Word: songs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This self-consciousness is reflected in Dylan's later protest songs. In Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and Only a Pawn in Their Game, the word "I" never appeared. He assumed his audience's sensibilities to be the same as his own--he could lay out his story and leaves it at that. When he returned to protest, with The Ballad of George Jackson, he could no longer be so sure, and the song emphasized that these were his personal reactions to Jackson's murder...
Joey follows directly from the tradition of Dylan songs epitomized by John Wesley Harding: the title song, on first appearance, seems to be simply another tribute to the myth of the "outlaw-hero". A closer listening, though, reveals that all of the traditionally apothesized qualities of the outlaw have been either turned on their head--"he travelled with a gun in every hand", "with his lady by his side he took a stand" (what self-respecting outlaw would make his stand with his lady by his side?); or else cloaked in puzzling ambiguity--"he was never known to make...
...liner notes to the album, Allen Ginsberg describes Dylan's singing in One More Cup of Coffee as "Hebraic cantillation," and indeed as Dylan chants the first verse of the song, you can imagine him as a cantor in a local synagogue chanting the Song of Songs...
...Once a song-and-dance man, always a song-and-dance man . . . Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell...
Sondheim's score counterbalances this by being agile and clever in the way only he can be. But his forte is sophisticated parody, and only in a song called Someone in a Tree does palpable emotion linger. The final impression is that the show belongs to the flagellant school of contemporary American selfcriticism. Whether he means to or not, Prince seems to be arguing that the U.S. opened up Japan by force, sowing the wind of brutalizing social change and thus reaping the whirlwind of Pearl Harbor and global commercial competition...