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
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How much of a genius is he? No much really. When I was at college I had to sit through endless parties where stuff like Dylan was played to death. I could never see what his appeal could possibly be. A poet maybe though not in the same league as Larkin, Shelley, Shakespeare or Donne. His whining nasal intonation could hardly be called singing. I think th e reason so many people laud hiom is because he came along at ‘the right time’. A time of political and social change and his wqriting mirrored the feeling of many young people. Ditto the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Zeppelin etc. None of them geniuses merely mirrors of protest.
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and thats why they still laud him today no and by the way other poet song writers dead or alive could write like bob did and still does you in a minority dont have to listen stick with the osmonds and worzels bet you never listened to a dylan song and by the way beatles never wrote protest and dylan wrote about vietnam and rightly so thank you but please leave the genious alone bet you were a right party pooper stick with the ballet leave proper music to us who appreciate it mr tamborine man
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