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Thursday, May 26th, 2011

And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme…

…you may do your tambourine in time, but it ain’t no poem, sunshine. At least, according to those tiresomely self-righteous elements of the Guardian readership who so often seem to take pleasure in bemoaning the ‘sad dumbing down of the country’. Nevertheless, this week, in honour of the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan, the grand-daddy of folk-rock himself has become the latest popular song-smith to get the academic treatment, in the form of a special debate at Bristol University between English professors on the poetry of his writing. This comes only a couple of years after the Beatles were decked out in cap-and-gown respectability with the establishment of an MA course on the Beatles: Popular Music and Society at Liverpool Hope University.

Now, don’t bury me under a shower of indignant phlegm, my fellow Guardian readers, but I think this recognition of the writing of the likes of Dylan, Lennon and McCartney is a wonderful thing. And not just because I’m a big Dylan and even bigger Beatles fan (indeed, I am expecting my honorary Beatles doctorate in recognition of my Fab Four devotion and expertise any day now), but because there should be no distinction between ‘proper’ writing and ‘popular’ writing – there is only good and bad writing.

Besides which, should this trend towards studying popular music as literature continue, it is, if anything, not the creation of a new phenomena, but the reversion to an old tradition. For a great deal of the poetry and literature that has survived to our day from medieval and early modern times, which we now sit silently reading in arm chairs, was originally popular or courtly entertainment performed to musical accompaniment. Thus several years ago, as my uni classmates and I sat poring over German medieval love poetry (yes, I really did study medieval German), we were informed by our professor that, having lost the original tunes, we really weren’t experiencing the words as we should have. Nevertheless, he assured, the ‘worth’ in studying them remains; before going on to rather prophetically claim that in years to come, people would  similarly be studying the songs of Lennon & McCartney, detached from their music, as poetry in their own right…

Georgina Phipps, Editorial Administrator

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