This morning's random song encounters.

1. I woke up and looked at the phone to see that it was 4 in the morning, and it made me think of that Paul Simon song with the soaring line "4 in the morning/Crapped out/Yawning/Longing my life away." I found it on Spotify and played it through headphones, then found this version by Karen Carpenter (singing "crashed out" for "crapped out"):

2. On the way to the sunrise, the car played Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide," which has the line "Even children get older/Now I'm getting older too." Meade said aborted children don't get older, and it made me think of that Byrds recording of a Pete Seeger song with the line "I'm only 7 although I died/In Hiroshima, long ago/I'm 7 now as I was then/When children die, they do not grow":

3. I was reading the news about the dismantling of the "autonomous zone" here in Madison, including a letter said to be from the family of the man who, it seems, drew a knife on the police and was shot to death. It said: "We are entrusting The Pressure Movement" and "We are working directly with The Pressure Movement." What's the Pressure Movement? This song played in my head:

"In 1981, David Bowie attended an Uncle Floyd performance at the Bottom Line nightclub in Greenwich Village..."

"... and later met Mr. Vivino backstage.'I said to him, 'How did you hear about the show?"' Mr. Gordon recalled. 'And he said, "Everybody talks about it," and that he and John Lennon and Iggy Pop used to sit and watch the show.' Mr. Gordon said that Mr. Lennon, who had been killed just a month earlier, had wanted to attend the performance. After meeting Mr. Bowie and his producer, Tony Visconti, 'Floyd says, "Jimmy get these guys outta here. We got a show to do!"' Jimmy Vivino said. Two decades later, Mr. Bowie wrote and recorded 'Slip Away,' a moody song about Uncle Floyd.... Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd/We were dumb/But you were fun, boy..."

From "Floyd Vivino, Throwback Comedian Known as Uncle Floyd, Dies at 74/His silly, vaudeville-style variety show was filled with his piano playing, skits, puppets and guest stars like Cyndi Lauper and Bon Jovi" (NYT).

If the game is scored by the quality of the guys about whom you said "get these guys outta here," Uncle Floyd wins.

"I’ve been reading a lot of Marcus Aurelius’s 'Meditations' book... And the funny thing about that book is..."

"... he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this book.... I really have adopted the Marcus Aurelius philosophy, which is that everything I’ve done means nothing. I don’t think for a second that it will ever mean anything to anyone ten days after I’m dead...."

Says Jerry Seinfeld, interviewed by David Remnick, in "The Scholar of Comedy/Jerry Seinfeld on how to write jokes, the ending of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' and the world-historical struggle to invent the Pop-Tart" (The New Yorker).

That movie about inventing the Pop-Tart was not sponsored by the company that makes Pop-Tarts, so it's not like the Barbie movie. I was glad to see that, so let me show you the trailer:

Nice effort at setting things in 1963 — including a scene in the Oval Office with JFK — so why use the David Bowie recording of "Rebel, Rebel," which came out in 1974? Is everything on the top 100 for 1963 not Pop-Tarty enough? Couldn't get the rights for "My Boyfriend's Back" or "Walk Like a Man" or "Easier Said Than Done" or "Da Doo Ron Ron"?

"You’re sitting in the office, and on the desk there’s the old-style intercom. The operator takes an incoming call, and then it’s like: 'Michael Nash, David Bowie on Line 4.'"

Said Michael Nash, describing something that happened to him in 1992, a year after he became director of Criterion, quoted "Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?/How the Criterion Collection became the film world’s arbiter of taste" (NYT). Much more at the link.

David Bowie through the ages.

A brilliant impersonation, after the jump, because it's TikTok:

I've got 9 carefully curated TikToks for you this evening. That is, these are all things I liked.

1. Some have FOMO, but a lot of us have FOPU.

2. A lobster has been seen in real life.

3. Kayak camping and the coconut crab.

4. The L.A. conversation.

5. What does Dolly Parton think about prostitution? 

6. I remember when I lost my mind.

7. When David Bowie shouted out "It's great to be in Cincinnati..."

8. The different generations react to they/them pronouns.

9. Unclogging the drain.

"A pillow is perfectly acceptable, but a life-size David Bowie doll is considered weird.... You have to ask yourself, are you enhancing something, or dependent on it?"

Said the sleep specialist Dr. W. Chris Winter.

