Her albums recorded on Phillips are all EXCELLENT. Not that she has ever done bad work, but these albums have a clarity that shows off her voice and piano playing to their highest level.
They’ve done some reissues on CD of her Phillips work, and put two albums on one CD. Well worth the price. You could start with the Best of Nina Simone CD, and then move into getting the other CDs if you find it to your liking.
> Enters auditorium, wildly waving conductors baton, then taps it harder and harder on podium until it snaps<
PEOPLE! Thank you. I wish to decree a…CIRCLE JERK. we need to get rid of some of this tension. Now then; those who hate Dylan’s voice, on my left, those who love it on my right. Strip…OK.
Rules are simple: whichever side reaches climax of all,ah, members first wins. However,everyone must finish no matter how long it takes. Ladies, please no "when Harry met sally: routines.
Anda three anda two anda one,GO!
Eye contact with your opponents please, people.
As your referee, I will be thinking about baseball. I may have my hands in my pockets but I assure you I’m thinking about…Mmmmm, baseball.
I just wanted to say that I’m sitting here listening to “With God On our Side.” I have yet to form an opinion of Dylan, but may I just say, “God Bless Napster!” And heaven has a special place for people with T3 lines.
Lisa, wiping a tear from my cheek.
Your kung-fu is weak. Now fall before my Angry Duck style.
Oh ho. Which goes a long way to explaining the Born-Again period.
Speaking as someone old enough to REMEMBER when the Born-Again period was actually happening, I remember how hurt and pissed we all were that he was spending his time doing gospel songs. 20 years later, I’ve looked back and realized that he was writing some of the finest damned gospel songs in the modern repetoire. See “Every Grain of Sand” and “Gotta Serve Somebody,” for example.
In reading alla this, the spontaneous pop into my mind is:
Some folks like a nice dip in the lake; cool water, swell day, pleasant refreshment humming along sweetly.
Others prefer the ocean; getting knocked around on the current currents on the best chance of riding that particularly right nice wave, even if it means salt water up yer nose and sand up yer ass.
Dylan, to me, is being in the ocean. His music always fills me with glee and surprise, buoyed by his great grounding and appreciation of those who sang before him.
:::Listening now to Time Out Of Mind:::
He’s still got it…
I know what I love.
I love art.
I love music.
I love different kinds, but gravitate toward similar stuff, I guess.
I love Bob.
I love Bruce.
I like Tom quite a bit too.
Oh, and Mick Jagger does such wonderfully strange things for me.
Roy Orbison ::Sigh::
Anyway, this is all so very subjective, but I had to get in here and say a few words for Bob. He’s sorta like an Impressionist… gosh, like a musical Monet. Oh, a lot of you probably “hate” him too, huh? Silly me
You really like his voice?
I sit. I stare. I don’t do anything else. I love it. The longest I did it for was a twelve hour stretch (damned getting hungry). I did nothing. Everyone who calls me a lunatic for it is an immature little fool who just doesn’t realize the sophistication inherint in that perfect stillness.
Well not really. Its just something I like to do, something that not many people care for. I don’t know if they could get acclimated or not. I don’t think acclimation is particularly a good thing. The first time I tried coffee it didn’t do anything to me. I’d totally addicted to coke classic it isn’t funny. Why? Because it clicked. Is forcing your self to get used to something really that good? It may increase your appreciation of it, but I hate Boy Bands, have from the moment I heard a Back Street Boys song. Probably if someone was sadistic they could get me to acclimate to it, to come to appreciate it. It would not make me more mature.
It doesn’t matter whether or not Bob is objectively a musical genuis. It matters what an individual feels when they first encounter it, and what they decide to do from there.
On a side note I haven’t seen many discusions get so venemous. I know its not just music, it is music that deeply touches you. But all the personal attacks and unpleasentness really isn’t neccesary.
One day, down at the playground, my mustard yellow plastic transistor radio with the 9-volt battery did something it had never done before. That something was play “Positively Fourth Street.” I mean, usually the radio crooned the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar,” or some such, that lasted 2 minutes 46 seconds; usually verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus. Strict line length, meter, & tight rhymes. A form as tightly structured as haiku delivered in voice as bland as suburbia.
At 7, I had found the 78’s in Gramma’s basement and the 45’s in my mother’s closet. I had heard Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday, just not on the radio. (I had to go through a lot of Mitch Miller and odd novelty tunes to mine a few gems; fortunately Gramma’s obsession was genetic.)
So I’m down at the park, and this song comes on, and goes on and on. The dude can’t sing. Is this a April Fool’s joke?
Then the words sweep me up, penetrate my little pre-adolescent brain, and alter the universe.
Looking back, that’s the point that everything changed. I might have become a poet anyway, but that’s the crystallized moment I first got a glimpse that you could change the ugly brains of the thugs encircling you with words. Sure, I still got beat up on occasion. Still do. Sent me back to the woodshed, to work on my licks.
Visions of Johanna is, in my opinion and the opinion of several collaborating sources, (mostly songwriters and playwrights) the shit.
Boys and Girls: it’s not that Dylan can’t sing. He has been impersonating an Oakie for so long, he can’t remember when he was just Bobbie.
Art, sometimes, is like that. Occasionally we need to eradicate the past to build the future.
VoJ is, in fact, the doc.; the shit, the stick. Sure, Frank is fun when one has over-indulged in straight bourbon, or has had the unfortunate eventuality of being hatched in Jersey; there’s nothing one can do about their origins, other than change their name & hitch to New York. & build a new self.
& ain’t that what Dylan is about? Bob was pomo a decade before anyone had the words to describe it.
Sure, he should be shot every day for the jack of hearts.
But is there nothing you should be shot for?
But is there nothing for which you should be shot?
::singing to hisself:: ‘It may be devil, it maybe the lord, but you’re gonna haveta serve somebody…’
Damn you, Ike for making me rememder that!!!::shakes fist in air::
Your Angry Duck style is strong yet it is no match for my Vile Crocadile style.