Plus, they've plainly not read any Pink Floyd lyrics :)

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It really, really bugs me when they pull in literature professors (or other worthless parasitic layabouts who can't get a real job) to be all sniffy about rock/pop lyrics in general before pronouncing Dylan one of the greatest poets of his generation.

I would have thought you'd appreciate these layabouts being made to produce something useful, and almost as insightful as your analysis.

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I don't think they should be getting a fee, or worse still any respect, for being so blatantly clueless. Just because Dylan was the only "poet" they ever managed to pull a girl by analysing, back in '68.

I stress that I don't have a problem with people liking the mighty Bob. But I'm sure I've seen multiple articles where academics claim that all popular lyrics are crap "except of course for Dylan", and I just don't think they're even bothering to engage.

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Do you know they are getting a fee? Are you sure it's not work they're doing for free to shamelessly promote the artist who got them their only snog?

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Maybe they have him confused with Dylan Thomas.

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"whoever he was".

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Hem, that would have been clearer with a link to my referent.

(Although I guess the really cool kids have already got it without.)

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I can just about tolerate Dylan being called a poet (and I'd much rather hear one of his lyrical ballads than any of Wordsworth's so-called "Lyrical Ballads", the tosspot) but I cannot stand people or things that call Jim Morrison a poet. Him or Kurt Cobain.

A song can be a fine song without being a poem, and I don't think there's any shame in calling it a song (and not a poem). But shame it is to call a thing what it ain't.

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Cobain is an awesome lyricist, I think, but only because he found that magic intersection between words and music and sheer force of delivery. I did "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at karaoke once and remember thinking "what the? these words are ridiculous, written down". But it's the way he told them.

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Well, I think this makes both points admirably. A song can be a fine song, and a lyricist a fine lyricist (of songs); but if it looks like gibberish written down and needs the music and the performance to make any sense, then it's disqualified from being poetry, at least in my book.

There's a sensitive and nuanced issue here, but if I may cosh it bluntly about the head with a bottom line, I think that poetry (good poetry, at any rate) has it own music. It doesn't need to appear in the context of a song in order to, well, sing.

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Who's Edward Lear?

When Dylan is/was good (your choice, I know a lot of people haven't thought he was good since the seventies . . . or earlier), he is/was excellent. Whether he's a poet or just a songwriter, I'll leave to someone else to decide. There are plenty of other people who are at least as good as he is/was, though.

The Stones have many better songs than "Satisfaction." I like the song. I understand and appreciate it. It has nothing on "Paint It Black" or "Waiting on a Friend," or . . . I should stop now.

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Who's Edward Lear?

Writer of nonsense verse, like The Owl and the Pussycat and tons and tons of limericks (I think he was one of the first to use the form).

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Oh! I thought "The Owl and the Pussycat" was one of those attributed to trad.:-)

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Edward Lear is the UK's answer to Doctor Seuss, about a century earlier. He's pretty awesome, actually, especially now I've just seen a picture of his incredible beard.

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That is quite a beard. Think you can grow one like it in time for your nuptials?

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Edward Lear is the UK's answer to Doctor Seuss

[Chokes on coffee]

Edward Lear is more or less the father of nonsense verse, although personally I generally prefer Hillaire Belloc. Much respect to the learnéd Seuss, but I think you have your questions and answers muddled!

And on the main point, I agree that most academics addressing pop culture talk a load of specious drivel. I love some of Dylan's lyrics, but would vote for Leonard Cohen over him any day... and Fish, Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour some days...

And Cobain? Cobain was an arse, who managed to become the greatest teen-angst magnet of his generation. Whatever it was that made Smells Like Teen Spirit a great song (assuming that it is a great song), it was not the quality of its lyric.

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I vote for Leonard Cohen too, and not just because I just bought two tickets for his Seattle show in April... *excited*

YMMV, but I never listen to a Nirvana song and wince at an unfortunate choice of word (rhyming dictionary syndrome, in other words). He's obviously not going to win any awards for narrative coherence, but he was more of an impressionist, wasn't he? Also, I have a huge tolerance for self-pity, as can be demonstrated by the fact that I still eagerly await each new Morrissey album even though half the songs are invariably about how pathetic high court judges and their verdicts are.

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No, I 'll grant you that. Love/Hate, a band for which I have an abiding fondness, dating back to my teenage years did occasionally force a rhyme that sets my teeth on edge to this day (I am hallucinating.../ I am imaginating... [Mary Jane])

Imaginating. I ask you!

On the other hand, I wouldn't find it easy to tell you what half the words in a Nirvana song actually are, just from hearing them sung. Don't get me wrong, SMTS is a vibrant, emotive, evocative song, but it's the whole sound that makes it so, and if Kurt had been snarling about Siamese cats on his shoulder in between the choruses, I doubt that many people - myself included - would have been any the wiser.

Self pity I can cope with, if I feel affection for the object of that pity. Self destruction causes me more problems. Not in any Roman Catholic Mortal Sin sense you understand; it just that I have a considerable aptitude for contempt, and that presses all the right buttons for it.

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Reminds me of Gene Simmons' pronouncement on Cobain's death: "I don’t have any sympathy with rockstars that whine. I could have told you that Kurt Cobain was going to kill himself! I want all rockstars to do the same thing that Kurt Cobain did. I want them all to get high on heroin and die! And get out of my way because I want more!"

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Don't you mean Dr Seuss is the US's answer to Lear?

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Questions and answers don't have to be in chronological order! It would make history exams pretty hard if they did. "Who was the Emperor of Rome in 100 A.D., answer by reference only to current or future members of the human race."

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That sounds suspiciously like you trying to cover your own oops with a semi-bullshit answer on perception, time & historical records.

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To defend verlaine¹, he did say "the UK's answer to Doctor Seuss, about a century earlier" (my italics). So I think we can see the semi-bullshit argument as pre-empted...

---

1 And how often do I do that?

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And how often do I do that?

I thought you'd just taken the maxim "the best defence is a good offence" to heart...

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And yeah, "Paint It, Black" is totally a better song than "Satisfaction"!

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"He can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke/the same cigarettes as me"

or

"I see those girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes/I have to turn my head until my darkness goes"?

It should be obvious. But then again, some people think Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain were poets.;-)

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Yeah, the freaks. ;-)

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Can I still trust him?
To wait till up to next Monday?

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やっぱり、るいすは嘘つき？

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るいすは、私のこと結婚詐欺だと思ってるかもしれない。

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'You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a siamese cat'

You have unerringly picked my favourite Dylan lyric to get sniffy about.

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I apologize. But be honest, would you still like it so much if it didn't feature the cat?

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As the great man himself might have said:

There was a young "poet" from Hibbing,
In concert quite prone to ad-libbing:
Obtuse literati
Who squeal like castrati
At his verses are frankly just fibbing.

Lear may not have had the finest-chiselled of cheekbones, but he managed to hang a terrific beard off them: one which, as he himself documents, was sufficient to nest a decent variety of bird life.

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What is the name of the verse form which goes, and I approximate, "heggerty haggerty, higgledy piggledy, tumbledown bumblebee, on with the show"? I think Robert A. Zimmermann's greatest contribution to poetry may have been his compliance with this metre, at least before he blew it all by a name-change.

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Double dactyl?

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That's the one! Thank you for rescuing me from my de-spondee-ency.

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Hibbingly, jibbingly,
Fool academics
To think you're a poet
By changing your name.

The next generation
Will be less forgiving:
You've outstayed your welcome,
Robert Zimmerframe.

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