Quoted in "40 Percent of Adults Still Sleep with a Stuffed Animal. Here’s Why/Finding comfort in an inanimate object isn’t just for kids" (sleep.com).

My question: If you're not sleeping with a stuffed animal, is your pillow really a deeply disguised stuffed animal for you? 

"That in the 19th century, men of the Nez Perce tribe of the Pacific Northwest who wore their hair long in the back faced pressure from Christian missionaries..."

"... to abandon the style in favor of something more 'civilized' tells us about the evils of cultural erasure, but also about conformity more broadly. In much of the Western world, mullets have largely been seen as a thwarting, whether one celebrated or feared, of convention. Take David Bowie, who wore chalky white makeup, psychedelic jumpsuits and a coiffed orange mullet to debut his otherworldly alter ego Ziggy Stardust in 1972. Not long after this glamorous alien emerged came a more working-class punk subculture for which rebellion was a raison d’être. And as much as torn clothes, safety pins, chains and piercings — the stuff of 'confrontation dressing,' as Vivienne Westwood called it — the mullet played a large part in the aesthetics of the movement. For one, the ragged style was purposefully ugly.... Perhaps, the mullet elicited such strong reactions because it refuses to be any one thing, sitting at the midpoint between long and short, masculine and feminine and tasteful and tacky. But if an inability to categorize causes discomfort in some, this sort of in-betweenness is just what some are looking for, especially at a time when gender and taste both feel, rightfully and crucially, so fluid. No wonder, then, that over the last five years the mullet has experienced a relative resurgence."

From "What the Mullet Means Now/The subversive hairstyle has found its way to runways and red carpets once again. But is there anyone left to shock?" by Megan Bradley (NYT).

Speaking of fluidity, the essay writer flowed from the concept of confrontational ugliness to the notion of "in-betweenness" and connecting the concept of being neither long nor short with the concept of being neither male nor female. I can see why in-betweenness can be unsettling to some people and why the refusal to commit to male or female can read as ugly — to some people — and feel confrontational.

It's almost possible to say, completely objectively, that a mullet is ugly. But it can look cool to wear something ugly if you can sell the idea that you're doing it on purpose and you love it. That it bothers fussy people is part of the energy you're absorbing and reflecting. That's another way of saying that if you don't like how other people are expressing themselves, you might want to deprive them of a reaction. Because — as my mother used to say — you'll only encourage them.

"I feel strongly that the essence of Charlie Brown is premature existential despair and world weariness..."

"... and both this song and the holiday special give you an inaccurate idea of the Charlie Brown ratio of despair to maudlin moments of transcendence. Then again, there’s a sort of evocative melancholy in this song that’s making me regret placing it here, scores of slots below 'Dominick the Donkey.' Eh, it’s probably fine."

Writes Alexandra Petri, explaining her placement of "Christmas Time Is Here" at #80 on "A ranking of 100 — yes, 100 — Christmas songs" (WaPo). 

I found her reasoning very amusing, throughout. Maybe you don't have access to WaPo, but — if you have Spotify — here's the whole list:

"I wasn’t sleeping so I took a pretty strong sleep aid. And I had this dream that David had called me and that we’d had this conversation."

"Then later I thought, 'Did he actually call me?' And I went to my phone and he had. But I have no recollection of what that conversation was. He died a week later. It’s all so frustrating."

Said Susan Sarandon, quoted in "Susan Sarandon reveals she had a final phone call with ex-lover David Bowie a week before he died and they shared 'things that needed to be said'" (The Daily Mail).

No recollection... but things that needed to be said. 

Did that need to be said?

"Pretzel in pocket."

A very short podcast for reasons explained in the first minute.

Topics: "Pretzels, height, crabs, white-presenting voters, roll-off voters, Wikipedia, Billie Eilish, George Harrison, David Bowie, Chrissie Hynde, Emanuel Macron."

Why I'm reading about a shooting that took place in 2007 over the question of exactly how tall was James Brown.

1. In the first post of the morning, I asserted: "Some of the best videos have been made like that, with the singer randomly walking along someplace mouthing the lyrics and interacting with this and that." Instead of naming any actual video, I just wrote, in parentheses and italics, as if that helps, "(Yeah? Which ones?!)" 

