Taking readers behind Bob Dylan's familiar image as the enigmatic rebel of the 1960s, this book reveals a different view--that of a careful craftsman and student of the art of songwriting. Drawing on revelations from Dylan's memoir Chronicles and a variety of other sources, the author arrives at a radically new interpretation of his body of work, which revolutionized American music and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan's songs are viewed as collages, ingeniously combining themes and images from American popular culture and European high culture.

Bob Dylan is one of the most significant figures in popular culture. In this book, the authors provide a multi-faceted analysis of his political art. They address Dylan's career as a whole, dealing with such themes as alienation, protest, non-conformity, the American Dream, modernity and postmodernism and pivotal moments of Dylan's career such as the ‘Judas’ accusation at the 1966 Manchester Free Trade Hall concert and Dylan’s comments on the need to aid American farmers at Live Aid, 1985. Dylan’s songs are analysed for their political meaning and for the songs in contemporary American political and popular culture. As notable specialists in the fields of political theory, literary criticism and popular culture the authors examine Dylan’s work from a variety of perspectives—aesthetic theory, Kant, Adorno, Lyotard, Lorca and Collingwood. Collectively, they question how Dylan’s work relates to the theory and practice of politics. In this second revised and expanded edition, the chapters have been revised and rewritten, with a new introduction exploring the enigma of Bob Dylan throughout the whole of his career and with a completely new Bob Dylan Timeline integrating Dylan’s life, songs and actions into the historical events that shaped his views. Two new chapters have been added, one focusing on the late Dylan, Masked and Anonymous and Love and Theft and another on Dylan at Live Aid and his stance on Farm Aid. This book is a must for anyone seriously interested in the legendary Bob Dylan.

Can a song change a nation? In 1964, Marvin Gaye, record producer William “Mickey” Stevenson, and Motown songwriter Ivy Jo Hunter wrote “Dancing in the Street.” The song was recorded at Motown’s Hitsville USA Studio by Martha and the Vandellas, with lead singer Martha Reeves arranging her own vocals. Released on July 31, the song was supposed to be an upbeat dance recording—a precursor to disco, and a song about the joyousness of dance. But events overtook it, and the song became one of the icons of American pop culture. The Beatles had landed in the U.S. in early 1964. By the summer, the sixties were in full swing. The summer of 1964 was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the beginning of the Vietnam War, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and the lead-up to a dramatic election. As the country grew more radicalized in those few months, “Dancing in the Street” gained currency as an activist anthem. The song took on new meanings, multiple meanings, for many different groups that were all changing as the country changed. Told by the writer who is legendary for finding the big story in unlikely places, Ready for a Brand New Beat chronicles that extraordinary summer of 1964 and showcases the momentous role that a simple song about dancing played in history.

The 1970s saw a wave of singer-songwriters flood the airwaves and concert halls across the United States. This book organizes the stories of approximately 150 artists whose songs created the soundtrack to people's lives during the decade that forever shaped musical composition. Some well-known, others less known, these artists were the song-poets and storytellers who wrote their own music and lyrics. Featuring biographical information and discography overviews for each artist, this is the only one-volume encyclopedic overview of this topic. Featured artists include Carole King and James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Gordon Lightfoot, Elvis Costello and dozens of other song-poets of the seventies.

Intended for researchers and practitioners in interaction design, this book shows how Bayesian models can be brought to bear on problems of interface design and user modelling. It introduces and motivates Bayesian modelling and illustrates how powerful these ideas can be in thinking about human-computer interaction, especially in representing and manipulating uncertainty. Bayesian methods are increasingly practical as computational tools to implement them become more widely available, and offer a principled foundation to reason about interaction design. The book opens with a self-contained tutorial on Bayesian concepts and their practical implementation, tailored for the background and needs of interaction designers. The contributed chapters cover the use of Bayesian probabilistic modelling in a diverse set of applications, including improving pointing-based interfaces; efficient text entry using modern language models; advanced interface design using cutting-edge techniques in Bayesian optimisation; and Bayesian approaches to modelling the cognitive processes of users.

This book provides a genealogical perspective on various forms of mind reading in different settings. We understand mind reading in a broad sense as the twentieth-century attempt to generate knowledge of what people held in their minds – with a focus on scientifically-based governmental practices. This volume considers the techniques of mind reading within a wider perspective of discussions about technological innovation within neuroscience, the juridical system, “occult” practices and discourses within the wider field of parapsychology and magical beliefs. The authors address the practice of, and discourses on, mind reading as they form part of the consolidation of modern governmental techniques. The collected contributions explore the question of how these techniques have been epistemically formed, institutionalized, practiced, discussed, and how they have been used to shape forms of subjectivities – collectively through human consciousness or individually through the criminal, deviant, or spiritual subject. The first part of this book focuses on the technologies and media of mind reading, while the second part addresses practices of mind reading as they have been used within the juridical sphere. The volume is of interest to a broad scholarly readership dealing with topics in interdisciplinary fields such as the history of science, history of knowledge, cultural studies, and techniques of subjectivization.

Both Dylan and Cohen have been a presence on the music and poetry landscape spanning six decades. This book begins with a discussion of their contemporary importance, and how they have sustained their enduring appeal as performers and recording artists. The authors argue that both Dylan and Cohen shared early aspirations that mirrored the Beat Generation. They sought to achieve the fame of Dylan Thomas, who proved a bohemian poet could thrive outside the academy, and to live his life of unconditional social irresponsibility. While Dylan's and Cohen's fame fluctuated over the decades, it was sustained by self-consciously adopted personas used to distance themselves from their public selves. This separation of self requires an exploration of the artists' relation to religion as an avenue to find and preserve inner identity. The relationship between their lyrics and poetry is explored in the context of Federico García Lorca's concept of the poetry of inspiration and the emotional depths of 'duende.' Such ideas draw upon the dislocation of the mind and the liberation of the senses that so struck Dylan and Cohen when they first read the poetry and letters of Arthur Rimbaud and Lorca. The authors show that performance and the poetry are integral, and the 'duende,' or passion, of the delivery, is inseparable from the lyric or poetry, and common to Dylan, Cohen and the Beat Generation.