Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...attempt to understand Bob Dylan's works, one ought to consider his music, his lyrics and his singing style separately, since each of these three elements has different history in the development of his art. Their conjunction--in the various stages of each's evolution--is responsible for both the wide variety of Dylan's musical output, and its enduring unity...
...Dylan's music has, essentially, always been rock and roll. In his early years he was forced to sing in the prevailing folk idiom of the times because there was no other way to break into big-time entertainment. Even then, however, most of his songs had a rock feel to them, a fact which was quickly appreciated by Manfred Mann in England and the Byrds in this country. Both groups had only to supply the standard rock accompaniment of drums, guitars, etc. to make enormously successful covers of early Dylan songs...
...Dylan's subsequent entry into rock, which so scandalized the folk fans at Newport, was the logical, and inevitable, outcome of a deep-seated movement in that direction. Nevertheless, it is clear that Dylan emerged considerably enriched from his experience in folk-music. In the first place, the free and bohemian atmosphere of the folk-world allowed, if it didn't encourage, Dylan to develop his own unorthodox singing style, in all the expressive glory of its distorted, flat phrasing...
Secondly, Dylan found that the hip, urban folk-music audience of the '60's hungered for, and savored, complicated and highly-strung lyrics. Dylan responded to this demand for "meaningful" lyrics with alacrity and in the process developed two extraordinarily powerful strains in his songwriting. One set of lyrics dealt with social ills; the songs in this group started out a fairly simple-minded protest songs and ended up as fierce expressionistic collages of the sights and sounds of modern America. The other set of lyrics was Dylan's special breed of love songs, at the same time supplicating...
...walks down a dark hall into a gallery lined with glass cases. Passing from one, in which a blonde woman in a white frock is suspended, to the next, his reflections in the glass and the woman's frame each other and make the sequence flow. The romantic music beneath, instead of making the moment sentimental, shapes its transformations of appearance and experience into something completely lyrical. Ulmer's sense of his characters' complex and constantly changing souls, realized in fantastic camera devices, has a truth that integrates all its extreme stylization. It must be for this reason that...