2. That loose thread nagged at me for 3 hours — from about 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. — and I tried to call to mind a great video that fit the description. I came up with "Brass in Pocket" and watched the delightful video, even though it does not fit the description:

 

3. Who cares? I like it anyway. Primed by a good YouTube experience, I took the websites suggestion to watch "David Bowie imitates Mick Jagger!!"

 

4. Bowie does do a quick, excellent Jagger impression. About 2 seconds of that video, but watch the whole thing. You'll get to a part about how his wife bought him an old suit of Little Richard's and he must not have been so little after all because the suit was way too big for Bowie. 

5. That got me looking up how tall the 2 men were. Have you noticed the internet is ready to tell you the height of various people? Just yesterday I was watching a video of Bob Dylan and David Crosby singing at the same microphone and Dylan seemed to tower over Crosby. The internet says Dylan is 5'9" and Crosby is 5'10". Maybe it's something about the shoes or the camera angle.  

6. In honor of the first post of the day, which got this list started, I pause to see if the internet will give me the answer for the famous philosopher named in that post, and I'm pleased to be informed: René Descartes was 5'1". Anyway, it turns out that David Bowie and Little Richard were the same height: 5'10". Maybe Bowie's wife got conned on that suit deal. 

7. Since I was interested in the height of Little Richard, the internet assumed I would be interested to know that James Brown was 5'6". That is pretty interesting. If you didn't know that fact, I could see how you might get into an argument with somebody who — knowing the fact — would annoyingly stand his ground. And that's what happened in January 2007: "Man shot over argument about James Brown's height" That happened not long after "Brown, who was known to wear lifts, died of heart failure Dec. 25 at age 73."

"We don't want to make 'em too unhappy, James... Would you teach all the action kids... would you teach us all to do the James Brown boogaloo?"

That's James Brown in 1964, found in an NPR article from last May, "Who Owns 'Boogaloo'?" which I got sidelined into while trying to find out if there was a special 1970s meaning to the word "boogaloo." This is a question I had researching the song "All the Young Dudes"... and let's take a minute to listen to Mott the Hoople: 

 

Wikipedia informs us that David Bowie — who wrote the song — offered "All the Young Dudes" to Mott the Hoople after they rejected "Suffragette City." "All the Young Dudes" was a big hit single for Mott the Hoople — their biggest. The answer to the question what's a "hoople" is: "Hooples... 'make the whole game possible, Christmas Clubs especially, politics, advertising agencies, pay toilets, even popes and mystery novels.' Obviously they're squares...."

But I'm thinking about "All the Young Dudes" this morning because I used the song title as a framework from the title of my podcast yesterday: "All the dangerous dudes are on the other side." There are some tricks to devising titles for episodes of the Althouse podcast, but I use things that are in the podcast and fit them together, sometimes using the form of a song title. In that case, the podcast discussed the Google Adsense policy banning "dangerous and derogatory" material, the line from the Wisconsin protests "All the assholes are on the other side," and the use of the word "dude" by a man who was arrested in an alleged plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Approving comments this morning, I saw that Joe Smith had recognized the presence of "All the Young Dudes" in the podcast title, and it made me want to read and understand the lyrics, something I've never done, even though I'd listened to the song — the David Bowie version — as I was working on the podcast.

Reading the lyrics at Genius.com, realizing I've never paid attention to the words, I'm surprised to see "boogaloo" in the chorus:

All the young dudes

Carry the news

Boogaloo dudes

The annotation says "In the 50s, “boogaloo” referred to a type of Latin music. But by the 70s, it referred to this..." And "this" is a video that is currently unavailable! And that's why I was looking for the 70s meaning of "boogaloo." I lived through the 70s. My memory of it is that the boogaloo was a dance. I'm stunned to see James Brown doing it all the way back in 1963. The reason the show host says "We don't want to make 'em too unhappy, James" is that after James did a joyous boogaloo, he was asked to do a sad boogaloo, which of course, he could also do and did so well that it could be a joke that he could make us — or whoever the "action kids" were — unhappy... and not just unhappy but too unhappy.

I'm just going to guess that the 70s meaning, the one referred to in the song, is the sexual meaning you can see at Urban Dictionary:

What that says about the right-wing terrorists of the 2020s is something I might riff on when I read this post out loud later today for the podcast. 

