophetic character.

Wicked Messenger

Author: Mike Marqusee
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801156
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
Bob Dylan’s abrupt abandonment of overtly political songwriting in the mid-1960s caused an uproar among critics and fans. In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous. Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one."