Word: pop
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...belligerence to the standard love song, upending it into airs of bitter, knowing rejection. When he tired of being the preeminent folkie, and the poster boy for political causes, he plugged himself in, merging the Beats with the beat, and immediately forced a rethinking of nearly every aspect of pop music...
...pop might be sung. He began by aping Guthrie's tinny tenor, but pushing it farther, into a siren wail, into banshee territory. Mitch Jayne of the Dillards famously compared the early Dylan sound to "a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire." It certainly was a prickly handful to kids raised on either the smooth Sinatra sound or the orgasmic church screaming of Little Richard. But to Dylan, barbed-wire vocals were an aesthetic and, as the French would say, a politique. Mellow was a lie; raspy was authentic. As he wrote in an early poem: "The only...
...What a pop song could be called... Dylan pioneered the eccentric fashion of hit singles whose title words don't appear in the song: "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("Look out, kid, it's somethin' you did./ God knows when, but you're doin' it again"), "Positively Fourth Street" ("You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend"), "Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35" ("Everybody must get stoned...
...What a pop singer could look like. Physically not a heroic figure (his song-publishing company was called Dwarf Music), Dylan nonetheless had a compelling presence: the voluptuous lips nearly hidden by his harmonica holder, the untelling eyes under a brakeman's cap. He didn't have as much influence on performing styles as Mick Jagger - he was a static figure, while Jagger's stage-sprawling struts set the fashion for rock-band lead singers - but he notarized the dress-down look for pop performers...
...Dylan didn't just materialize, in the Village, "modern Gomorrah," he called it, in 1960. The pop-cult 50s was Dylan's home-or, at last, his sleepover when he was a kid. In Chronicles he describes his feeling of kinship with smooth-singing Bobby Vee and Ricky Nelson, with the composer Harold Arlen and the wrestler Gorgeous George. He also played occasionally in rock band and briefly backed Vee in 1959, when the Buddy Holly soundalike singer was booked to fill the dates Holly couldn't make because he'd died in a plane crash in a frosty Iowa...