Status Updates From Bob Dylan's Poetics: How th...

"When he yowls, it is because he wants to yowl, and he is yowling for a reason."

"Dylan's songs derive their extraordinary vitality from the interplay of different registers and forms of utterance. . . . This means that listening deeply to Dylan is much less a matter of tracing Dylan's 'influences' or unearthing 'sources' than remaining open to the interplay of forms, conventions, and expressions within each song--and, in some cases, between songs."

"The entire point of Dylan's song, however, is that in the world of globalized capital, /everyone/ is an exile. Even if you are at home, you are not at home."

"The paradoxes of personal or religious transformation offer a window into the consequences for selfhood and identity of a moment at which the middle-class fantasies of personal liberation (underwritten by economic expansion) that had fostered Dylan's rise to stardom were beginning to pale."

"The problem for popular art then became linking the intimate world of the self and its desires to the larger world of capitalist market expansion."

"[T]he language one uses to free oneself is inevitably a metaphorical language. . . . [T]he point of the song is that one cannot escape metaphors and similes. They are what give meaning to experience."