ADDED: The NPR article says the James Brown clip is from 1964 (or 1963), so I excluded the possibility that "the action kids" were the extras on the Dick Clark TV show "Where the Action Is," because that wasn't on TV that early. The years in the 1960s are very fine-tuned in my memories! The show debuted in 1965, and, as Wikipedia verifies, the extras on the show were, in fact, referred to as "The Action Kids"! So James Brown is dancing in 1965 or later.

 

AND: And in the 1970s — as as Leo Sayer sang in the 70s — before you can eat, ya gotta dance like Fred Astaire:

"I’ve always been a wriggler. I mean, I am my own fantasy. I am the ‘Cosmic Dancer’ who dances his way out of the womb and into the tomb on Electric Warrior."

"I’m not frightened to get up there and groove in front of 6 million people on TV because it doesn’t look cool. That’s the way I would do it at home. It’s not serious. I’m serious about the music, but I’m not serious about the fantasy."

Said Marc Bolan in 1971, quoted in "The Timeless Glam Perfection of T. Rex: Why Marc Bolan Still Casts a Spell/The new Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees have been a guiding spirit for cosmic dancers from Prince to Harry Styles" (Rolling Stone).

Born in 1947, the son of a Hackney lorry driver, Marc Feld grew up as a mod on the London scene. As a broke young poseur, trying to hustle into showbiz, he got hired one day to paint his manager’s office with another kid. Marc introduced himself as “King Mod,” and declared, “Your shoes are crap.” The other kid was David Bowie. These two rivals would torment each other for years to come. In February 1969, after Bolan blew up on the U.K. charts, he invited Bowie on tour — as a mime. “Marc was quite cruel about David’s as-yet-unproven musical career,” producer Tony Visconti recalled later. “I think it was with great sadistic delight that Marc hired David to open for Tyrannosaurus Rex, not as a musical act, but as a mime.” (What could make it even sweeter for Bolan? Bowie got booed.)

I went looking for a Marc Bolan/Hall of Fame article after Bolan came up in the first post of the day, the one about "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo." That post quoted Marc eating potatoes with Ringo and saying "Ooh you, boogaloo." In the comments over there, I said:

He goes into the the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame... it was just announced a few weeks ago. I should do a post on that. I am a big Marc Bolan fan from back when his band was called Tyrannosaurus Rex.

As a college kid in 1969, I would make anyone I could get to put up with it listen to the album "Unicorn."

Anyone else here a fan of "Unicorn"?

Here's the whole album. Just imagine yourself captive in 18-year-old Althouse's dorm room!...

The toad road licked my wheels like a sabre
Winds of the marsh lightly blew
Stone jars stacked with stars on her shoulders
Hunters of pity she slew...

Are you listening?!!!

A couple years later, Marc was much more accessible, and everyone loved...



... didn't they?

David Bowie — speaking 20 years ago — says the internet "is an alien life form."

Extraordinary clip from 20 years ago. David Bowie sharing what he feels about what the internet is going to turn into. And he’s not wrong.
Paxman: it’s just a tool tho isn’t it?
Bowie: No it’s not.
pic.twitter.com/zypoJEVJCN

— Omid Djalili (@omid9) October 25, 2019

Paul Anka steps on Obama's "My Way" and agrees to perform at the inaugural dance for Trump.

Did you remember Paul Anka wrote the lyrics to the song that drives some people crazy? The original lyrics are French, "Comme d'habitude":



In 1968, David Bowie tried writing English lyrics. Bowie's version is "Even a Fool Learns to Love":



Frank Sinatra rejected Bowie's lyrics:

"I was so pissed," said Bowie later. "I thought, 'God, I could have done with that money'. And so I wrote Life on Mars, which was sort of a Sinatra-ish parody, but done in a more rock style."

And the work went to Paul Anka.

Now, just a couple days ago, HuffPo put up "This Farewell Mashup Of Obama Singing ‘My Way’ May Leave You Misty":

And suddenly, the news comes out that Paul Anka is going to sing the song for Donald Trump:

An insider tells the site, "Paul was asked by the members of the Trump inauguration committee and he was only too happy to do it for his longtime friend. While everyone else was running scared from performing at the inauguration, Paul stood fast. He wasn't about to be intimated [sic] by anyone!"

