By Dave Tianen

Journal Sentinel, July 1, 1999

There’s an argument to be made that the state of American popular songwriting has been in decline for roughly 40 years.

The case goes something like this: The rise first of rock, then funk, then metal and finally rap, represents a progressive devaluation of melody in songwriting that has yet to bottom out.

Accompanying that loss of melodic sense has been a dumbing down of lyrical content that has slid from the nursery rhyme silliness of early rock (“I gor a gal named Boney Maroney;/ She’s as skinny as a stick of macaroni”) to the rampant obscenity and ugliness of gangsta rap and death metal.

In other words, they don’t write ‘em like they used to.

But is that true? On Sunday, Summerfest will host perhaps the two most acclaimed songwriters of the rock era –Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. These are artists whose work has been confirmed by decades of critical acclaim, who have done some of their finest work in recent years and whose impact continues to be widely felt within their respective musical spheres.

Simon specially has exhibited a restless intelligence in his middle years, moving from a classic album fashioned from the rhythms of African tribal music to the complex percussive music of South America to the melding of doo-wop and Broadway in ‘The Capeman’.

In the case of Dylan, you have a musician whose art helped define the soundtrack of the ‘60s anti-war movement and, to the degree it shaped the attitudes and agenda of a generation, plausibly may have influenced history. With ‘Time out of mind’, he also is coming off a creative comeback of stunning dimensions.

But as artists, do they bear serious comparison with the great architects of American song such as Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, Harlond Arlen, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and Sammy Cahn?

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to speak to Tony Bennett and the conversation turned to songwriting. Not surprisingly, Bennett argued for the superiority of the writers of the great standards that make up his repertoire. “What about Dylan?,” I asked. “Dylan used words very well, the famous crooner conceded, bur the melodies, the melodies just didn’t compare.”

The conversation with Bennett also may have reflected an issue that greatly complicates comparisons of songwriting across the decades.

Issues og generational allegiance tend to intrude on the discussion. As Susan Cook, music professor at the University of Wisconsin, notes, that kind og generational allegiance illustrates one of the functions of popular music. It marks its audience at a particular point in time. The music we grow up with, Cook points out, is part of our chronological identity.

Over the course of the century, songs themselves have come to serve a different role. The great songs of Gershwin or Rodgers and Hart often were written for Bradway –certainly not to suit an individual voice. There was a clear distinction between singers and songwriters and, if anything, the latter were superior. During the classic pop era, songs rather than recordings tended to be hits. As late as 1955, there were four different chart versions of ‘Unchained melody’.

By contrast, Dylan and Simon are singer-songwriters who write hit records in a highly personal voice. They are, first and foremost, writing for themselves. ‘Blood on the tracks’ and ‘Graceland’ both are acknowledged as classic rock albums, but neither is readily accessible to another artist trying to put a stamp on them. Not surprisingly, few have tried.

“Dylan is a totally different type of songwriter compared to Gershwin or Harold Arlen,” says Paul Zollo, author of ‘Songwriters on songwriting’. “Dylan doesn’t reach their level of melody, but there are Dylan tunes which are quite melodic. Dylan’s songs usually aren’t as reliant on strong, beautiful melodies. He also comes out of a folk and blues tradition that uses words in an entirely different way.”

One of the ironies of the success of Dylan and Simon has been the fact that by popularising the style of the singer-songwriter, they have encouraged other artists to write in their own voice rather than cover their material. Consequently, even the greatest and most familiar Dylan and Simon tunes such as ‘Blowin’ in the wind’, ‘Bridge over troubled water’, ‘I shall be released’, ‘Homeward bound’, ‘All along the watchtower’ and ‘Mrs. Robinson’ have not been recorded with anything close to the frequency of the great standards.

One of the processes by which standards become standards is through their incorporation into the repertoire of the jazz world. For whatever reasons, jazz musicians have tended to ignore most of the popular hits of the past 40 years. By and large, mainstream critical thought in jazz has tended to devalue the hits of the rock era.

“What the jazzers are looking for is harmonic complexity,” says local musician Paul Cebar. “Every once in a while, somebody does Joni Mitchell. She’s got a harmonic complexity they want, but so does Simon in a lot of things and even once in a while, so does Dylan… The jazzers don’t go at those songs, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t or shouldn’t.”

The music of Dylan and Simon also represents a different set of musical values than what the classic pop composers emphasized: the great standard themes of love and romance with keen wit and sophistication.

Consider Lorenz Hart’s great lyrics from ‘I wish I were in love again’:

“The sleepless nights,/The daily fights,/ The quick toboggan when you reach the heights,/ I miss the kisses and I miss the bites./ I wish I were in love again.

“The broken dates,/ The endless waits,/ The lovely loving and the hateful hates,/ The conversations with the flying plates./ I wish I were in love again.”

Writing of that urbanity is rare in any era. In the late ‘90s, it’s all but extinct.

That’s not to deny the virtues of the rock-era songwriting. Composers like Dylan and Simon were influenced by the blues, by the folk, doo-wop and early rock’n’roll. The language in which they spoke tended to be simpler, more direct and more visceral. They were less coy about issues of sex and mating. They also were inclined to open up the range of topics far beyond matters of the heart.

Dylan, for instance, has written about the self-righteousness of the war machine (‘With God on our side’), the California Gold Rush (‘Days of ‘49’), the Resurrection of Christ (‘Slow train’), the murder trial of a middleweight boxer (‘Hurricane’) and the survival of Israel (‘Neighborhood Bully’).

Writers of the classic pop era were not devoid of social conscience. Occasionally, a song like ‘Strange fruit’ would challenge an injustice such as lynching. But there’s no denying that the rock era has greatly broadened the songwriter’s palette of subject matter.

The downside of topical songwriting is that the song remains identified with the issues that produced it. ?The times they are a-changin’ may be a great anthem of the ‘60s political movements, but it is essentially a musical artifact in the same way as the Depression ditty ‘Brother, can you spare a dime?’.

Abundantly clever and melodically resourceful, Simon probably bears the easiest comparison to the old masters.

‘You can call me Al’, for instance, blends an absolutely killer dance groove with high spirited, bright lyrics: “He ducked back down the alley/ With some roly-poly little bat-faced girl./ All along, along/ There were incidents and accidents,/ There were hints and allegations./ If you’ll be my bodyguard/ I can be your long lost pal./ I can call you Betty/ And Betty, when you call me,/ You can call me Al.”

Also, although not a great stylist, Simon is a much more accomplished singer than Dylan in the conventional sense. As Cooks puts it, he, like Paul McCartney, has a very “tuney” voice. By contrast, Dylan’s distinctive Midwestern twang certainly works for him within the blues and folk-rooted styles he writes in, but it’s not a very flexible instrument when he strays from his own writing. Some of the great car wrecks of Dylan’s career have come when he has tried his hand at interpretative singing. The ‘Dylan’ album from 1973 is often considered his worst album. It has covers of songs like Johnny Cash’s ‘Ballad of Ira Hayes’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Can’t help falling in love’.

In popular culture, the ultimate arbitrator of artistic worth tends to be time. The lasting value of Rodgers and Hart or George Gershwin is confirmed with each new album from Diana Krall or Natalie Cole.

But in the same sense, we are now 30 years or more from the moment when Dylan and Simon netered the scene. Songs like ‘Blowin’ in the wind’, ‘Bridge over troubled water’, ‘The boxer’ and ‘I shall be released’ are still very much in the air, still a part of the collective imagination of a nation.

They are of their time, but they also trascend it.

When a song does that, we call it a standard.