NPR: Sigur Ros Has Nothing on Dylan

Sigur Ros Has Nothing on Dylan

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We've gotten a boatload of responses to Luke's Sigur Ros interview. But if you think that video breaks new ground in the field of bad interviews, you've never watched a fireside chat with one Bob Dylan. The man's legendary for being an impossible subject.

In fact, Dylan's been giving bad interviews for so long that New York Magazine compiled a list that they call "The Ten Most Incomprehensible Bob Dylan Interviews of All Time." Now I applaud them for their research, and it's certainly worth a look, because they tracked down video of most of these trainwrecks. (A 1986 classic is above.) But I take issue with New York's slant.

How many times have you heard Bob Dylan characterized as being out of it and incoherent? How many jokes have been made about him mumbling and rambling through songs and sentences? It's a pretty old and predictable take, and it has little or no basis in reality.

Say what you will about Dylan. You may think he's past his prime, you may think his songs go on forever, and after watching interview clips like the one above, you may think he's a jerk. But make no mistake--he knows exactly what he's doing.

He's spent his entire career expressing contempt for interviews and interviewers, bending over backwards to make it difficult for journalists to define him. Any question that attempts to pin him down at all is evaded, or sometimes worse for the questioner, attacked. It might not be nice, but it's certainly not an accident. As Dylan well knows, it's pretty hard to do great music justice with plain old words. That's why it's great music and not great prose. And that's why he has avoided definition throughout his career, at the expense of many an interviewer.

We're going to get more into the art and science of the music interview tomorrow, when we welcome author and Rolling Stone writer Jancee Dunn. She's even going to sit down with Luke, watch our now-infamous Sigur Ros interview, and record a DVD commentary-style track over the video, which we'll post on the web.

Dan Pashman

7:30 AM ET | 10-15-2007 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

Is BPP Bizzaro Morning Edition?

Sent by Paul Leary | 8:00 AM ET | 10-15-2007

Dan -
Dylan is a "tough" interview subject because most interviewers want to talk about him as a personality and a "voice" as opposed to what most musicians really care about - music and songwriting. Take a look at this piece in the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/04/060904crbo_books?printable=true

Menand does a good job showing just where Dylan's - and I would suspect many others' music interviews - break down. And look at the excerpt from a very successful Dylan interview, which appears about 2/3 of the way into the piece. Here we have an exchange that arrives at a meaning for the "jingle jangle morning" - a great insight and an interviewing coup. But we get this information only because the conversation began with a discussion of songwriting only. Had the interviewer asked - "What's the jingle jangle morning" - right away, I'm sure Dylan would have clammed up.

So, important lessons to be learned... And as many of the comments in the Sigur Ros thread point out, the BPP interview may have been better served with a discussion of actual music and songwriting, and not "meaning." I'm looking forward to hearing what Jancee Dunn has to say. And to hearing future BPP music interviews!

Sent by JTA | 9:18 AM ET | 10-15-2007

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