please have some perspective. you are starting to sound like a teenage myspace girl who rants for the sake of ranting (i'm ranting right now for the sake of procrastination, which is a completely different thing altogether). dylan is a very important artist. sometimes he says crazy things... actually; he says crazy things quite often. tone and sound quality are things of preference, though i'd assume that dylan's knowledge of all genres of music gives him some weight. do you have to agree with him? no. do your arguments sound a little petty? yes. i expect more from a site that prides itself on its perceived intellectual approach to life, art, and (sometimes) baseball. it would've been nice if you would've backed up your statement with some history or precedence as to sound quality, how it was thought of in the past, the takes of different artists, the idea of art v. entertainment, and all discussions that have been had by people more informed and intelligent than you. the juice blog is rapidly becoming a self-serving disappointment.

I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. He is the only guy that I've ever wish I could be. I don't want to be like him, I want to be him. But it's not because I think he's ideologically centered, honest, or even remotely consisten except in his desire to anger people. Think about it. Everything he's done has been designed to make people mad. Protest music? Going electric? Going Christian??? He was even on a patriotic album after 9/11 called "God Bless America". I love him for having the power to make me so mad. I also love Love and Theft.

Jesse and to the other like minded haters of me on this topic,

I wrote in the initial post that I agree in some ways that there is some sound benefits to recordings on vinyl. What I was going off on was that I think it's short-sighted, as CD's were easier and keep their quality of sound longer, unless you are some dude from a Nick Hornsby novel who caresses each record when pulling in and out of its sleeve.

On the subject of MP3 players, I love it, as it allows me to bring my whole musical collection with me. I will put up with a slight diminshed sound for this great convenience. I paid cold hard cash for my MP3 player, so the company could go right back around and give it to Bob Dylan. Ouch.

I didn't get into the long history of sound quality because this is a blog. I'm not a writer for a music magazine, so sorry, but I don't spend a month on each piece like I'm Ben Fong-Torres gettng paid in money and coke from Jan Wenner.

In regards to the self-serving disappointment, I will cop to the self-serving part.

gpellamjr-

I appreciate your post, as it's the best one I've read here from a Dylan fan. I like that Dylan has a large contrarian streak. Guess what, so do I, which is part of why I wrote the piece on him. I like to take on sacred cows when they need to be tipped over. Maybe it's because I'm from Iowa and it's a birthright to cow-tip.
I'm stopping for now, as I need to compose myself, because that piece of self-deprecating comedy was hilarious!

American's Finest Self-serving Disappointment

Scott Long

I think Dylan's issue has more to do with recording techniques than CD's or MP3's as a technology, and he's not the only one to have noticed. There's a good article (with an interesting chart at the bottom) about the general decrease in the dynamic range of popular music recordings here: http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.htm

please have some perspective. you are starting to sound like a teenage myspace girl who rants for the sake of ranting

it's Mike's Baseball/rants he can rant about was he pleases to rant about.

ps you go boy! (Mike)

This isn't Mike's rants though...

yeah, i was having a bad day at work. good to unload on a blogger. i actually really dig the site. though i like dylan's more recent stuff, i do concur that his statement had more to do with recording practices, not the medium.

keep up the good work.

Unlike most bloggers, I actually encourage some verbal teabagging, as it makes for a more lively site. As long as it has some semblance of thought, I enjoy it. I'm glad you enjoy the site overall.

On some level, I sympathize with Dylan's technological Luddism, because at the tender age of 26 I'm already feeling left behind by the technologies -- and there is something to be said for the sound quality of just about any medium (other than maybe cassette tapes) over Mp3. And I'm sure the money was nothing to sneeze at. But it does make him look pretty silly.

I recently spent two entire weeks in the company of my 18-year-old brother, and it just made me feel like a dinosaur. He's got this cell phone that could rule the universe like a Philosopher King, all on its own, no input from any human whatsoever. He's got a laptop the size of a graham cracker that out-paces my once-state-of-the-art tower. He text messages. He IMs. I swear to god he mind melds through the Interwebs. I long ago developed this theory that people of my generation are disposed toward premature crotchetyness because we are the last people born before miniaturized computers became standard in daily life -- so, in our mid-twenties, everything has changed so radically that we're already living in what, in our minds, is still classified as The Future. I can watch television through an Mp3 player on my desktop. What kind of science fiction, year-3000 crap is that? Not that I don't appreciate it, but when I fire up an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on iTunes (which itself seemed like science fiction to me when it first arrived on the scene) I get this disorienting sense of floating in space. Damn you, Steve Jobs!

Sometimes I want to go live in a cabin in the woods with a squirrel and a shotgun named Bessie.

I absolutely loved your comment Voxter. It's what a lot of us feel, but you did a great job of personalizing it. Now for being 26 and feeling old, well.......