Personal pronouns, as ever, such as "you", "I", "me", "him", are irrelevant and metaphorical. At once the author talks about nothing and everything, everybody and nobody. There is no singling out where I'm coming from, because I don't know anybody well enough to single out. Ask what exactly is my point, and you shall be met with silence, because frank talk falls on deaf ears, and after all, I'd hate for me to talk literal and then be dismissed as not having depth. Not explaining yourself seems to work for Dylan around here.
Something only makes you "think" if it hits with you emotionally. Which is why high school lessons on poetry and what this poem or that poem might mean can sometimes be really painful, because the poems they choose to "de-cipher" are fucking shit, often written by contemporary poets for the sole purpose of being taught in a classroom. That's about as poetic as a fucking dildo.
Why have I suddenly started to swear a lot more, and why are my points about pop charts being continually ignored (though not without claims against elitism or bias)?
Dylan's lyrics, Smith's lyrics, Cohen's lyrics, Doseone's lyrics, Nas's lyrics; they don't have inherent depth to them. I don't even know what depth is if it isn't some kind of emotional strand which stems from personalised communication between Memory and Desire (for those are the two concepts I would argue comprise all rational thought).
Dylan's lyrics are about as shallow as a kids' swimming pool if you're completely indifferent to what he's writing about. Or they might be the most meaningful lyrics you've ever heard if you like the way he sings them but don't know what he's singing about. Or, like me, you might not speak Icelandic, but think Sigur Rós play some of the most meaningful music and/or lyrics you've ever heard. Or, like me also, you might go to see José González live and be surprised that he brings you to tears by covering "Put Your Hands On Your Heart and Tell Me" by Kylie Minogue, that well-known Australian pop queen. But if Kylie Minogue had come on and sung it to a well-worn catchy beat behind it, you might have cried in pain, right? Ear-splitting cliché music. You might be a music fan to the point that you don't really like all that much music because music is about depth to you and most of it you hear isn't all that deep because most of it you hear is on the radio or in the charts because you happen to consume it passively or actively every single day, and you do that because music, although you would argue against it, might be a trend or fashion or industry more than it is an expressive artform.
Why is Sonata No. 14 by Beethoven referred to most commonly as "Moonlight Sonata"? Why do people feel the need to give a meaning to pieces of music which might also give it the burden of having to represent something outside of its own form? "To evoke feelings of the moonlight shining down below" and all that rubbish, but it might have easily been called "Sunshine Sonata" and you suddenly start thinking about a tranquil afternoon in some long grass with a lover and the sun beating down on you.
And if you're in a nightclub listening to, well, a tune which was produced and performed and recorded in order to be played in a nightclub and make people dance, to be played really fucking loud, loud enough so the bass hits your heart and produces an unconscious rapture throughout your body, so that in a sense the music is flowing through your veins and before you know it, because you're part of a crowd who's also dancing along to this pop chart shit, you find yourself dancing along to it too, moving your feet to the rhythm of the Scissor Sisters, grinding into a girl's ass to the slow beats of Usher, swinging your arms and flicking your wrists to 50 Cent singing about candy shops and lollipops and removing girls' tops. If that isn't loving what you're hearing, if that isn't two-way emotional masturbation between you and the music, if that isn't depth, I don't know what is.
Then again, whoever's writing this, whoever is claiming to be the author of this post, whoever that or this or him or I might be, may be talking rubbish, may be confusing people with abstraction and pathetic drivel. He might even be considering to give it all up, to throw the idea of debate out of the window because he finds himself having to defend music he might not even necessarily like, but finds himself contrarily being pulled down by his ankles by a heavy force into a dark whirlwind in which music fans expose their own irrationality and ignorance with a term thrown here, a term thrown there, buzz-phrases and clichés in order to describe what they term clichéd and mediocre, and the whole thing is very discouraging, because it results in a whole lot of negativity, of fickle tastes and reductivism which are just as bandwagonned and fashionable and short-lived as the bandwagons and fashions and trends they're shitting on.
