Thanks to Lyle for the link to an interesting post at a blog dedicated to musicology: Phil Ford writes first about American Idol and then progresses to Dylan:

And it gets you thinking about performance, too: TTTD points out that the problem with a lot of the AI contestants is that they think that if they just really, really feel the music they can turn in a good performance. But performance isn’t always, or even often, a matter of sincerity. George Burns is supposed to have said, “sincerity is everything — if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” So true. In my classes I often like to point out that the artistry of singers like Bob Dylan is largely directed at fashioning a rhetoric of authenticity. You hear Dylan’s hard-prairie voice on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and think, ah, the splintery authenticity. But the chewed-up R’s and flat vowels and the moments of high intensity where Dylan overshoots the pitch are just as carefully crafted as the portamenti on a Frank Sinatra album. What’s particularly impressive about Dylan’s sixties albums is how he was coming up with a whole new vocal-performative code for each album. It’s a remarkable achievement: between 1963 (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan) and 1967 (John Wesley Harding) he invented half a dozen ways of being authentic.

I think he’s absolutely right in zeroing in on the remarkable level of craft in Dylan’s singing. I think that the ways in which Dylan has altered his voice ( in a number of senses, mind you) while maintaining a sense of authenticity is genuinely amazing. Think about his entire career, and consider Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde, Nashville Skyline, Desire, Infidels, World Gone Wrong, Time Out of Mind — each album presents a quite dramatically different voice in the audible sense, but not only in that sense: the singer in each case seems to be residing in a different world (or to have a completely different relationship with the world that is), as compared to the other recordings. The lyrical voice is also dramatically different, and the perspective of the singer seems unique to that album.

Yet, why does it continue to sound authentic (to me, anyway)? I think for two reasons. (1) Because the craft which Dylan is practising does not seem to be one of careful calculation, where he sits down and plots out how to sound different to his last album, but rather a necessary product of inspiration — an unconscious craft, to a considerable extent. That is, the songs which are coming to him during a certain time-frame demand a certain voice to sing them. (In the case of a covers album like World Gone Wrong, it’s the spirit in which he feels inspired to interpret the songs.) Ford compares what Dylan is doing to Sinatra’s work, and that’s a very good comparison, because Sinatra was the singer that he was in large part because he also let the material (or his sense of it at any given time) determine the nature of his singing. There are huge differences between Dylan and Sinatra, obviously, but on some fundamental level, I think they are both ruled by the songs, and ironically it is in that way that they also master the songs. Sinatra is purely interpretive, of-course, while for Dylan that sense of allowing the song to dictate the performance is inextricably linked to his role as the composer, as well. It gives him the added freedom of reinterpreting his songs over and over again. The song is never quite done; it’s always continuing to be composed, on stage.

And (2), the sense of authenticity is retained because despite the apparently dramatic stylistic turns, where, as said, each album can seem to present to the listener a world unto itself, there is nonetheless a consistency at rock bottom. Certain things — certain guiding principles and certain inner truths — are non-negotiable and provide an anchor for any kind of approach that the singer (Dylan) takes.

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