Music Minute: In Which Bob Dylan, Salvador Dali, and Napoleon Dynamite Meet For Tea

Jen here, bringing y'all another Music Minute. Today I'm thinking about surrealism and art.

One of the many ways an artist can distinguish himself from all the other artists out there is by using a kind of unique angle or perspective through which we're supposed to view his art (and maybe the world, too). You could even say that combining "known" things together in unknown ways makes them more interesting to people.

For example, if you've ever seen a Tim Burton movie (like Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, or Alice in Wonderland), then you probably know that Tim Burton's movies tend to be elaborately decorated, and populated with people you could say are larger-than-life clichés, almost like cartoons. But Burton also seems to like taking a situation which looks pretty normal, and then introducing a character, setting, or other element which turns everything on its ear. In Edward Scissorhands, he combines a Frankenstein-type story with an uptight suburban neighborhood. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, the "what if" is "What if a bunch of scary Halloween characters suddenly got jealous of the fun of Christmas and tried to make Halloween more like it?" 

So one way to make art is to take two things your audience is familiar with and pair them together in a way that is new and different. It happens in books—how about a teen romance complicated by vampires and werewolves? Hey, Twilight! It happens on TV—how about a deserted island and time-travel? Look, it's Lost!

And it happens in music. Fifty-odd years ago, a guy named Bob Dylan combined acoustic folk music with a kind of art known as surrealism and changed popular music forever. (Later, he would combine his folk-surrealism with electric guitars and flip everybody out again.) 

You've seen the Salvador Dali painting "The Persistence of Memory," right? Dali's painting is an example of surrealism, an art movement from the early 20th century that involved drawing strange associations between two things that are generally thought to be unrelated. 

What Dali did with pocket watches and paint, Bob Dylan did with poems and a guitar. When he started writing and performing back in the early 1960s, folk music was kind of like pretty stories set to music. Dylan added humor, stream-of-consciousness writing, poetry and pop culture references into folk music and made something brand new out of it. Some songs became protest songs, others were just funny little songs that made people laugh.

And a few others just got weird. In "Highway 61 Revisited," he tells five stories (including the story of Abraham and Isaac) in the context of US Highway 61, which runs parallel to the Mississippi River. Highway 61 is where Delta blues guitarist Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil for the ability to play the guitar (in reality, Johnson never said he did this and the myth of selling one's soul to the devil for the ability to do something extraordinary is much older and more widespread).

Y'all see what he did? A Bible story, a legendary place, and a reference to classical literature themes...in a pop song. Bob Dylan expected you to have an education and know a few things if you listened to his music. But those things really have nothing in common with each other, and the song doesn't exactly play out logically.

Why am I talking about this? Well, you've seen Napoleon Dynamite. You know it's weird and random and funny and you don't really know why. Why are Chapstick and cage-fighting and a liger and big sleeves and tetherball and a stupid story about wolverines funny? Because they are random, unrelated, surreal things. In fact, a lot of comedy these days is based on surrealism, or things that are intentionally nonsense and weird. It's what makes Monty Python funny, and any time you see a band dressing up in costumes to give a concert, it's the same idea. You kind of have to know something about something in order to get it. 

So, to recap, Bob Dylan did protest songs, folksy songs, and some songs that were just plain strange. He used a raspy, nasal singing voice in the hopes people would listen to the words rather than just hum along with a pretty tune. He incorporated history and pop culture into his music, and came up with something new. He brought poetry and an intellectual seriousness to music. He influenced comedy, movies, modern humor, history, and pop culture. And you really should be familiar with a few Dylan songs. Here are some you should know. 

For protest songs, listen to "Blowin' In The Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall." Think of the context of the '60s while you listen.

For some songs that are a little more straight-ahead rock, check out "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," "Forever Young," "Like A Rolling Stone," (which most people agree is about the 60s) and "Gotta Serve Somebody" (recorded shortly after Dylan became a Christian in the late 1970s).

For surrealism and weirdness, check out "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Subterranean Homesick Blues."