From a forthcoming interview in Rolling Stone, via al-Reuters:

Noting the music industry’s complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, “Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.”

“You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them,” he added. “There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like … static.”

As pointed out by a reader, the Drudge Report is spinning this story a little inaccurately by linking to it with the text: “Bob Dylan says modern music is worthless.”* Well, OK, he does say “it ain’t worth nothing,” but, in the snippets released he’s only criticizing the recording technology, not the artistic content. It’s nothing new for him, either. For example, in an interview (with Bono) from 1984, Dylan said:

I don’t know, they spend time getting their various songs right, but with me, I just take a song into the studio and try to rehearse it, and then record it, and then do it. It’s a little harder now though to make a good record – even if you’ve got a good song and a good band. Even if you go in and record it live, it’s not gonna sound like it used to sound, because the studios now are so modern, and overly developed, that you can take anything good and you can press it and squeeze it and squash it, and constipate it and suffocate it. You do a great performance in the studio and you listen back to it because the speakers are all so good, but, ah, no!

Today’s wire story continues:

Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it’s a losing battle.

“Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ‘em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it.”

If he thinks CD’s have no stature, how about thousands of tunes squeezed invisibly on an iPod?

I don’t think Dylan is genuinely endorsing illegal downloads, or writing off all modern recordings (he does play some on his radio show, after all). He’s just going out of his way to make a cantankerous point about something that’s been lost through recording technology. Even to my ears, old recordings seem to have an organic wholeness to them that modern recordings often seem to lack. Even when they’re recorded live, they tend to sound like they were recorded in 24 different takes and spliced together. There’s no solution to it all, but Dylan seems to like to hear himself complain about it. It’s an intangible thing, and completely contrary to what you’re supposed to believe about how much better technology is these days, so maybe it takes someone like Dylan to point it out.

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*Addendum 5:32 pm: Not Drudge’s fault after all; that was Reuters’ own headline in at least some appearances of this story.

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