I confess that I am not a fan of rap "music". The quotation marks symbolize my problem with it, and with its twin, hip-hop--they simply are not musical to my ear. This genre sounds like angry people talking fast as if they are making a game of it, so I'll have to listen over and over to slowly unwrap their message. Some are crude and vulgar and demeaning to women. No thanks. Lest I be viewed as a crusty, old musical curmudgeon, let me offer a couple of positive points before I move into my thesis. I will say that rap has provided a platform for many people--black, white, and brown--to give voice to the issues in their lives. And rap/hip-hop has penetrated and expanded into middle-class white America and pop radio maybe beyond even that of the 1960's musical icons. That said, let's move to Mr. '60's Protest Icon, himself--Bob Dylan.
For the last several years, a recurring thought to me has been that maybe Bob Dylan invented rap. Every time I hear his song, Subterranean Homesick Blues, I think, "that is not rap, but it sounds like its parent". It was recorded way back in 1965 (when I was 11), on the Bringing It All Back Home album, which, by the way, also included his iconic Mr. Tambourine Man. (if I'm overusing the word "iconic", it's hard to think about Bob Dylan in the context of the '60's without using it. Dylan is the one that moved popular music out of the rut of silly songs like the Beatles "I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah" and on to more substantial ideas.) Here is a video from a 1967 documentary--before there were music videos--of Bob Dylan creatively fooling around with his song playing in the audio.
Check out the bearded guy in the background who is the last to meander away. He is Allen Ginsburg, famous beat poet of the 1950's and one of the mentors of Bob Dylan and scads of other hippie generation movers and shakers.
Let me know what you think of my thesis about Bob Dylan being the first rapper. By the way, Dylan's song is just another incarnation of various talking blues songs that Dylan heard from his other mentor, Woody Guthrie. It seems that even the most creative artists reshape other artists' ideas, add their own reflection, and present them to a new audience. That's good . . . what Pete Seeger calls "the folk process".
Trained as an ecologist and later as a plant pathologist (sick plants). Worked for years doing research on tree diseases, then plant diseases in general for the Cooperative Extension Service. Then it was the landscape maintenance business for many years, until I left to pastor a church for five years. Now my wife and I are running a dog boarding business called Ernie Boudreaux's Doggie Dude Ranch. We also have HollandWildflowerFarm.com where we sell seeds for native plants. I recently returned to work at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville where I conduct research on soybean diseases. We have two grown daughters and sons-in-law, plus an "adopted" Korean son and his new bride. I play the mandolin among other things.
