Why Bob Dylan Matters
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Narrated by:
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Nick Landrum
About this listen
When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, a debate raged. Some celebrated while many others questioned the choice. How could the world's most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter who wouldn't even deign to attend the medal ceremony?
In Why Bob Dylan Matters, Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas answers this question with magisterial erudition. A world expert on classical poetry, Thomas was initially ridiculed by his colleagues for teaching a course on Bob Dylan alongside his traditional seminars on Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. Dylan's Nobel Prize brought him vindication, and he immediately found himself thrust into the spotlight as a leading academic voice in all matters Dylanological. Today, through his wildly popular Dylan seminar - affectionately dubbed "Dylan 101" - Thomas is introducing a new generation of fans and scholars to the revered bard's work.
This witty, personal volume is a distillation of Thomas' famous course and makes a compelling case for moving Dylan out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and into the pantheon of classical poets. Asking us to reflect on the question "what makes a classic?", Thomas offers an eloquent argument for Dylan's modern relevance while interpreting and decoding Dylan's lyrics for listeners. The most original and compelling volume on Dylan in decades, Why Bob Dylan Matters will illuminate Dylan's work for the Dylan neophyte and the seasoned fanatic alike. You'll never think about Bob Dylan in the same way again.
©2017 Richard F. Thomas (P)2017 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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- By: Peter Ames Carlin
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In Catch a Wave, Peter Ames Carlin pulls back the curtain on Brian Wilson, one of popular music's most revered luminaries, as well as its biggest mystery. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before heard studio recordings, Carlin follows the Beach Boys from their earliest days through Brian's deepening emotional problems to his triumphant re-emergence with the release of Smile, the legendarily unreleased album he had originally shelved.
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Not great
- By J. Barker on 08-08-16
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Your Song Changed My Life
- From Jimmy Page to St. Vincent, Smokey Robinson to Hozier, Thirty-Five Beloved Artists on Their Journey and the Music That Inspired It
- By: Bob Boilen
- Narrated by: Bob Boilen
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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From the beloved host and creator of NPR's All Songs Considered and Tiny Desk Concerts comes an essential oral history of modern music, told in the voices of iconic and up-and-coming musicians, including Dave Grohl, Jimmy Page, Michael Stipe, Carrie Brownstein, Smokey Robinson, and Jeff Tweedy, among others - published in association with NPR Music.
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Cool if you know all interviewed artists
- By Farfield on 12-05-16
By: Bob Boilen
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The Never-Ending Present
- The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip
- By: Michael Barclay
- Narrated by: George Stroumboulopoulos
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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From our talent-rich neighbor to the north comes this biography of one of the most successful Canadian rock bands, The Tragically Hip, which announced a year-long tour after sharing the news of lead singer Gord Downie’s inoperable cancer. Now available to US listeners, The Never-Ending Present details what led up to the memorable night when music fans all over the world watched Downie’s heroic final performance.
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Hometown Heroes
- By Tommy Garou on 12-13-18
By: Michael Barclay
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Something Wonderful
- Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution
- By: Todd S. Purdum
- Narrated by: Todd S. Purdum
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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They stand at the apex of the great age of songwriting, the creators of the classic Broadway musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, whose songs have never lost their popularity or emotional power. Even before they joined forces, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written dozens of Broadway shows, but together they pioneered a new art form: the serious musical play.
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Fabulous book about Rodgers & Hammerstein!!!
- By BigWally on 06-27-18
By: Todd S. Purdum
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Dreaming the Beatles
- A Love Story of One Band and the Whole World
- By: Rob Sheffield
- Narrated by: Rob Sheffield
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn't another exposé about how they broke up. It isn't a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles' music on their parents' stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? Find out.
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Wonderful ramble
- By Tad Davis on 05-18-17
By: Rob Sheffield
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Where the Heart Beats
- John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
- By: Kay Larson
- Narrated by: Jason Wineinger
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself - and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. "Remarkably researched, exquisitely written", Where the Heart Beats weaves together "a great many threads of cultural history" (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s.
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Mind Expansion
- By Robert Keith on 04-04-15
By: Kay Larson
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Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?
- Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock
- By: Gregory Alan Thornbury
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1969, in Capitol Records' Hollywood studio, a blonde-haired troubadour named Larry Norman laid track for an album that would launch a new genre of music and one of the strangest, most interesting careers in modern rock. Having spent the bulk of the 1960s playing on bills with acts like The Who, Janis Joplin, and The Doors, Norman decided that he wanted to sing about the most countercultural subject of all: Jesus.
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Hagiography not Biography
- By Keith Howard on 10-29-18
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Go Ahead in the Rain
- Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
- By: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The seminal rap group A Tribe Called Quest brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces. This narrative follows Tribe from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Throughout the narrative, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself.
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Beautiful
- By Joshua Lindell on 03-06-19
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
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So We Read On
- How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures
- By: Maureen Corrigan
- Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.
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Reading Gatsby as an adult reveals its greatness!
