Bob dylan Brown, Donald; Brown, Donald
2014., 2014, 2014-01-21
eBook
Tempo: A Scarecrow Press Music Series of Rock, Pop, and Culture offers titles that explore rock and popular music through the lens of social and cultural history, revealing the dynamic relationship ...between musicians, music, and their milieu. Like other major art forms, rock and pop music comment on their cultural, political, and even economic situation, reflecting the technological advances, psychological concerns, religious feelings, and artistic trends of their times. Whether you are a professional musician or regular listener, diehard fan or music student, titles in the Tempo series are the ideal introduction to major pop and rock artists and the music they produced and their cultural and musical impact on society. With each year, new books appear on Bob Dylan, attesting to his continuing importance as a major figure in American music and culture. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour is the first book on Dylan to look at his entire career, from his first album to his most recent, Tempest, released 50 years later in 2012. In a brief compass, Brown provides insightful critical commentary on Dylan’s entire corpus, placing full scope of Dylan’s career in the context of its times in order to assess the relationship of Dylan's music to contemporary American culture. Each chapter addresses a particular phase of Dylan’s career, taking its cue from events in Dylan’s life and from the collective experiences that shaped the times. As the artist who famously proclaimed “the times, they are a-changin’,” Dylan was never static as an artist, his music altering as the times changed. In Bob Dylan: American Troubadour, Donald Brown 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-‘60s 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, to his frustrations as a recording and performing artist in the 1980s; from his retrospective importance in the Nineties to the refreshingly vital albums he has been producing in the 21st century. Bob Dylan: American Troubadour will engage not only Dylan fans and students of his work but those interested American popular music, history, and culture. Anyone who has been touched, challenged or surprised by a Dylan song, who would like to know more about this long and fascinating career, who wants to discover Dylan within his context will find in Bob Dylan: American Troubadour a concise and informed critical overview of Dylan’s music and his place in the American musical landscape.
Bob Dylan has always been something of a mystery. He has worn a variety of masks that have delighted, puzzled, amused and angered his many audiences. Andrea Cossu offers a strikingly fresh ...explanation of Dylan and the transformations he has made throughout his career. Cossu's descriptions of key Dylan performances explain how he forged authenticity through performance, and how the various attempts to make 'Bob Dylan' have often involved the interaction between the artist, his public image and his many audiences. It Ain't Me Babe offers a striking vision of how Dylan built his image and learned to live with its burden, painting a unique and coherent new portrait of the artist.
For fifty years, the music, words, story, and fans of Bob Dylan have fascinated David Gaines. As a son, a husband, a father, a teacher, and a passionate lover of the literary in all its guises, he ...has pursued the poetic fusion of knowledge and emotion all his life. More often than not, Dylan's lyrics and music have expressed that fusion for him, and so he has encouraged others to acknowledge the musician or writer or painter or director or actor or athlete who matters deeply (perhaps a bit mysteriously) to them, and to deploy that enigmatic passion in service of self-knowledge and social connection. After all, one of the central reasons to be a fan is to compare notes, explore mysteries, and riff with fellow fans in a community of exploration.Gaines's personal journey toward creating such communities of passionate knowledge encompasses his own coming of age and marriages, fatherhood, and teaching. As a devoted fan who is also a professor of American literature, questions about teaching and learning are central to his experience. When asked, "Why Dylan?" he says, "He's the writer I care about the most. He's been the way into the best and longest running conversations I have ever had." Talking with students, exchanging Dylan trivia with fellow fans, or cheering on fan-musicians doing Dylan covers during the Dylan Days festival, Gaines shows that, for many people, being a fan of popular culture couples serious critical and creative engagement with heartfelt commitment. Here, largely unheralded, the ideal of liberal education is realized every day.
Counting Down is a unique series of titles designed to select the best songs or musical works from major performance artists and composers in an age of design-your-own playlists. Contributors offer ...readers the reasons why some works stand out from others. It is the ideal companion for music lovers. For fifty years, Bob Dylan’s music has been a source of wonder to his fans and endless fodder for analysis by music critics. In Counting Down Bob Dylan, rock journalist Jim Beviglia dares to rank these songs in descending order from Dylan’s 100th best to his #1 song. Surveying the near six-decade career of this musical legend, Beviglia offers insightful analyses into the music and lyrics and dishes out important historical information and fascinating trivia to explain why these 100 rank among Dylan’s best to date. At the same time, a portrait of the seemingly inscrutable Dylan emerges through the words of his finest songs, providing both the perfect introduction to his work and a comprehensive new take on this master of American songwriting. This work will appeal to the legions of Bob Dylan fans who have taken to analyzing his music. Unlike other Dylan books, which vary between the academic and the journalistic, Counting Down Bob Dylan uniquely renders Dylan’s music approachable to new fans by highlighting the powerful emotional forces that fuel his dazzling lyrics.
Many critics have interpreted Bob Dylan’s lyrics, especially those composed during the middle to late 1960s, in the contexts of their relation to American folk, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll precedents; ...their discographical details and concert performances; their social, political and cultural relevance; and/or their status for discussion as “poems.” Dylan's Autobiography of a Vocation instead focuses on how all of Dylan’s 1965-1967 songs manifest traces of his ongoing, internal “autobiography” in which he continually declares and questions his relation to a self-determined existential summons.
In this new biography of Bob Dylan, writer Andrew McCarron provides a unique look at Dylan's life and work by focusing on his various reinventions and incarnations.
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