Jeg lytter til The Fall p.t. Og skriver f.eks. 'The Fall' i Googles søgefelt og finder tekster og ting og sager, som man jo gør, når man skriver noget i Googles søgefelt. Og jeg har også tænkt på Bob Dylans seneste plade, fordi den stadig ligger på min mp3-afspiller, til trods for at jeg ikke rigtig gider høre den og faktisk har tænkt mig at slette den til fordel for f.eks The Fall. Og så falder jeg over noget, som Mark E. Smith åbenbart har udtalt for nylig (kilde), og som jeg bringer her:
I think he rocked in the mid-'60s and that was about it. I just find his lyrics extremely annoying. It's like 'the moon in June', it's a rhyming dictionary. It means nothing to me. I'm allergic to it. How would I compare my writing style to his? Hopefully not at all. I used to like a lot of New York prose, and Dylan adapted it into a phoney working-class thing that I don't think is really him. I liked Ginsberg, Burroughs, Delmore Schwartz. They were taking a lot more chances. I think the fact that so many buskers like playing Dylan's songs says his songs are a bit cheap. He did eight-minute songs, which was new at the time. But I remember when 'Hurricane' came out you'd go round people's houses and they'd play the whole fucking thing. lt's about 20 minutes long. I'd rather listen to avant-garde German music for that long, or Beethoven. I also had the unpleasant experience of playing just before him, at Glastonbury. There were 15,000 Dylan fans there and about 500 Fall fans. I was so depressed, I walked off and fell asleep the minute he started playing. Vic Reeves came up and said 'Come on, Mark, you're missing Dylan.' I told him to go away. I don't think he's spoken to me since. For John Cooper Clarke's generation, Dylan was all about, 'And they shouted traitor to him in Manchester...' But for me, those older rock stars were the enemy. And that music still has too much influence. Even new members of The Fall play Bob Dylan on their fucking iPod. I find it so depressing. And now he's No 1 in America again. That says a lot, doesn't it? We play with a lot of American groups at festivals, and you can see his influence. They go down one channel. It's all about women, and it's all about politics. And it goes nowhere. But these groups are so grateful to play with him. It's because he gives off a very serious, humourless New York sort of mentality. You have to be like that in America, if you want to be taken as a serious lyricist. But I can't stand that sort of reverence. In my group, they keep fucking staring at me. And I'm always, 'Look front..,' I don't like to see that sort of attitude in a musician.
Jeg tror også, jeg har fået det sådan efterhånden. Jeg synes f.eks. Love & Theft og Modern Times er kedelige. Ikke ud fra de dér åndssvage Knud Romer-kriterier (jf. manden kan ikke synge, og så lugter han sikkert også). Men fordi det jo ikke rigtig rykker i noget.
