Emotion Comes in Sound

So I took a Bob Dylan class and I wrote this paper. Some of it is about Bob Dylan.
Here is an excerpt:

               I remember the moment exactly. My father and I were driving along Taylorsville Road on our way home and John Mellancamp was blaring from the stereo, specifically his tune “Rain on the Scarecrow.” This song is about the hardships that farmers in Mellancamp’s home state of Indiana were facing in the 1980s. It is haunting, aggressive, and passionate. In the middle of the song, amidst silence among my father and me, he turned to me and said something along the lines of “Isn’t it such a gift for a musician to take an emotion and create every little part of a song to express that emotion?” This moment exactly is where my passion for emotion in music began.

              When music journalists interview an artist or band, they usually ask questions about their music in two ways: their songwriting or their musical style. While it is an art form, similar to poetry, songwriting is just words and sometimes strong words at that, but what I want to emphasize is that the combination in the sound of the lyrics and the sound of the music is more impactful than any sentence can describe or elaborate.

              As a listener of music, I have found that there are many ways that we can treat a song. I do not declare that there is a right or wrong way, but I feel that regardless, what a musician wants us to do is to feel. Just feel. Whether it is Justin Timberlake producing the next club stopper or Sinead O’ Connor crying in her music video, the most impactful goal and success of music is to hear something and be moved. Moved to the point that you want to dance, to smile, to cry, to jump wildly, to open the window and scream at the world.

              Do not be confused, words are not useless. A lot of times they are the driving force, but some people are confused and they hang onto the words with every drop of their energy. In this paper, I will point out examples of those who take advantage of the music in the ways I am believe it should be done.

              Firstly, I want to explain the common state of music, why I feel the way I do about this topic and why it is topical. I have been frustrated with the “Hot 100” for a while now. Their songs are cheap, shallow, and derivations of what once used to be great. They have lost a certain intangible element that made some musicians years ago so impactful. Unlike my experience with John Mellancamp, I do not hear these songs and feel any emotion coming through. The musicians are simply churning out hits to be hits makers. I am being somewhat cynical, but I am always amazed at how a musician can be so passive in the music writing process and expect to feel a song beyond the beat.

              In many occasions, such as the current pop musician Bruno Mars or country artist Jason Aldean, these musicians are not writing their songs. If you look at their liner notes, there is what seems to be an endless list of composers, engineers, and art directors. I am not saying that they are doing it wrong, but that his or her resonance as a musician is lost when they are ineffective at making an audience feel something significant. How can musician be effective if he or she is nothing more than an image and a vehicle? Where is that passion a listener deserves?

 An artist that has always made people feel in song has been Bob Dylan. Sometimes people attribute this reputation to his words and sometimes to his music. In his many masks, Dylan was a coffee shop crooner, a troubadour, a Christian, a Nashville country man and many other identities. He was also known for inspiring million and being the so called “voice of his generation.” Bob Dylan, though, was most impactful for his combination of lyrical styles and musical sound to create a grand scale of noise that drives people to not just hear his music, but to feel it.

             What gets me caught up on studying Dylan though is that people want take a microscopic view to his lyrics and analyze them like he is Shakespeare. What use is it? If he wanted people to understand exactly what he means, he would not have made everything so ambiguous. “Blowin’ in the Wind.” What the hell is that? Do literary poets have to face this sort of stress trying to answer critical questions by readers and journalists? Do artists need to sit down at press conferences to answer a question for every brush stroke? Those journalists and fans wants to know because Dylan has effectively created a sound that no one has produced before. It is moving and emotional and it takes the voice and the music for that to happen.

 Bob Dylan has been effective in making an audience feel an emotion and their desire to know derives from the effect of emotion taking over their body while they heard the music. The most desired artists are those that make people feel something deep inside them that was not provoked until they heard that song, saw that painting, or read that poem. In music, the way that bands do this and have people remember them for it is to treat voice like an instrument.  

