| Bob Dylan – All Along the Watchtower Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| Ten years ago I made these comments, but the song is still a great one. There is more confusion than ever sounding in our ears, especially if you spend much time with the Internet and other media. I would suggest to fans of the song that they consider who is talking falsely now, and who is making the greatest effort to get us overexcited in an effort to turn our attention from our precious existential crisis. It is precious because facing it-and staying strong-can lead you to understanding, compassion and action. Ride out own your crisis with your ear attuned to universal truth and see what kind of strength you can gain. | |
| John Lennon – God Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
This is John's best song, I think. Certainly one of the most clear-eyed statements in popular culture, anyway. Forget the sappy nonsense of Imagine, this one just burns a hole in your brain. It ssend you beyond John-worship, too. You have to appreciate that these lyrics reject just about everything in life that is not concrete, real and immediate. This song is a sword against myth. You can use it, too. |
|
| John Lennon – How Do You Sleep? Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| It's such a sad memento of the end of the dream of the Beatles, and the worldwide community that formed around them. John should have left his song "God" as the last word in coming of age and ending the Beatles, but this song came later. Sad, too, that Ringo and George were there for the session. What a great clash of styles and personalities they were, though. Both very self-centered, both preternaturally talented, but John was intemperate and aggressive, Paul was overly politic and passive-aggressive, it seems. That two such young men could end up in the same four-person band is simply amazing and forms the core of the late 20th century's most important cultural phenomenon. | |
| Van Morrison – Astral Weeks Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/reviews/astral.html The most wonderful essay about this album can be found here. I think it'll help all of you get closer to the creative and mystical mind of the very young man who made Astral Weeks. I'm convinced that even Van couldn't explain what some of these songs mean, as he opened up let the mystic flow into him. He escaped all boundaries and made a timeless work about yearning and coming of age, about sex and death, acceptance and love. I'd put it up against some of the greatest poetry or prose we have. Once in a while over his career Van has touched something like this again, but rarely. St. Dominic's Preview had some, Veedon Fleece had a lot, but never did he, nor anyone in this era, equal the beauty and enigma that is found in Astral Weeks. |
|
| The Beatles – Memphis, Tennessee (Chuck Berry cover) Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| This was written by Chuck Berry, folks. Look it up. | |
| The Beatles – Across the Universe Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
You kids need an old hippie to explain things to you, it seems. Some of you have this right and some of you are just speculating wildly. Those of you who think George wrote or sang this song do not know your Beatle history and cannot even hear the difference in their recorded voices. This is sad. It's John Lennon, of course, and he's writing about the trenscendental meditation experience. Some of you have translated Jai Guru Dev already, you're right. It's what TM meditators say at the end of their sessions and it's praise for Maharishi's guru (teacher), who has become the guru of all TM meditators due their training by Maharishi. I suppose when Maharishi dies the honor could pass to him. Gurus receive devotion and respect from their students, it's an age-old Indian tradition. The lyrics are written by John but are taken from the many analagies that Maharishi liked to use to describe the way thoughts float around in one's mind while in a mediatative state. Maharishi was quite talkative and loved explaining concepts through analagies. Hinduism says that there are states of conciousness that exist at a deeper place in our minds and that it is possible to access them through daily meditation, in which we are trained not to dwell on these passing thoughts. So what John did was to turn his TM training into a poem. He was iintitally very taken with TM but later became disaffected with it and with Maharishi. I suspect that John's own powerful ego could not abide the competition. Go listen to "Sexy Sadie" and insert "Maharishi" in place of the title. Try to find the versionj of this that was not botched by Phil Spector for the first Let It Be album. The choir and the strings are awful. They recorded the song and then donated it to an environmental organization for a fund-raising album before it was on any Beatle release. |
|
| Bob Dylan – Desolation Row Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
I recommend Anthony Scaduto's biography of Bob Dylan for a neat interpretation of this song. He says Desolation Row is the place all artists should be. It's a place where false idols have been broken, where the self-deluded have been excluded, where phony personalities are banned, where success is failure. Think about it, all the activity happens outside Desolation Row. All the fools and their fantasies, all the exploitation, all the self deception is for people who are not able to escape to Desolation Row. Desolation is a state of grace. It's the absence of socially-derived character, it's the state of freedom from the need to compete for any kind of status. It's the only place an artist can live and be honest, and that is an artist's duty, according to Dylan. An artist has to reveal the truth, to strip away the paint, the makeup, the Bette Davis styles that separate him from what's eternal. This is a strange but perfect place for which there is no name but Desolation. There things are exactly what they appear to be, they are not merely images of things, or what one hopes them to be. It is a place of intellectual integrity, emotional clarity and understanding. It's a place that even the leaders of our culture cannot go -they peek into it or are prevented from escaping to it - because they are trapped by their utterly limited meanings, by conventionality and by what is expected of them. Dylan was deeply influenced by Arthur Rimbaud whose poetry painted emotional landscapes with disturbing imagery of excesses, debauches and violence, but whose symbols were not merely of well-known people or obvious analogies. That approach is too easy for Dylan who had the verbal power and intellectual depth to create a whole world of meaning in Desolation Row. |
|
| Bob Dylan – All Along the Watchtower Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
It's cool that a 35 year old song can still get people to think and more, to discuss meaning. That's the power of poetry. I've been listening to this song since 1968 and have a few thoughts. Back then Dylan was not writing or talking about Jesus at all, certainly not in any way that foreshadowed his conversion experience ten years later. But he had written poetry for a long time about the meaning of life and our dilemmas as thinking beings. What is there to believe in? What has real meaning? is there anyone we can trust? What is the risk of stepping outside the norms and commonplace meanings of things and looking at ourselves directly? This song, I think, borrows a mythical style and setting to set up the problem of meaninglessness in our existence. The two personalities are both outsiders, a joker who lacks conventional dignity and a thief who lacks conventional morality. They are outside of the walls of psychological safety, where the regular social order still holds, despite the threats from wolves and howling winds. I read these as metaphors for the psychological dangers one must face when throwing off easy explanations of life's meaning. One must be very brave to be outside those walls. But there is no going back once you have cast off conventions -"You and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, let us not talk falsely now the hour is getting late." This is a crisis, he's saying, a crisis of existence itself. So, it's the opposite of an endorsement of Christianity or any other religion. It's a description of the land where a seeker of truth must find his own way, whatever the dangers may be. This song, in its three little stanzas, is wonderful writing and courageous personal philosophy. This is why Dylan was and still is considered one of our culture's great voices. |
|
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.