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Bob Dylan's Christmas Lights: A Scholarly Treatise (merrillmarkoe.substack.com)
51 points by NaOH on Dec 26, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments


I assume this article is just for fun, a poke at the grand tradition of people overthinking everything Dylan says or does. I hope so anyway, and at Merrill Markoe didn't have to dig through his trash to gain these important insights.


Merrill Markoe was an early writer for and big influence on David Letterman.


Yep.


I found this hilarious, thanks for sharing - I didn't realize Merrill Markoe had a substack :)


For folks who've never heard the name, Merrill played a very important part in the post-Carson late-night TV of the late 1900s–early 2000s (think Letterman and Conan): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill_Markoe


In a similar but visual vein, here’s a Mad Magazine style treatment of the great man’s song Ballad of a Thin Man: https://paulpritchard.github.io/Ballad_of_a_Thin_Man/


[flagged]


This is funny. It's a slight dig at those folks (of which I'm sure the author is one, or the self-effacing sort) who want every one of Bob's incoherent ramblings to be 'deep'.

"Because I grew up in a world where nothing that Mr. Dylan ever did was too insignificant not to be worthy of serious intellectual scrutiny, I immediately understood that this was no ordinary, haphazardly arranged, string of colored lights. It had to contain a deeper meaning."

A lot of Bob's work is the intellectual equivalent of a paltry string of Christmas lights. Your outlook with figure if that's an insult or a compliment.


Well, thanks for clarifying!

I enjoy satire and sarcasm; but I found the parody of "dylanologists" weak enough that maybe that was how he actually thought. And anyway, is that really still a thing? So I doubted that he was trying to pastiche something we've all thought was silly for a couple of decades.

Perhaps I have a sense-of-humour defect; maybe I just didn't get it.


Is this entirely factitious, or did someone actually photograph one of Bob Dylan's houses once a year, layer "parodic humor" on top of it, and then publish it online? If the former, hardy har har. If the latter, I worry sincerely about the wellbeing of the person who completed this strange action, regardless of the layer of "it's just a joke I'm in on" placed on top.

Edit: disregard. I realized I'm just "being a hater" on HN lately which is in the wrong spirit. My bad.




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