MUSIC IN REVIEW

1 8 6 Y M U S I C I N R E V I E W T I M O T H Y Y O U N G As a creative race, we may have reached a high point on 13 October 2016 when the star chamber for approved cultural signifiers, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announced that its prize for literature would be awarded to Bob Dylan. The Nobel Prize is given for a particular kind of literature, the sort that moves the reader and provides phrases that can be kept in memory for insight and inspiration – lines from Munro and Saramago and Jelinek and Neruda and Morrison. Dylan’s lyrics may be the easiest kind to retain, since they are set to music, a generally successful mnenomic combination. It might be too much to think that this award resolved all arguments about popular music, for which Dylan’s output stands as a pinnacle of the genre in its imaginative expanse, being a true art form. But at least it may finally settle the question of whether popular music can and should be taught to high school students alongside Shakespeare. Anyone who attended public high schools in the United States in the late 1960s may remember the genre of youth-focused textbooks that included lyrics by Simon and Garfunkel next to the poems of T. S. Eliot and cheer Dylan’s laureate. Because the sense of what literature is has been expanded to 1 8 7 R encompass a wider range of artistic verbal expression, it seems that now might be a good moment to change the name of the award to the Nobel Prize in Rhetoric. All writing uses rhetoric, of course, but creative (or, as a professor of mine liked to call it, ‘‘nonutilitarian’’) writing is buoyed by rhetoric. Popular music is one of the most easily accessible repositories of rhetorical devices. Mind you, you’re not likely to often encounter the really fun ones, such as zeugma or apophasis, but you will find the grab bag of easy-to-remember tools that we were taught early on: metaphor, simile, and hyperbole. Bob Dylan is a master of a particularly e√ective rhetorical device , balancing one of his best-loved songs on a metaphor, ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone.’’ Other songwriters dive equally deeply into wordplay . Van Morrison built one of his most pointedly romantic songs around the comparison of his love (and the quest for social justice) to Tupelo honey. Tom Waits worked unashamedly with personi fication in the 1970s when he sang: ‘‘The piano has been drinking , / my necktie is asleep; / And the combo went back to New York, / the jukebox has to take a leak.’’ A master class can be taught using the work of John Prine, who came up with the simple ‘‘The air’s as still / As the throttle on a funeral train’’ (‘‘Mexican Home’’). Even the honest poetry of Ferron relies on figures of speech, as in her classic ‘‘Ain’t Like a Brook’’: ‘‘But life don’t clickety clack down a straight line track / It comes together and it comes apart.’’ While these masters of persuasive writing have been accorded their due, more or less, there is an equal strength in plain narrative , a neutral form that posits one thing after another – storytelling without embellishment or comparison. A songwriter who has built a successful career while forgoing dependence on rhetorical devices is Jonathan Richman, one of the most interesting songwriters that America has produced in the past forty years. While he may not be placed in the lineage of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, he possesses an introspective and charming manner. Calling him charming might o√end long-time fans who continue to hold him up as one of the first real voices of punk music. The Modern Lovers, the group he founded in the early 1970s in Boston, played a key role in the formation of punk. The band made short and direct songs that rejected the bloviated frippery of the prog- 1 8 8 Y O U N G Y rock landscape popular at the time. Some of the subject matter of the early songs was assertive (‘‘Pablo...