Grab Instantly Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown Assembled By David Yaffe Released Through Digital Format

dust jacket has a great photograph of Dylan in which he appears to be almost invisible, You see a white cowboy hat, a bit of a blue jacket, shoulder and forearm, the upper neck of a guitar and the shadowed fingers of his hands.
Thats all, the rest is black, To a certain extent, Dylan has remained invisible to those who have tried, particularly in biography but also in criticism, to make sense of him.
In this regard he is not unlike Pablo Picasso, Both were chameleons, both were rife with contradictions, both in word and deed, and were totally, consistently unreliable in interviewsthough an aspect of their consistency was a refusal to tolerate any form of definition, which left a bottom line truth in all the obfuscations, contradictions, and, well, lies.
Dont label me. Dont limit me. Dont project on to me, Instead of heeding the subterranean, consistent truth, writers have cherrypicked the poisoned fruit of Dylans interviews, friendly, combative, or pro forma, as if one might be the real Dylan revealed.
Maureen Dowd most recently took a bite from one of those apples to deleterious effect, Picasso and Dylan, too, were sponges, soaking up influences across the full spectrum of their fields, and incorporating these influences into their work in ways that were revolutionary but also timelessly connected to tradition.


David Yaffes book is not a biography or a comprehensive look at Dylans work, Its essentially a collection of four essays on Dylan, each with a discrete theme: Dylans voice, his connection to film by or about him or with him in it, his debt and affinity to black music and culture, and his Shakespearean habit of borrowing from the work of others.
They are all interesting topics, wellcovered and written, The chapter on his voice is mostly focused on how and why its changed over time and how well his late voice is suited for the kinds of songs he is singing and writing now.
I would have liked some more on Dylans influence as a singer, which is underappreciated since many folks cant get passed what Philip Larkin called “a cawing, derisive voice” and all that nasality.
The second chapter on Dylan and film is interesting, particularly as it talks early on how Dylan was influenced by American movies and filmthe references are many in his songs, but its not on the level of importance as the last two chapters: Dylan and what he owes to black music and culture and the issue of plagiarism.
The latter has three defenses:thats folk music for you if you stole from somebody, he/she stole from someone first, who probably lifted from someone elsein art, bad artists copy and great artists stealif what you steal is put together in inspired and new ways its not stealing whatever the number of appropriated elements.
The connections to black culture are both obvious and surprisingDylan would have married Mavis Staples in the earlys had she said yes, Yaffe points out numerous complex references to black women in Dylans songs and the fact that his second wife was a gospel singer who toured with him during the lates ands.
But its a bigger connection, a larger debt, than that, Dylan is a man in search of a place to beexcept for a brief moment around the time of “New Morning” and “Planet Waves” Dylan has never in work or interview acknowledged, let alone celebrated, his actual familial and community roots but instead insisted on an orphans or runaways identity.
He told the interviewer in the Scorsese documentary that he never felt like he belonged where he grew up or felt that he was part of that home or town.
He made up stories about his youth and early adulthood for interviewers when he first started out, Hes been on an endless tour for decades, He often seems to live and work in another time and place, Yaffe helps readers see this restlessness in a context of his musical interests and his own search for a personal resting place, a home, a community.


Yaffee is smart, wellversed in Dylans music and American literature and culture, bringing it all to bear in lucid prose that only occasionally gets compromised by the penchant that so many writers on Dyaln suffer from for cutesy paraphrases of Dylans lyrics.
Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown is an engaging, perceptive easy read for fans or for interested folks who want a quick but nuanced introduction to the mystery that is