Anka will be singing special re-written he-did-it-Trump's-Way lyrics. We can only guess what changes he'll make to the lyrics. You can't start with "And now, the end is near...." even though that's a perfect line from the Trump hater's viewpoint — along with "Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew/When I bit off more than I could chew...."

And, whatever you do, wear a shirt — "That’s Just. The Fucking. Way. It Is!"

David Bowie, "America."

From the Concert for New York City (after the 9/11 attacks):


david bowie simon and garfunkel america concert...

I encountered that this morning by chance, just after writing about the Bernie Sanders "America" ad. I'm reading the NYT, and the Bernie Sanders ad was discussed in an article about the political ads of 2016. The David Bowie performance came up — via "The Most Read Styles Stories of 2016" — in "David Bowie: Invisible New Yorker." Bowie lived in NYC for a long time — in SOHO from 1999 until his death — and he was never recognized on the street.

He was always in a sharp suit or tux. Regularly at the Met Gala or the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards to support his wife [the model, Iman]. Never caught stumbling out of the hot club at 4 a.m. He’d already been to a lifetime’s worth of parties.

Iman once described Mr. Bowie as a “homebody”; The Onion imagined him as a “pansexual alien” staying in to “do lasagna for dinner.” He led a pretty normal-seeming life. He shopped for groceries once a week at Dean & DeLuca. He loved the chicken sandwich with watercress and tomatoes at Olive’s on Prince Street. He liked to rise at 6 a.m. and get his “buzz” by walking the still-empty streets of Chinatown.

He read a lot. He collected art. He painted. He and Iman socialized with the parents of their daughter’s friends at school. He spent his remaining time meaningfully and productively, and largely here.

I wonder what he read. And he wasn't always in a sharp suit or tux. He was also like this...

Forever my favourite latter-day Bowie pic. pic.twitter.com/M8uM6eVExo

— frozen reeds (@frozenreeds) January 13, 2016

... another man in shorts. No wonder you wouldn't know it's him. If we know you as the man in a suit, you can attain invisibility, dressing in the most ordinary way possible.

Ah! And I did find out what books he read:

"Lots of men messed around with masculinity..."

"And for reasons that make no cosmic sense, a few of those men — Prince, David Bowie, Prince Be of P.M. Dawn, and now Mr. Michael — died in 2016, a year in which dismaying ambivalence about aggressive, invasive male behavior was matched by the reinstatement of duller performances of masculinity in both our pop music and our politics. The Princes and the George Michaels seem as radical as ever."

Writes Wesley Morris in "George Michael Mattered Beyond the Music."

The Princes and the George Michaels — sorry, there is only one of each — let's put them to the side now. I give Prince and George Michael all the love the deserve — which is a lot — but I want to focus on what Wesley Morris said about the "performance of masculinity" in the music and politics of 2016. I almost had to diagram that one sentence to understand it. But clear out the stuff about artists who died this year, and you have a statement about the keeping-on-living men of 2016.

These  unnamed men of 2016 showed us 2 different masculine presentations: 1. "aggressive, invasive" and 2. "duller."

And we were ambivalent. Dismayingly so.

Presumably, Morris thinks the dead radicals — Prince, George Michaels — marked the path away from the unappealing choice between the 2 styles of masculinity — ugly or boring — that prevail among us the living. I say "presumably," because the sentence I want to talk about is a sign for an exit ramp Morris zooms past.

Who are the Masculinity Style #1 men and the Masculinity Style #2 men of 2016 that Morris didn't bother to name? It seems as though he had 1s and 2s for both politics and pop music. I don't follow pop music enough to know who the men of 2016 are and whether they are "aggressive, invasive" or "duller." There's Justin Bieber, I know. Which is he?

Politics, I follow. I'm sure Donald Trump was the whole reason for the words "aggressive, invasive." And yet... "In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, 'I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.' I took her out furniture...."

Trump's "performance of masculinity" is just as complicated as Prince's.

"Was Queen Elizabeth hot?/Confirm. She was very stylish in the ’60s."

"She had a fabulous figure, fabulous waist and big bosoms, and she looked good in her clothes."

That's André Leon Talley, doing a "Confirm or Deny" interview with Maureen Dowd. I'm putting this up for Meade because just yesterday we had a discussion about whether it's ignorant or jauntily jocose to put "bosom" in the plural (when speaking of only one person) and because the interview — the whole thing — is very amusing.

