Rich here again with a follow-up to my post about "Long Song Titles."
Assuming that Jan & Dean were a pre-Counterculture outlier when they recorded a song whose title took 2-3 mouthfuls to say. But once Bob Dylan showed off his predilections for long and/or bulky song and album titles, there was an explosion of verbosity.
One of the most obvious responders to Dylan was Paul Simon. Whereas Dylan -- despite his middle class roots -- liked to present himself as a self-educated working class folk poet in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Paul Simon made no bones about being a college-educated intellectual, and he was more than a bit jealous of Dylan, whom Simon felt was dishonestly portraying himself.
And so it was obvious that Simon was satirizing Dylan when he penned "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)." And if the point was lost on any listeners, Simon included the lines "He's so unhip that when you say 'Dylan,' he thinks you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture. But it's all right, ma, everybody must get stoned."
SIMON & GARFUNKEL - "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)"
Assuming that Jan & Dean were a pre-Counterculture outlier when they recorded a song whose title took 2-3 mouthfuls to say. But once Bob Dylan showed off his predilections for long and/or bulky song and album titles, there was an explosion of verbosity.
One of the most obvious responders to Dylan was Paul Simon. Whereas Dylan -- despite his middle class roots -- liked to present himself as a self-educated working class folk poet in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Paul Simon made no bones about being a college-educated intellectual, and he was more than a bit jealous of Dylan, whom Simon felt was dishonestly portraying himself.
And so it was obvious that Simon was satirizing Dylan when he penned "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)." And if the point was lost on any listeners, Simon included the lines "He's so unhip that when you say 'Dylan,' he thinks you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture. But it's all right, ma, everybody must get stoned."
SIMON & GARFUNKEL - "A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)"
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