This an exploration of why the \u201ccrackin\u2019 breakin\u2019 shakin\u2019 sounds,\u201d as the Minnesota bard once termed them, are as important to his persona as the lyrics that most critics\u2014and fans\u2014focus on. Making well-argued points that sometimes get lost in academic prose, Rings, an associate music professor at the University of Chicago, breaks down the various components\u2014vocals, guitar, harmonica\u2014that enhance the picture. He quotes Richard Manuel of the Band dismissing Dylan\u2019s guitar work\u2014\u201che\u2019s a strummer\u201d\u2014and notes blues purists copping an attitude about his singular harmonica styles. The author occasionally references French postmodern structuralists, though his New Criticism forebears seem equally applicable to his approach, which often includes note-by-note analyses of the changes in different performances and recordings. (He also references Quora posts and other Dylan fanboy message boards in the course of these obsessive travels.) Luckily, he includes links to the snatches of songs he writes about, which should make it easier for the lay reader to follow along at home. To demonstrate the inseparability of sound and sense, Rings quotes the original notation, \u201cWords-Music,\u201d that Dylan used as he typed out \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s a-Gonna Fall\u201d in a borrowed Greenwich Village apartment, refuting the urban legend that the original draft was intended to be a poem. Liner notes are not Nobel-worthy. \u201cDylan\u2019s idiosyncratic sounds are not incidental to his art, a troublesome husk we can discard once we have extracted his celebrated words,\u201d the author writes. \u201cRather, his art lives in the noisy encounter between words and music.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This an exploration of why the \u201ccrackin\u2019 breakin\u2019 shakin\u2019 sounds,\u201d as the Minnesota bard once termed them, are as important to his persona as the lyrics that most critics\u2014and fans\u2014focus on. Making well-argued points that sometimes get lost in academic prose, Rings, an associate music professor at the University of Chicago, breaks down the various […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4340"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}