Played a few numbers last night by Jimmy Buffet, Jerry Jeff Walker & Bob. Quality song material. Interesting to consider the parallels and dissimilarities between the sentimental American iconography of Dylan`s cannon and that of Jerry Jeff Walkers lyrics – for instance Eastern Avenue River Railway Blues.
The early 20th Century Hobo Folksinger Itinerant features but tonally Walkers perspective is different, perhaps more urbane, positing the protagonist trapped within the urban wasteland seeking escape through the boxcar. More later perhaps: I have to take a deeper look inside Walker`s catalogue. In (a lazy) comparison the Dylan protagonist would be moving or not moving from an opposite direction.
“Where another man`s life might begin is exactly where mine ends.” I am a Lonesome Hobo, Bob Dylan.
Dylan positions the OUTSIDER within the traditional outsider contexts. Riding the rails.
Click here for some great articles on Dylan`s use of melody, lexicon, voice, blues tradition etcetera & are easier to consume than Michael Gray`s exhaustive Song and Dance Man III. Radiohead by contrast position the outsider existentially within all of us and more occasionally it seems within a technology that is at the root of this loss of self, disconnection, otherness. If not at the root technology serves, as in Iron Lung to highlight the futility and tragedy of the human condition. Technology that serves as a control mechanism through surveillance, technology that replaces metaphysics? Escaping an existential life of Orwellian nightmare seems only possible in the In Rainbows song Videotape through suicide perhaps? (“I can`t do it face to face”) or death with videotape judgement or a video record in (8-bit) red, blue and green…is it syllogism?
Radiohead perhaps make their modernism plain through a vacuum where romantic ideals, icons, traditional themes and historicism would once have been evident but have been replaced by songs that metafictionally recreate a bleak, unwholesome, wasteland of soulless corporate control, governmental, terror, solipsism and lonely existentialism? There are echoes of the traditional gothic sublime across the In Rainbows recordings but as usual concrete themes seem obscure.
Briefly, it`s interesting to note the sense of the Sublime (Edmund Burke) in the Lyrics of Radiohead`s “In Rainbows” – particularly the use of gargantuan scale – there is “falling off” in three songs that I have noticed thus far.
This spatial exaggeration and use of outsized objects reminds me of “Castle of Otranto” and “House of Leaves” (Mark Z. Danielewski / Horace Walpole respectively).
A house of cards, an organization, structure, consciousness even, or plan that is weak, fragile and liable to collapse. Household objects suddenly take on vast proportions at a particular junction in the song:
“Fall off the table and get swept under” – House of Cards by Radiohead.
Similarly in “Weird Fishes”, which is highly spatial, the protagonist falls off the end of a (pre-copernican?) earth. There is also a parallel between Hendrix` “1983″ (Electric Ladyland side C) and “Weird Fishes” in overall schemata – escaping through immersion into the depths of the sea.
Listening to B-sides from several Radiohead singles – e.g. “Melatonin”, “Pearly”, “Lozenge of Love”, and “A Reminder” the effect of the In rainbows record isn`t surprising at all. Stereogum.com suggest that “Radiohead’s lexicon is all about bureaucrats telling you you can’t succeed.”
If lyrically perhaps Dylan is singing the 20th century song of ideas – themes of money, women, class, race, politics etcetera, where would a modern band like Radiohead be lyrically? Radiohead’s modern antihero illustrates/transforms the song of ideas into a song of images…? Have songs moved away from ideas to images? They would be closer to Paul Auster`s City of Glass than Frank Norris? ..maybe not. Dylan`s seems to be interested in romantic ideals:
The 19th Century Western Pioneer, The early 20th Century Hobo Folksinger Itinerant, The enigmatic Poet, Wordsmith and balladeer, a Pioneer of “cosmic consciousness”, the political dissenter and Angry Young Man…There are degrees to which these stereotypes may have been imposed upon the artist, perhaps most wholly by the media….because, primarily the lexicography and musical style of Dylan reveals an understanding of blues and folk forms reinvented (lyrically) in the post war plastic of the 60`s. Dylan`s a good advert for intertextuality, but, times are increasingly intertextual. Is there a tendency in modern music lyrics toward ….anaesthetised, minimal, modern to the point of being hard, tableaux Keatsean samples for a world with a short attention span ?