- By Mark on 10-06-14
By: Maureen Corrigan
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John Lennon
- The Life
- By: Philip Norman
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins
- Abridged
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Philip Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the definitive portrait of John Lennon. This biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into almost a secular saint.
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Really Bad Abridgement Job (slash job)
- By Let's Be Reasonable on 12-04-08
By: Philip Norman
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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
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Thelonious Monk
- The Life and Times of an American Original
- By: Robin DG Kelley
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 25 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Thelonious Monk is the critically acclaimed, gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the 20th century. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers.
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The definitive bio of Monk
- By ricardo on 12-27-17
By: Robin DG Kelley
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One of America’s finest historians shows us how Bob Dylan, one of the country’s greatest and most enduring artists, still surprises and moves us after all these years. Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager; almost half a century later, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminent American historian as well as the passion of a fan.
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Editing badly needed.
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Across seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singer of American song. As a writer and performer, he has rewritten the national songbook in a way that comes from his own vision and yet can feel as if it belongs to anyone who might listen. In Folk Music, Greil Marcus tells Dylan’s story through seven of his most transformative songs. This is not only a deeply felt telling of the life and times of Bob Dylan, but a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they were given as Dylan sat down to write his own.
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Monstrously Pretentious
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Bob Dylan is a singular figure defined by a lifetime of creative invention that has helped transform music, literature, pop culture, and even politics. This book provides a lively, accessible look at his art and music as seen by leading rock and pop critics and music scholars. The chapters are carefully integrated so that listeners can take quick dives into specific topics ranging from the Blues to religious faith, civil rights, and American literature.
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For almost half a century, Bob Dylan has been a primary catalyst in rock's shifting sensibilities. Few American artists are as important, beloved, and endlessly examined, yet he remains something of an enigma. Who, we ask, is the "real" Bob Dylan? Is he Bobby Zimmerman, yearning to escape Hibbing, Minnesota, or the Woody Guthrie wannabe playing Greenwich Village haunts? Folk Messiah, Born-Again Bob, Late-Elvis Dylan, Jack Fate, or Living National Treasure?
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Expansive and well researched.
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The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a vivid, full-bodied portrait of one of the most influential artists of the 20th-century - a man widely regarded as the most important lyricist America has ever produced. Acclaimed poet and biographer Daniel Mark Epstein frames Dylan against the backdrop of four seminal concerts - all of which he attended. Beautifully written, The Ballad of Bob Dylan is a unique, eye-opening portrait of an artist who has transformed generations and continues to inspire and surprise today.
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In 1975 as Bob Dylan emerged from eight years of seclusion, he dreamed of putting together a traveling music show that would trek across the country like a psychedelic carnival. The dream became reality, and On the Road with Bob Dylan is the ultimate behind-the-scenes look at what happened when Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue took to the streets of America. With the intimate detail of a diary, Larry "Ratso" Sloman’s mesmerizing description of the legendary tour both transports listeners to a celebrated period in rock history and provides them with a vivid snapshot of Dylan during this extraordinary time.
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Bob Dylan is an internationally best-selling artist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and an Oscar winner for Things Have Changed. His career is stronger and more influential than ever. How did this happen, given the road to oblivion he seemed to choose more than two decades ago? What transformed a heroin addict into one of the most astonishing literary and musical icons in American history?
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Bob Dylan in the Attic
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In this beautifully crafted book, Freddy Cristobal Dominguez makes a provocative case for Dylan as a historian, offering a deep consideration of the musician's historical influences and practices. Utilizing interviews, speeches, and the close analysis of lyrics and live performances, Bob Dylan in the Attic is the first book to consider Dylan's work from the point of view of historiography.
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A Freewheelin' Time
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Suze Rotolo chronicles her coming of age in Greenwich Village during the 1960s and the early days of the folk music explosion, when Bob Dylan was finding his voice and she was his muse.
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An extraordinary woman sheds light on her time, and Dylan
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Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One explores the critical junctions in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities: smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough.
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Understanding
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What listeners say about Why Bob Dylan Matters
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Learning everyday
- 09-28-21
Brilliant analysis of Dylan's work
Although Thomas' work covers Dylan's entire career, this book's focus is on his latest work including the album he declares a masterwork, Tempest. I like some of the ideas Thomas brings up especially his discussion of triads in Dylan's catalog. By reading this book, it's easy to understand why Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-20-20
why Bob matters
better than I expected narrator was excellent more in-depth than I expected
glad I bought it
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- J.B.
- 12-01-17
His Work is Talmudic; But He is Only A Man
Why Bob Dylan Matters, by Richard F. Thomas, and narrated By Nick Landrum. Professor Thomas is a classical (Greek/Roman) literature professor. That means he studies fate; under the command of the gods, and man’s function and duties within that realm. That’s a perfect background for studying Homer, Sophocles, Euripides and Ovid; but does it translate into an insight into Dylan? Maybe not so much.
