Letter: This Bob Dylan bloke - how good is he?
Letter: As we are being repeatedly reminded, Bob Dylan is 70 and I'm fed up of often being told that he is a genius.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_ujAXxNxU0
Letter: As we are being repeatedly reminded, Bob Dylan is 70 and I'm fed up of often being told that he is a genius.
When someone is rated a genius they are being placed in the same elevated category as Shakespeare, Vermeer, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, J S Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Newton, Goethe, Tolstoy and Einstein, among others.
As much as I admire and adore the music of Duke Ellington, I would hesitate to call him a genius.
Yet, compared to Ellington, the likes of Dylan, Elvis, Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, the Fab Four, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley et al (all called geniuses at some time or other) are musical midgets, which I'm confident time will demonstrate.
One man who thinks Bob Dylan is a genius is Professor Christopher Ricks. With people like him moulding young minds in our universities, it's little wonder the young aren't very hip.
When the likes of Michael Jackson and Jackson Pollock are called geniuses then critical standards have flown through the window.
As Samuel Taylor Coleridge said 200 years ago: "Praise of the unworthy is robbery of the deserving."
For a long while I've felt like the boy in the story "The Emperor's New Clothes".
Sidney Evans
Chirk
