Ted Gioia: belief

Transcript context

…Who is the best shaman in the history of rock music? It’s a key theme in your book, right? Music: A Subversive History. The importance of the shaman, the rebel, the outsider. I would say Bob Dylan. I think that there’s this mystical aspect of music in which it becomes very hypnotic, but it’s also embedded in the culture. It’s life changing. It reaches on a personal level but also has these broader social levels. I don’t think anybody’s brought that together better in my lifetime than Bob Dylan. I was very happy when he won the Nobel Prize. I know purists were angry. Songs are not literature. But hey, if you go back to the roots, Homer was a singer. If you go back to the roots, Sappho was a singer. The origin of literature is song. So for someone like Dylan, he would capture that for me. Was Jim Morrison a wonderful shaman but a terrible musician and poet?…

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