We Interrupt Drum Week for a Special Announcement

It's drum week at songwritinghooks.com, but I wanted to do a non-drum-related shout out about a podcast that you should hear. 

I'm not a huge Dylan fan. Never really felt connected to his music. But I am a big Paul Simon fan, because I think the man farts more genius than most songwriters can muster with a lifetime of straining. (That was too graphic, wasn't it?)

Anyway, I'm listening to a podcast from early May, and thought y'all might want to listen too. It's from a lecture series run by CUNY (the City University of New York). This installment is about Simon & Garkunkel, but the speaker Pete Fornatale puts Dylan and Paul Simon into context:

It was Bob Dylan who changed American songwriting... Certainly American rock 'n' roll songwriting... He was rewarded for that with a Pulitzer prize. It was Dylan who blew open the doors for all of the intelligent singer/songwriters who followed in his path, and no one -- no one -- took greater advantage of that than Paul Simon...
Dylan opened the portal to a new way of communicating in popular music, a new way of communicating in rock 'n' roll. My own theory about this is that for its first 10 years, rock 'n' roll was very much about the crotch. That is where most of the music originated from and came from. What Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel did was raise it a little to the level of the brain, and for that alone we should all give them our undying thanks. 

So far, it's a great lecture. Catch it at the CUNY site, or download it from iTunes.