Replay: Timothy Hampton shares Five Things He's Learned about Listening to Bob Dylan
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“He said once in an interview: “The problem is that they clean up all the mistakes, but my music is about what’s wrong.””
“Everything means something in a Dylan song. He integrates these fumbles and wobbles, which are part of the rhythm of spoken American speech, into the song. This is a fascinating feature of his work and one of the reasons why he’s very difficult to sing the chorus of a Bob Dylan song.”
“What’s characteristic about Dylan’s writing—and this is where I think it has an ethical dimension—is that he’s able to put himself in the position of someone else. The implication is that to know yourself, you have to put yourself in the shoes of others. This is much more important than preaching at others or telling people to respect their brothers and sisters or to love one another.”
“What matters is what the voice is making happen. Many singers who come in Dylan’s wake sing with raspy voices and shout into the microphone. But in a Dylan performance, the voice is always doing multiple things—sliding between sarcasm and hostility, between tenderness and misery.”
“When we listen to his songs, we sense that there’s something we’re not getting – something hidden inside that if we could access it, we would know more. In that sense, the songs are like poems, short stories, or novellas, and we sometimes pick up on things years after having heard them for the first time.”
—Timothy Hampton, Five Things I’ve Learned about Listening to Bob Dylan
Timothy Hampton is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. An award-winning teacher and scholar, he has written widely about literature across languages and centuries, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to the present. Here’s the first five minutes of Tim’s two-hour class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned from a lifetime of listening to the greatest songwriter of our time.
Five Things I’ve Learned from Listening to Bob Dylan looks closely at some of Bob Dylan’s most famous songs work, and explains why he remains as urgent and important as ever. Tim’s session offers insights to why Dylan’s music speaks to so many. He explores the depth and meaning of Dylan's work, challenging conventional approaches by emphasizing the importance of listening beyond the words of the songs and debunking the notion of Dylan as a poet. To do so, he delves into the mechanics of Dylan's famous songs, uncovering their inner workings and unraveling the mystery behind Dylan’s art.
If you want to better understand how Bob Dylan’s songs work, and why they remain as urgent and important as ever, this class is for you.
Bob Dylan is at the center of Tim’s personal and academic passions, making this class a must-watch. “I’ve been deeply engaged with Dylan’s music since I first heard it on a scratchy bootleg, smuggled into my high school English class by a friend, back in the late 60s. It has never failed to amaze, delight, and challenge me. It speaks across the years to all of us,” Tim says. In 2019, he published Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work, an innovative and much-praised study that broke new ground by focusing on the intersection of words and music in Dylan's compositions. His essays have appeared in such publications as Salon, Psyche, and Representations. His newest book is entitled Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History.
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