Dylan and Rhyming Method
Dan Green points out (and in the process gives me the first “my name in a URL occurrence”) a relevant section from Luc Sante’s recent article on a few Bob Dylan books in the New York Review of Books: “I is Someone Else”:
In a revealing interview for a book called Songwriters on Songwriting, excerpted in Studio A, Dylan talks about the “unconscious frame of mind,” the state of suspension he uses to bypass literal thinking:
“In the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.
In other words, his use of rhymes is not unlike a Surrealist game or an Oulipo exercise, a way to outsmart front-brain thinking, and the same is true of his employment of folk-lyric readymades.”
This is not an altogether uncommon way of working: lining up a rhyme scheme and then filling in the lines. It is nice to see some of my interests (I am a Dylan fan) collide.
Tags: Constraint, dylan, Music
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