 Even though Dylan’s vocals were nothing like a Gregorian style, his vocals choices are calculated and purposeful. Dylan’s eight minute epic “Hurricane” about the falsely accused boxer Rubin Carter is a fine example of this method. There is a specific part of the song that convinces me that Dylan was concentrated on something bigger than the song itself. For each verse, there is a small part where it is just voices and drums. There is a specific amount of room for words here. Bob Dylan couldn’t care less. Each time, this moment in the song sounds different because he either stuffs what seems like an impossible amount of words in this spot or puts more than one break in the song. It is just not natural. Dylan though as you have seen throughout his career is not concerned with what sounds methodical or what will please the teenagers’ ears. He may be calculated but he does not conform to a conventional style. He writes to make people feel.

 In terms of lyrical use, Bob Dylan is not alone in this technique. Other prominent singers sing with a purpose. Some make it seem almost theatrical. Adam Duritz of Counting Crows sings conventionally on the album, because it makes sense to follow the rules on an album, but live, the man is a storyteller. Those who want to sing along with him at concerts can rarely do so. It is nearly impossible. I tried last year at Iroquois Amphitheater and it didn’t work. He can perform a song that he wrote in 1994 and sing it in a way today he has never done before.

            After hearing the song “Round Here” live and the original studio version, you can understand that Duritz found no use in just providing an album track on tour. But it all comes thorough how he feels. He has matured and changed since the song’s creation, but the song is still consistent and the audience is going to get passion regardless. Songs have the possibility of changing meaning over time for the singer or the audience. Live, songs take singers over and their choices on stage can be made by personal inspiration or adrenaline. The show I saw last summer was not the same show Counting Crows performed the next night. This then begs the question though, does it really matter what the singer sings? 

From a scattered singer to a band where the lyrics are flat out unintelligible, I present Sigur Rós, an Icelandic ambient post rock band. Their sound is known for its atmospheric qualities and its ability to tweak a song with every possible aspect to create the perfect aesthetics. They are most known for Hopelandic, their incomprehensible language which lacks any sort of grammar or meaning. The band’s beautiful songs derive from their expertise with the sounds of language. Those critical techniques are what create their genius. Language has a meaning, but it also has a sound. Mixing its sound with the sound of the instruments makes for pure bliss.

             In an interview with the Montreal Mirror, a now defunct alternative newsweekly in Montreal, Sigur Rós drummer Orri Pall Dyrason explains, “When we were writing the songs, we didn’t have lyrics—we’ve never had lyrics—just these silly working titles. It’s like the album is unfinished and the listener gets his own pure expression and finishes it himself. We are very interested to know how people interpret it. Jonsi’s not using any language when he sings, it’s just some blubberings, using his voice like an instrument. We only called it Hopelandic because the first song he did this is in was called ‘Hope’” (Carpenter).  

Lyrics are not useless because a singer should say something, but you find the real beauty in the sound of the lyrics. As complicated as it may sound, the noise that comes out of the singer’s mouth is far more impactful than what he or she is actually saying. Take Sigur Ros’s song "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur." Technically it means “within me a lunatic sings,” but what does it really matter? Like Dyrason said, it is open to interpretation. The first time I heard this song my uncle was playing it for me while we were driving in the car, and at the bombastic end of the song, he slyly looked over to me and said, with ease, “The king has arrived.” No words told him that that is going on. They do not provide a definition for us to draw that conclusion. The music speaks to him. We felt the triumphant moment. Who needs words when you have noise that will lead you there?

 An important point to make at this juncture is how one voice describes a song in a completely different manner than any other voice. If we compare our focus, Bob Dylan, to an artist covering his song, we can understand that what is really beautiful is what the voice can do to produce a sound, not the words they are saying. I think it is understood that Bob Dylan’s voice, to say the least, is scratchy. Some people can’t stand it, but yet others are mystified by it. Someone totally different than Dylan in vocal style is Bonnie Raitt.

 In her most recent album, “Slipstream,” she covered “Million Miles,” an original Dylan tune off of “Time Out of Mind.” But she gave it a whole new nature to it. Raitt’s voice, smooth and soulful, led her to a more acoustic arrangement than the electric version Dylan produced. Dylan is really singing the blues. You can picture him on a street corner or jazz club, playing in and out of the darkness, but yet Raitt’s voice is more confident making her version of the song fiercer. Dylan was a hurt man when he wrote it. The elements were minimalistic—the chopping organ and simple drums. Raitt has her pianist pound on the keys and the strings are more traditional, funky blues. Their voices are of a different gender, but they are also have a different confidence. The whole tone of the song wraps around the emotion of the singer. From shriveled to sharp, two versions of “Million Miles” tells two different stories.  

