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A recent Dylan symposium at Stanford proved that as rock fans, academics can babble with the most brain-dead metalheads. BY MICHAEL BATTY | Among the rewards of listening to pop lyrics, getting them wrong ranks high. "A mosquito, my libido" (from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit") becomes "Mendocino, my burrito"; and in "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," "the girl with colitis goes by." These goofs -- often abetted by the mewling, sloppy-drunk singer -- are called mondegreens. They remind us of popular music's frivolity and mercifully brief shelf life; sometimes they're even funny. But for all the public's adoration of garbled transmissions, academia seems to have done them one better. At a recent Bob Dylan symposium at Stanford's Kresge Auditorium, professors didn't just slur jingles, they slurred significance. Nowhere else, save perhaps the remotest fringes of a fan club, could Bob Dylan's nasalizing be given such soft-focus, generous scrutiny. (Not even at Wednesday's Grammys, which incongruously placed a score of black-clad young men and women behind the Old Master in an effort to demonstrate his continuing relevance.) The symposium offered shaky pop culture theory and better praxis, the latter ably demonstrated by the $14.50 price of admission and the black and white photos of Dylan and other Village luminaries available in the lobby for $50 a pop. Ten or so presenters stroked pet theories down to the bone. Program titles like "Only a Pawn in Their Game: Bob Dylan and Politics," "The Sound of One Dog Barking: Bob Dylan and Religious Experience" and "A Long Way from Hibbing: Bob Dylan's Black Masque" promised to confuse fandom with acumen. Among the half-capacity audience, the fans were teeming, if not ubiquitous. One couple flipped through bloated chapbooks of Dylan lyrics, reading along and cuddling as songs were discussed. Elsewhere, ponytails and comb-overs were cast into stark relief by pink, reflecting scalps. Proceedings would be partisan -- boomer, by jingo -- though moderator Susan Dunn of the Stanford Humanities Department provided a brief tilt at the podium: "I'd like to ask that this be more than an exercise in nostalgia and canonization." Hear, hear -- and good luck. The program's biggest academic name, Christopher Ricks ("Keats and Embarrassment"), a core curriculum professor at Boston University, made a case for classic mondegreens during "Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet," a treatise on Dylan's latest album, Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" and how nice it is to rhyme. "What you gain on the hearing," Ricks said of Dylan's sage verse, "you lose on the sense." Examples followed: How "ode" could sound like "owed," "hear" like "here" and "cents" like "sense." (You might ask, So what? Good for you.) Ricks put such gravity into his reading of Dylan's catchy doggerel that you'd think you were hearing a King James edition of "The Cat in the Hat." "Can you tell me what you're waiting for/Señor," Ricks intoned. "Down the street the dogs are barking/And the day is getting dark." "Do room/Do room/Do room." Ricks played snippets from "Not Dark Yet," and the auditorium filled with a voice that has only grown more bizarre, more nasal, over time, to the point where it now seems to have left Dylan's nose altogether, dangling at its tip. But Ricks was right: Dylan can rhyme. German studies Professor Tino Markworth provided an apt assessment of most other presentations in his own, "Too Much Educated Rap? Bob Dylan and Academia" -- though perhaps only by accident. "Society is a confused series of discourses determined by power structures," Markworth said, toeing the pomo party line and lamenting the "transmission of information that obscures Dylan." The speakers had an easy time talking about anything but Dylan in their attempts to lend him context. The Tupperware mattered, not the leftovers. Markworth himself, despite the initial illusory promise of one con for every pro, only ended up huffing air into the rubbery proposition of a Bob Dylan studies program. Drama Professor Rush Rehm's "Only a Pawn in Their Game" was devoted in turn to bitching about the Gulf War and the genocide of the Native American and quoting Noam Chomsky. "I'm dealing with a debased subject," Rehm conceded. "Politics, not Bob Dylan." Rehm's passion for outrage was enviable (as was his shame at admitting that Dylan had sold the rights to "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to the Bank of Montreal), but his thesis elusive. "We've become suspicious of folk music," Rehm dubiously proposed at one point, "thanks to the celebration of Das Folk: the Nazis." "Labels and categories have an important heuristic function," explained Religious Studies professor Mark Gonnerman, who went on to grace Dylan with four: prophetic, apocalyptic, biblical and transcendentalist. Why? To underscore the importance of skepticism in religion, quoting some more of those allegedly elliptical Dylan lyrics: "I only asked for something that I'm gonna understand." Me too. N E X T+P A G E+| Metaphoricity and wanting to be black |
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