The OED takes my side on "bosoms": "In recent use, a woman's breasts. colloq." with quotes going back to 1959:

1959   C. MacInnes Absolute Beginners* 68   Snaps of the Dean sell like hot ice-cream among vintage women with too many bosoms and time on their hands.
1961   L. Hughes Ask your Mama 72   Sojourner..Bared her bosoms, bared in public To prove she was a woman.
1965   I. Fleming Man with Golden Gun v. 70   She gave him a quick glimpse of fine bosoms as she bent to the door of the icebox.
1978   C. Beaton Parting Years 2   Can you really imagine that is the way the arm comes out of the socket? Look at their bosoms—they're nowhere near where they should be. Have you ever seen a naked woman?
1986   Observer 2 Mar. 60/1   She was larger than lifesize: enormous buttocks and stomach, with two medium-sized watermelons for bosoms.

Those are some fine quotes! I love "medium-sized watermelons." Meade is outside shoveling snow, and here I am consulting the Oxford English Dictionary to win a debate from yesterday. It's not really a debate. I agree that "bosom" embraces the entire chestal area. "Bosoms," like "chestal area," is silly, and that is the point. By comparison, "breast" has always referred to the entire area OR to one of "the two soft protuberances situated on the thorax in females, in which the milk is secreted for the nourishment of their young; the mamma" (as the OED delightfully puts it). And by "always" I mean both meanings predate modern English.

Maureen Dowd got 2 articles out of her encounter with André Leon Talley. The other one is "Monsieur Vogue Is Leaving Trumpland." It's kind of sad. I don't remember noticing André Leon Talley, but he's an important fashion person. There had to be a reason to see him as being in Trumpland for it to be possible for him to be leaving Trumpland.

In fact, he'd traveled with Melania and helped her pick out her wedding gown. He'd "called Melania charming and private, 'soignée and polished' with 'impeccable' manners." He'd said that Melania was “a wonderful person to be with,” and that she “will be one of the great stars in the administration,” and even "I hope there will be a great, great Trump presidency.”

He got slammed by — well, Dowd doesn't say who:

It didn’t take long for the guillotine to fall. One friend emailed him, “Oh my God, you have gone to the Evil Empire!!!!!”

We're supposed to just somehow know that the fashion world demands that Trump be hated.

Did Talley contact Dowd and request some reputation-saving publicity? The next paragraph is:

He agonized about the “tragedy of ruptured friendships” to me in an email, saying about Melania: “She’s a nice person. I do not endorse Trumpism on any level. So why can’t one be positive and want her to shine? I mean, it’s good she cares about napkins, crystal, dinner plates with gilded edges to the point of over the top, and abundant flower arrangements. In the end, why pick on her when they should be picking on her husband’s billionaire cabinet and his seeming readiness to turn the country back towards oppression, anti-Semitism, anti-culturalism, etc.”

It sounds as though he wanted to play a part in the fashion and design side of the new presidency, but he couldn't bear the risk.

As we sit in the hotel lobby, he muses: “I’m not a big person in the world. I’m maybe a big figure in the fashion world. I mean, sort of iconic. But I don’t want to get phone calls in the middle of the night, telling me I’ve gone over to Trumpland and I’m going to Darth Vader because I said nice things about Melania....."

He's afraid of bullies.
______________________
*

"When we first heard this raw, very young, and seemingly untrained voice, frankly nasal, as if sandpaper could sing, the effect was dramatic and electrifying."

"We—my young husband and I—were classical music lovers for whom the arrival each month of chastely spare, black-on-white Musical Heritage Society albums (does anyone now living remember these?) was an exciting event. Bob Dylan seemed to erupt out of nowhere. The genuine power, originality, and heartrending pathos of 'Blowin’ in the Wind,' 'A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,' 'Masters of War,' 'Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right' were like nothing we’d encountered before."

Wrote Joyce Carol Oates in 2004. I'm reading that now because it's quoted in the Wikipedia article for the David Bowie song "Song for Bob Dylan," which has the similar line "a voice like sand and glue":

I wrote a song for you
About a strange young man called Dylan
With a voice like sand and glue
Some words had truthful vengeance
That could pin us to the floor
Brought a few more people on
And put the fear in a whole lot more