Dylan.
Very nice book by David Yaffe, I enjoyed the analysis of Dylan's voice as well as the aspect of his attraction and imitation of black music.
A nice addition to the Dylan library, very interesting short meditations on various aspects of dylan's work lots of good insights, A must read for any Dylan fan, It's a witty, well written synopsis of Bob's life as a homeless road warrior, poet, "song and dance man", . . legend. A bit all over the place more miniessays than a book, this was published in time for Bob'sth birthday, There are certainly worse Bob books out there, but there are also many better, fuller ones to be read before you get to this one.
Yaffes slim yet scholarly book is full of respect for the many contradictions that make Dylan so fascinating, Yaffe is an intelligent and balanced author, combining great love as a fan with a professors critical summation skills, Understanding Dylans mercurial nature and vast body of work is, in my humble yet obsessive opinion as a songwriting admirer, a worthwhile pursuit, Yaffe offers a playlist at the end of the book that in itself is worth the price and our time, Four essays explore Dylan. The one about his voice intrigued me, but the ones about his blackness, songwriting and films did not,

David Yaffe worked on sitelinkReckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell while writing this book, That was a good, solid and wellresearched fivestar story, So I thought this would be of similar caliber, It falls short. Two short. Overwrought.

It is hard to know where to place Dylan, writes Yaffe, He arrived in the sixties as a hybrid, assimilating himself from others, His influences came from everywhere, Dylan belongs among singersongwriters, a cult of authenticity whose members included Muddy Waters, Odetta, Woody Guthrie and Joni Mitchell,

Dylans harsh and strident caw also characterized Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, writes Yaffe,

In sixtyfive we could understand him, now his voice croaks, Yaffe wrote eight years ago, An appreciative and incisive look at Bob Dylan's expansive career, published to coincide with the singer's seventieth birthday

Bob Dylan is an iconic figure in American musical and cultural history, lauded by Time magazine as one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century.
For nearly fifty years the singersongwriter has crafted his unique brand of music, from hisselftitled debut album to'shit Together Through Life, appealing to everyone from baby boomers to the twentysomethings who storm the stage at his concerts.


In Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, literary scholar and music critic David Yaffe considers Dylan from four perspectives: his complicated relationship to blackness including his involvement in the civil rights movement and a secret marriage with a black backup singer, the underrated influence of his singing style, his fascinating image in films, and his controversial songwriting methods that have led to charges of plagiarism.
Each chapter travels from thes to the present, offering a historical perspective on the many facets of Dylan's life and career, exploring the mystery that surrounds the enigmatic singer and revealing the complete unknown Dylan.
The book tries to do several things on the topic of Dylan, but only manages to do a few of them, This is a book I didn't like so much, but it's also a book I feel like I need to apologize for not liking more.
The author knows his stuff, and he has to juggle the demands of the Yale Icon series, which seeks to examine American culture through the focused lens of single people, events or things.
Perhaps I've read too much about Dylan or lived with his music for too long, but the book offers too few insights for its length.
He criticizes Dylan's pilfering of American tradition, which is fine, He takes Dylan down a notch or two, which is also fine, He positions him among other great singersongwriters who are his equals, which works well, But, by the end I didn't feel I understood Dylan more deeply than when I started, The author also has an annoying, almost cloying, habit of slipping in quotes from Dylan's work in the middle of his own sentences, That might be fine, poetic even, except that he criticizes Dylan for slipping in quotes from all over the place into his songs, without giving the source, credit or, he seems to suggest, respect due.
The playlist in the appendix, always interesting for Dylan listeners to check out, seems to reduce the cultural context of the songs themselves, since most were part of larger song cycles on albums and CDs.
That, and the portion of the book spent on his social presence, takes time away from commentary on the music, analysis of the lyrics or figuring out the why of his powerful effect on listeners that has continued for decades.
Despite these criticisms, I would not want to have not read this work, He makes a lot of fine points, draws interesting new connections, and covers a lot of territory, I felt in the end, though, that somehow this was not the work he wanted to write on Dylan, Maybe that work will come out later, and Yaffe's earlier work on jazz "Fascinating Rhythm Reading Jazz in American Writing," remains an excellent, indispensable work on the intersection of jazz and prose.
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