Hello, all! (I will here take up my boyfriend's challenge.)
Ken and I are in the midst of listening to all of Bob Dylan's
released works(!) including some bootleg material (we are up to Nashville
Skyline.)
(Major caveats: I am neither an expert on Dylan nor psychology,
and since many of you out there are, indulge me, please!)
I mused recently with Ken on the subject of Bob and Joni being two sides of
the masculine/feminine coin: Bob--animus, Joni--anima.
Predominantly, anyway, and, I think, significantly from an artistic
viewpoint.
His Bobness, as Ken likes to call him, often focuses on details
and references that can be quite obscure and open-ended. He will
weave an evocative story from which one can feel an importance to what he is
communicating, even if the text cannot be completely explicated
easily. You know, "something is happening but you don't know what it is, do
you, Mr. Jones?"
While it would be an easy statement to declare Joni's lyrics
more accessible, they are often similarly inscrutable, except that
their focus is more on describing the emotions of situations, rather than
the events. Joni seems to me more emotionally direct, and I personally
connect more closely with her "versions" of things, if you will, though I
very much appreciate Dylan.
It is as if Bob wants to bring attention to the world and say "pay
attention, here's something you may have missed," and Joni says, more
cosmically, to me, "oh, you remember THIS, don't you?"
So, what different stimulation do we get from the very different songs of
these two artists? When I listen to Bob, I tend to feel he
is attempting to communicate how things ARE. When I listen to Joni, I feel
her attempt to communicate how things FEEL. I respond more strongly and
more consistently to Joni's way of communicating, and I'll leave it to Ken
to share more of his thoughts. Though with any particular lyric we might
say that here Joni is writing cerebral and there Bob is waxing poetic, I get
an overall feel from them along these lines. (And of course it has
something to do with their styles of music and the sounds of their voices,
but I think their differences run deeper.)
Men and women both find in their personalities pieces
of the other's perspective. We need both halves to be whole.
But does my personal identification with Joni's "take" on things
make me more feminine; does it indicate that my psyche is more rooted in the
feminine perspective, though I am male?
For all of us men on the JMDL--self-identified fans, gay and
straight--does our interest and appreciation of Joni suggest we are more
(dreaded cliche) "in touch with our feminine sides" than others?
Doesn't it make sense that the music that we "get," that we
intrinsically understand somehow, should indicate something about us? (Well
beyond gender stereotypes, of course.)
Some beginning thoughts on the subject.
Steve in Atlanta
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