Thu 18 Sep 2008
Bob Dylan on Rap
Thursday, Sep 18th, 2008 at 3:41 pmCategories: Music; Poetry; Horses; Dylan, Bob
Posted by Administrator
No Comments
“They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs.”
- Bob Dylan
I recently read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One with considerable pleasure.
It’s an engaging book: Dylan
combines reminiscences about his inner life with thoughtful anecdotes about people he’s known over the decades.
This passage really caught my eye:
Danny [Lanois] asked me what I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks,” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it … be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He’d be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you’d know him when he came — there’d be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn’t blame them. The kind of music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s honestly how I felt. With Ice-T and Public Enemy, who were laying down the tracks, a new performer was bound to appear, and one unlike Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day.
- Bob Dylan: Chronicles, Volume One
I love that phrase, “hurling horses over cliffs” ….
Outside the door, they would bury two sacrificed dogs, presumably as symbolic or supernatural guardians. If you look in the attached image showing a magnetic map of Botai houses, you will see pairs of small magnetic highs to the southwest of the larger (but weaker) square pit-houses. These have not been tested, but it is imagined that these pairs of anomalies may be dog sacrifices.