One of the key tasks a producer performs is to assemble the team. Look at who she chose to work with, especially for the albums after Post, where she had more creative direction.
She picks her mastering engineers. She picks her choirs and writes for them; picks her strings sections and writes for them. She works with her video producers, not for them.
She is mindblowingly good at a wider range of jobs than she’s typically credited for.
She is absolutely right to draw a comparison to Kanye
Pitchfork: The world has a difficult time with the female auteur.
B: I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second . If whatever I’m saying to you now helps women, I’m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats—it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn’t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos’] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don’t even listen to him. It really is strange.
Dylans voice is an acquired taste too 
Interesting perspective considering your earlier comments about the Prodigy; the one band that everyone could get on board with back in the day (to which I agree - I remember dancing to Out of Space at Full Tilt in Camden, basically a full on Goth Club, sandwiched between Sisters and Front 242). Sometimes making a thing popular is the innovation, rather than the thing itself. Nine Inch Nails didn’t create a genre (continuing on the industrial tip), but he found a way to bundle up everything else into a way that was both mainstream and still accepted by the fans.
None of us can are really comment on the impact that Dylan or Beatles had, because we weren’t there. We can all look at varied subjective opinions of cultural of people from the time, and see that through the our current day lens - where anyone can listen to anything at any time.
I don’t like Dylan - but when you say
He very famously alienated his audience by plugging in - like they totally hated him, said he’d sold their cause out - I would call that brave. Was he the first person to plug in? No - of course not, doesn’t mean he did nothing of any value to music. Just because a few snobby pricks get a pen up their arse about Dylan now, it doesn’t mean that everyone at the time was wrong. Innovation comes in a lot of forms, and he meant something to people then.
This article gives a good insight of this.
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/inside-track-bjorks-vulnicura?amp
That’s a good article , thanks, not read that before, Vulnicura is one of my favourite Bjork albums
Yeah, all fair points, but if he’d plugged in, been fucked off by everybody and disappeared into obscurity, he wouldn’t have influenced anyone, would he?
It’s the fact that he did what he did and succeeded that matters. He took a calculated gamble and reaped the rewards. Fair play to him. For me, that is separate to the subjective quality of his music. As we all know that popularity and quality don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
All art is subjective. So if I say I think Dylan was shit, I’m not saying anything objective, because there’s nothing objective about any of it. If I put on a hanatarash record, most people would immediately say it was shit, yet to me, they are one of the most influential and greatest artists out there. Subjective. So when I say something is shit, it’s clearly just what I think and I don’t care how many people were influenced by it or how important other people think something is, if it’s shit, it’s shit.
In popular culture there are trend setters and innovators. Innovators have a bit of a tendency to garner less attention than trend setters, who often get mistaken for innovators.
Very rarely, an artist can be both (Prince being a good example). For me, Dylan was a trend setter, which is absolutely fine, there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I just don’t see anything that innovative about what he was doing.
Maybe I’d care more if I was a 50’s beatnik with an electricity complex.
One of the biggest problems with Dylan superfans is–in my experience, mind you–they often don’t actually seem to like music, just the idea of music. Or rather the obsessive cataloging of trivia, arguments about arcane shit, pedantic lectures about same, etc. And they are always, always middle-aged white men.
Wait, that sounds a lot like me and synthesizers–and I’m a middle-aged white man. Never mind, carry on…
A few people liked him. 
My wife likes Take That.
Doesn’t stop me thinking she’s great.
Hot take: Gary Barlow is a better songwriter, singer and artist than Bob Dylan.
He had already changed music by that point.
It wasn’t a gamble; he just did the thing he wanted to do. I doubt he would have cared had he failed. He would have still gone down a legend, not that cares much about that either.
Fusing folk and rock songcraft with political, surrealist lyrics (and doing so so successfully) had not been done.
That’s our point. You are refusing to give Dylan credit as a great because of your own subjective taste for his music. In order to do so, you are framing his impact on culture much less significantly than it is. And honestly it comes off that way as a method by which you can stick it to the Dylan fans you’ve had bad run-ins with.
Another argument I do not oppose.
“Dylan was a good businessman, that’s why you all love him.”
Yes, when I fell in love with his music in 8th grade, it was actually his business acumen that blew me away.
Of all the hot takes in this thread, this one is the most…special.
“I’m not angry, I just don’t like Dylan’s music, or his fans that have a superiority complex.”
I think you’re projecting 
Actually he played folk and blues standards and got famous doing it because he was a trendy young buck from a trendy neighbourhood in NYC. He was good at what he did, but like the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks etc. across the pond he was not making anything new, he took the musical tradition that was not really his and packaged it in a way that was non-threatening and fit the aesthetics of pre-hippy middle class youth. He was the Elvis of folk music. When he went electric, it was only a surprise to the stuffy, narrow minded fanbase he had built. Blues had gone electric decades before in Chicago, and sounded quite similar to what he’d done. He emulated his idols very closely.
I don’t deny his popularity, I just think he’s shit and not as innovative as his fans would like to think.
The fact that I’m being psychoanalysed to the degree I am kinda proves my point.
I’m not.
You keep making this point, but it’s wrong: folk, as it was at the time, was not Black music: Guthrie, Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary et. al. Guthrie meant everything to him and he made the journey to see Guthrie in the hospital; Seeger was the person to get him a record deal. He loved them and they loved him but he went deeper than they ever did.
Ok but it wasn’t his market at all. In fact, his fanbase was against it in principle.
Btw I never said him going electric was innovative musically. It wasn’t; he had always loved RnR. What I was saying above was that it was innovative in a kind of nonconformity, F-U sense in that it was so against his fanbase, doing exactly what he wanted to do.
Plus it rocked liked hell. It was very much blues based, but no blues musician was writing songs like that. Very different thing.
Who doesn’t?? How is this a mark against him??
That we’re “psychoanalysing” you (you do keep wearing your prejudice on your sleeve, its kind of hard not to point it out) proves that Dylan wasn’t innovative? How does that work?
Hey, man, you gotta listen to the words, maaan. But seriously, I do enjoy the words
Not often 808 state and Bjork get mentioned in the same sentence…
Felt compelled to share these two beautiful 808 state and Bjork collabs:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEvWHoqUbYM
