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Cohen or Dylan ?

Let's also not forget Loudon Wainwright III, who also tells it like it is, whether it's it's trying to find a fag in the middle of the night or missing Martha's birthday party.
 
Singslinger said:
Cohen and Dylan are probably the only two artistes I know of who could sing that badly and get away with it. Good songwriters though.
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There's something to say about Lenny Cohen. But to my ears, Dylan's singing is so iconic that I count him among the great singers. Listen to him in his first years - he never was a Freddie Mercury, but his voice signalled instantly that he had something to say.

Apart from that, both were outstanding guitar players.
 
foxwelljsly said:
I have no idea which generation the OP is referring to. I love Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but there isn't an album whose lyrics speak to me, or a younger me, anyway, more directly to me than The Streets 'A Grand don't come for Free'.
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I like it too but I am really talking about artists with more than, say, 10 albums over more than 20 years. to prequalify.
 
I think this is a very good question. I think Cohen probably as the pure wordsmith. But I'm not sitting down reading this stuff I'm listening to it, and I'd rather listen to Dylan on the whole.
 
windhoek said:
Let's also not forget Loudon Wainwright III, who also tells it like it is, whether it's it's trying to find a fag in the middle of the night or missing Martha's birthday party.
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The epitome of the confessional singer-songwriter. A true star.
 
Singslinger said:
Marillion's Fish for me.

Cohen and Dylan are probably the only two artistes I know of who could sing that badly and get away with it. Good songwriters though.
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Fish (Derek William Dick!) is indeed a remarkable lyricist. Marillion's Fugazi (the album and the track) feature some breathtakingly eloquent lines.

Fugazi

"Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a Blackheath cell
Extinguishing the fires in a private hell
Provoking the heartache to renew the licence
Of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule
Propping up the crust of the glitter conscience
Wrapped in the christening shawl of a hangover
Baptised in the tears from the real

Drowning in the liquid seize on the Piccadilly line, rat race
Scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth
Caress Ophelia's hand with breathstroke ambition
An albatross in the marrytime tradition
Sheathed within the Walkman wear the halo of distortion
Aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation
She turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart
She hung herself around my neck
From the Time-Life-Guardians in their conscience bubbles
Safe and dry in my sea of troubles
Nine to five with suitable ties
Cast adrift as their side-show, peepshow, stereo hero
Becalm bestill, bewitch, drowning in the real

The thief of Baghdad hides in Islington now
Praying deportation for his sacred cow
A legacy of romance from a twilight world
The dowry of a relative mystery girl
A Vietnamese flower, a Dockland union
A mistress of release from a magazine's thighs
Magdalenes contracts more than favours
The feeding hands of western promise hold her by the throat

A son of a swastika of '45 parading a peroxide standard
Graffiti conjure disciples testaments of hatred
Aerosol wands whisper where the searchlights trim the barbed wire hedges
This is Brixton chess
A knight for Embankment folds his newspaper castle
A creature of habit, begs the boatman's coin
He'll fade with old soldiers in the grease stained roll call
And linger with the heartburn of Good Friday's last supper

Son watches father scan obituary columns in search of absent school friends
While his generation digests high fibre ignorance
Cowering behind curtains and the taped up painted windows
Decriminalised genocide, provided door to door Belsens
Pandora's box of holocausts gracefully cruising satellite infested heavens
Waiting, the season of the button, the penultimate migration
Radioactive perfumes, for the fashionably, for the terminally insane, insane

Do you realise? Do you realise?
Do you realise, this world is totally fugazi
Where are the prophets, where are the visionaries, where are the poets
To breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary"
 
I have both in my collection but don't think there is any comparison. Cohen will be a footnote in 15 years just as David Ackles is now. Personally I'd probably rate David Ackles over Cohen.

Dylan's up there with Yeats and Braque but not quite with Shakespere and Picasso.
 
When it comes to wordsmiths, I guess it's what resonates with you personally. In my case, the late great Gil Scott Heron was extraordinary.
 
Warren Zevon? Sorry, he is no favourite of mine. I saw him give an uninspiring concert in Binghamton, NY in 1987/1988. Not impressive. Neither was the performance by Dylan in Aalborg 200(?). But Cohen's in a park in Aalborg thrilled me no end. Fantastic.
Lou Reed? I like him - watched an uneven concert in Aarhus in ... 2000(?).

Cohen as a poet/musician. (Cohen should perhaps land the Nobel Prize in Literature)

Dylan as a sign of the times throughout 5 and a half decades.
 
Dylan. Every time. Just listen to Every Grain Of Sand. From one of his worst albums! Blows most everyone else away.
 
I like Leonard Cohen a lot but it has to be Dylan for me, Masters of War, Blind Willie McTell, and so many other great songs, the man is a legend.
 
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