“Snagged by a sour, pinched guitar riff, the song has an acerbic tinge…and Dylan sings the title rejoinders in mock self-pity. It’s less an indictment of the system than a coil of imagery that spells out how the system hangs itself with the rope it’s so proud of.”… (How did this ever get by copy-editing?)
In other blogs,
Honkymagic has this:
MacDonald is also a bit more technical in his analysis of the songs, emphasizing, especially, the critical role of harmony in Lennon’s numbers and melody in those of McCartney. When Riley does get technical, though, he tends to do so to push a particular interpretation, something that MacDonald avoids. When Riley does this well, or when his analysis (the intersection of style and theme, right?) seems justified, he’s enjoyable (claiming, for example, that in “She Said, She Said,” “phrases are extended from eighth notes into triplets to intensify the rhythmic stress, the thin line between confidence and anxiety”). But when the point is less apt, it can feel like he’s flailing for something to say, as in this claim about the out-of-tune piano that wanders through the end of “Tomorrow Never Knows” as the song fades: “This is less a self-parody of the message than it is one more random sound tagged on to emphasize the lack of rational hierarchies in the altered state.”
Tim-
Your “flailing for something to say” is always more entertaining than most music writer’s carefully crafted, pedantic hoo-ha.
bill