DIGGING deep in the crap pile I'm deleting, I do suspect I know where the lie that I disrespect Bob Dylan came from but it is based on nothing I ever said about him and certainly nothing I wrote about him online. He is one of the finest songwriters in the ample canon of American song writers, certainly more profound than the show-tune writers, good as some of those are. I'd place him on the highest end of of that category along with some of the great blues composers, some of the greatest of the country writers, up there with a very short list of great American poets and with some of the finest prose writers.
My brother, last year, introduced me to his 2012 album which I'd missed and I kicked myself for not listening to it before. A pirate CD. Sure his voice was shot but those songs, the stories told and those longer ones implied, some of those epic in length. The biggest problem with Bob Dylan is that he's better than his most slavish of worshipers and pop-level critics realize. He's right up there and a lot of that is probably because he doesn't believe it, himself. Not believing the publicity about yourself is probably necessary to have the guts to keep writing like that so long, the guts to still take chances instead of going for what's predictably respectable.
Update: Oh, I don't think the pop-level critics and slavish fans know he ranks with the best because most of them don't have that much of an appreciation of the best until they get permission from some article in The New Yorker or some PBS show. And even then they still prefer white bread.
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