What Professor Thomas has to say in heling us understand Bob Dylan is somewhat interesting, but not sufficiently insightful for me to recommend this as a must read. I found most of this work to be a rambling dive into who was Bob Dylan at the time he wrote his original (1960s through mid-1970) works, and what may have occurred to him since that early time that affects his later day works. Only the final two chapters were probative into what Dylan provided western literature.
There is one part of the story I found fulfilling. It seems Dylan has taken parts of other great authors, poets and philosopher’s works and incorporated their exact or like statements into his work. This, as is well explained in the book, is not an act of plagiarism. Rather, a deeper dive into the concepts previously provided by the earlier writers. For example, a lot of Dylan’s such undertakings came from the Roman poet, Vigil. (In fact, Vigil, like Dylan, took from others to create his poetry, as well.) Since, Dr. Thomas is a classical expert, which thus includes a good understanding of Vigil and his times, there was much substance to these arguments, and this was the most interesting and learning part of the work. There seems to exist poetic licenses to take from others their insights and incorporate that combination of words or thoughts into your own. As explained by Dr. Thomas, it is not theft; it is love. (Is that where the title Love and Theft comes from?)
I think those who try to delve into and explain poetry by figuring out the poet’s nature at the time his/her work was written is absurdly wrong because knowing the poet’s nature does not teach you the ephemeral drift into thought and insights that poetry permits. One must concentrate on the words, not the author’s history. One might even hypothesize, a poem has little or nothing to do with its author. It has to do with the reader. What does the work invoke in the reader?
Perhaps that is why Bob Dylan is always so annoyed with his purveyors; those who seek to report on Dylan and those that want to tell us what he meant. Dylan wrote the stuff and if you enjoy it, it is not Dylan that is providing the meaning. He, with great genius, provides the lattice for which the reader must develop a full flagged structure.
Yet, I do not mean to totally discourage you from this read. This read does provide one with remembrances as Dr. Thomas reviews the famous landmarks of Dylan’s work product. This is a good trip down memory lane and provides an opportunity to remember where when and with whom you were at the time of that Dylan Album.
When the audio speaks, my eye catches a flash off into the corner of my peripheral ability.
Something like the effects of thunder storms behind a cloudy sky.
Then I am left with the ozone to drift upon, and provide a lie for me to lay within.
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5 people found this helpful
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- TL
- 08-06-18
Good book bad Bob Dylan impersonation
This was an insightful book into the sophistication of Bob Dylan’s work. My only complaint about the narrator is that he did a good job except he does an annoying impersonation of Bob Dylan’s voice every time the author quotes Dylan.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Mooshy
- 08-26-22
The best Bob Dylan book ever written
I am a lifelong Dylan fan and can’t - or couldn’t read enough about him until this book. It is excellent-the most substantial, comprehensive and fascinating biography of the mysterious icon that is Bob Dylan. I have listened to this book several times and always hear something new that I somehow missed the time before. And I’m not done yet. There is so much there, it’s impossible to to take it all in at one -or five times. It is beautifully read as well. None of the other Dylan books come close to being this good and I have read most of them.
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- Paul in Maryland
- 01-14-18
couldn't wait for it to end
I've never thought much of Dylan's Tunes or lyrics. I thought even less of his voice. The only reason I read this book is that my daughter is about to marry a young man whose first name is Dylan. Yes, the young man's parents named him after Bob Dylan. Their hero. I figured I owed it to my Dylan and his parents to see what the fuss was about. Listening to this book was excruciating. The author cites examples of Dylan genius. Genius? You've got to be kidding me. He's no Stephen Sondheim or Billy Joel. to me, this book simply reaffirmed why I thought Dylan is a second or third rate pretender.
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- Buretto
- 11-27-17
Classical Dylan
I thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook. It's exactly the kind of book on Dylan I've been waiting for. I've been a fan since I was a kid in the '70s, when Street Legal was the very first album I ever owned. I've steadfastly resisted the attempts at interpretive biographies, as if these authors presume to explain the the masses what Dylan himself has left enigmatic.
This is different. It's much more involved with Dylan's connection to the classical structure of literature and storytelling. There are the periodic references to Suze Rotola and Sara Lownds, and others involved in Dylan's life, but they are presented as characters in the epic stories that Dylan refashions from Ovid, Homer, Rimbaud and others.
The author, clearly a huge fan himself, may have underestimated the negative reaction amongst the more snobbish literary types regarding Dylan's Nobel Prize. I know of several who were beside themselves in horror. But I suspect Dylan might regard them as the right types of enemies to have.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Ex
- 11-26-19
good, but too into it's subject
very interesting and a vital analysis of a vital subject. that said, towards the end, there's quiet a lot of too-deep analysis, grasping at words somehow as hints, almost in the paranoid style. I feel like there's more obvious connections to be made left unsaid.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Sean Girardin
- 03-09-21
Way over the top
Dylan is on my music Mt. Rushmore. He’s a genius. But this book came off way too often as Boomer historical hyperbole, which made it hard to even listen to in some stretches. Think I’ll go listen to Blonde On Blonde now...
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