 Isn’t that what is so great about music? We can all make it what it seems to us. There is a specific demographic that gazes at music at its truest form—just a bunch of people playing their instruments to the best of the ability, letting the passion of the heart rush into the fingers and into the instruments. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan got a lot of harassment from people not in this demographic for not being transparent in his lyrics. People suddenly freaked about the havoc that this could cause. They didn’t freak out because it was criminal. They freaked out because it was different.

 In May 1963, Dylan released “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” an album that included the ever-confusing “Blowin’ in the Wind” as well as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” On May 25^th of that year, the number one song on the Billboard charts was “If You Wanna Be Happy” by Jimmy Soul (“The Hot 100”). This song encourages men to marry an ugly woman for absurd reasons. I would say Bob Dylan hits a little closer to home than Jimmy Soul. Keep in mind though, it is not the topic of the song that is important here. It is how each element of the song is patterned together to make a moving, complete sound. “If You Wanna Be Happy” is ditsy and shallow while “Blowin’ in the Wind” is entirely the opposite, enthralling and contemplative (“If You Wanna Be Happy Lyrics”).    

This trend of Jimmy Soul-like songs has not stopped though. People have always been intrigued by the more simple songs. While they have been given their successes, in terms of making a substantial note in music history, those who have created a mixture of sound and emotion are the ones remembered for their work. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a physical representation of this. Musicians in this prestigious club have been excellent at crafting this combination.

 A most recent inductee, hip hop group Public Enemy, was able to write a lot of rhymes on the topic of race. Their lyrics were very telling and instrumental to the racial movement of the nineties, but the mixing of their beats with their militant style of performance and Chuck D’s lyrical delivery took their act over the top. Take the effective “Fight the Power” for example. Chuck D is one of the greatest MCs of all time and Flavor Flav is the model for every hype man. Together, they created a sound and an image that affects people inside. With their music, people felt powerful. They were moved and enraged. Imagine if Chuck D used lyrics like Sigur Rós . I firmly believe the reactions would have been similar.

 Chuck D was passionate because the music affected him personally. What about musicians who write about real events that have nothing to do with them? That is what grunge band Pearl Jam did in 1991 when they released “Jeremy.” Jeremy is a 15-year-old boy from Richardson, Texas who committed suicide in the front of his English class. Lead vocalist Eddie Vedder saw an article on this story and, as he told Seattle Sound magazine in 2009, felt the need to “take that small article and make something of it—to give that action, to give it reaction, to give it more importance” (Brownlee). As you listen to the song, note Vedder’s rage and his aggression into the lyrics. Along with the powerful, chaotic guitars, his voice reaches an interesting level. Vedder was not involved in this issue other than as a reader of news, yet this story and consequently this song took ahold of him. If a man so distant from something can create a sound so emotional over something that he really has no emotions in, it is obvious that “Jeremy” took many people by surprise. It burns in your mind.

 That is where the essence of music lies—in drawing an emotion out of you that you did not know existed by taking the combination of voice and instruments to a level never been created before. The voice is not just a vehicle to say words. It is just as much an instrument as the drums and guitars that it collaborates with on each song. Memorable musicians do not overlook this. They capitalize on it.

The origin of my theory was a day in the car listening to John Mellancamp, but the manifestation of it is in Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan is a transformer. This is where his genius lies. Take a listen to a Dylan song from each decade. The evolution of his music is obvious but the evolution of his voice is remarkable. From a young Woody Guthrie impressionist to a 71-year-old man writing love songs, his vocal progression is amazing. Some people say that Dylan fakes his voice, in others words, it is not natural. Whether it is true or not is not important, but if it is true, I do not fault him for it because you can tune an instrument, you can add effects to instruments, why should the voice be any different? Every time Bob Dylan performed a different style, he sung a different style. It is just another instrument to enhance the particulars that drive a listener to the emotional brink.

It should not matter what comes out of singer’s mouth, but when he or she does speak, whether on an album or in a concert, he or she must realize that their responsibility is not just to invite people to the dance floor or shout at them to crack open a beer, but it is to drive people to an emotional level that can only reached when the passion of a singer and the mastery of the musicians set an atmosphere worth resonating in someone’s soul.