Comment by petcat
2 days ago
> we still praise musicians who take the time through endless Moog / Ableton fine-tuning sessions to find the perfect loop patterns for their craft.
There are still plenty of purists that will not consider this a "craft". But it's always been that way. The electric guitar itself was a controversial music transition. Bob Dylan was famously criticized heavily for going electric.
But that was a long time ago, and people got over it. And they will again this time.
Dylan going electric was not about instrument choices. It was about abandoning the radical folk music tradition that Seeger, Guthrie, etc. had revived.
Bingo. The problem with this take is that the people pissing and moaning in the early '70s were right. Early Dylan sounds good. The texture of an acoustic guitar draws focus to songcraft and away from objectively bad execution. Dylan's vocals were always bad but they went from charmingly bad to just-plain-bad with the transition to electric. The bigger sound was not flattering for him. With 60 years of hindsight, folk still remains a largely acoustic genre because the sound is flattering to the rest of the genre too. That isn't to say that all folk should be acoustic, it's just that you have to come correct otherwise. I find later Dylan annoying despite loving his early records, and I was born 30 years after everyone stopped caring.
Actually most serious music fans consider Dylan's best work to be in the 70's period.
New Morning, Saved, Planet Waves, Basement Tapes
Source: Worked in record store for 15 years.
2 replies →
It absolutely was about the instrument choice.
Because folk music had strong norms about acoustic authenticity. Going electric at the time was seen as "commercialized" and "mass produced".
We see the parallels with what some perceive as "slop" today.
Dylan went electric for money purposes. That was the big betrayal.