Why (so many) critics are full of shit

OK, so this is JUST ONE example of how full of shit critics can be. Being as how I am in yet another Dylan cycle, triggered by the album he released just last year, I've gone back into some of his classics, including one of the most atmospheric songs ever written, his paean to Sara Lownds (and if people still puzzle over "gee, who could he have written this for?", just insert a "la" in the middle of her name), and have been hypnotized and enthralled all over again. 

One does not "listen" to Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. One is overwhelmed by it. It is a pavane, a stately, courtly processional that has just a hint of a nihilistic funeral march. It is relentless, and it builds on itself in rumbling, trembling piano chords that express a passion we can only guess at.  In Rough and Rowdy Ways, he similarly creates a world and pulls us into it - or we go willingly, captives with our hands tied behind our backs. But man, he was doing that back in 1966 at the age of 25. Already he had lived several lives as a dazzling creative artist and a Byronic, if not TITANIC figure in popular culture.

But let's get to the good stuff, that "critics are full of shit" part. I call this this little passage "HOW WRONG CAN YOU BE, YOU DUMB-ASS?", for want of a better term. In poking around in Wikipedia to find out more about the roots of Sad Eyed Lady, I found lots of commentary and analysis, much of it lame and completely missing the point. Here is how one self-proclaimed "Dylan scholar" described it initially, and how the scales fell from his eyes decades later - FINALLY - so he could hear it for the erotic masterpiece it is.

Dylan scholar Michael Grey expressed a similarly contradictory attitude to "Sad Eyed Lady". In his book Song & Dance Man III, Gray writes of the song's imagery: "Dylan is... cooing nonsense in our ears, very beguilingly of course. The only thing that unites the fragments is the mechanical device of the return to the chorus and thus to the title... It is, in the end, not a whole song at all but unconnected chippings, and only the poor cement of an empty chorus and a regularity of tune gives the illusion that things are otherwise."

In a footnote to this passage, written later, Gray adds: "When I read this assessment now, I simply feel embarrassed at what a little snob I was when I wrote it... When I go back and listen, after a long gap, to Dylan's recording, every ardent, true feeling I ever had comes back to me. Decades of detritus drop away and I feel back in communion with my best self and my soul. Whatever the shortcomings of the lyric, the recording itself, capturing at its absolute peak Dylan's incomparable capacity for intensity of communication, is a masterpiece if ever there was one."

"Masterpiece"! But one wonders if this bastard-piece (of shit) and his stupid assessment of a classic affected Dylan at all, if he was bruised by such inane and plain STUPID remarks about the most potent of the many dozens of heart-stabbing love songs he has written. Maybe yes, maybe no, but, relentless as that chord-rumbling chorus coming around and around again (much as Dylan keeps rolling like that Big Wheel that keeps on turnin'), Dylan kept on touring for concert after concert while the audience boo-ed him, literally threw things at him and swore at him for being a turncoat and a sell-out and a "fake". But Dylan knew he had it, whether they got it or not, and that is the true mark of genius.

So what happened to all those people? Who gives a shit! But they remind me of the time I soaked a carrot in bleach and pulled it out white and sickly, devoid of all colour, flavour, or meaning. It had lost its vegetable essence. These people never had it to begin with. Is it any wonder Bobby could be a tad bitter, to the point of writing the most genius lines of all:

"I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

You'd know what a drag it is to see you."