ROCKSOUND

Who is the better songwriter? Bob Dylan or John Lennon?

                      


While you are weighing the greatness of these two legends, my friends let me take you down to Strawberry Fields err memory lane.

Long ago when man is still living in the remnants of world war II, a Swiss chemist conceived what he did not expect to be a hallucinogenic drug.  He took some for himself and eureka! the first ever LSD high known to man is recorded.  Our friends over at Wikipedia said that the effects of it are, in all quotes verbatim "Some psychological effects may include an experience of radiant colors, objects and surfaces appearing to ripple or "breathe," colored patterns behind the eyes, a sense of time distorting (time seems to be stretching, repeating itself, changing speed or stopping), crawling geometric patterns overlaying walls and other objects, morphing objects, a sense that one's thoughts are spiraling into themselves, loss of a sense of identity or the ego (known as "ego death"), and powerful, and sometimes brutal, psycho-physical reactions interpreted by some users as reliving their own birth. Many users experience a dissolution between themselves and the "outside world".This unitive quality may play a role in the spiritual and religious aspects of LSD. The drug sometimes leads to disintegration or restructuring of the user's historical personality and creates a mental state that some users report allows them to have more choice regarding the nature of their own personality."  And it is being use for medical purposes and for art projects.  Art projects epecially rock musicians.

What exactly is rock music?  No I dont want to give a genre description to it because I dont want an uproar of disagreement for we all know since its berth its scope had been disputed.  Anyway I'll just bravely declare that the greatest rock bands of all time are The Beatles for creating a vast theme on rock songs;  Led Zeppelin for revolutionizing the sound of rock;  The Who for the fiery stage performances; The Rolling Stones for if we dont have them we surely wont have Aerosmith and the likes and The Jimi Hendrix Experience for giving us Jimi Hendrix.  If they did not exist probably we will be stuck in a world of guys chanting about how flashy their blings are.  Thanks to them we had Panic! At The Disco, Oasis, Greenday, Fall Out Boy and the list of their obviously influenced band goes on.  Their music lives on not only in the hearts of their living hardcore fans but also in the younger generation.  Rock as they say is the music of the philosophically gifted and it has definitely altered how generations behaved.  It would only take a poet like Bob Dylan to put into words the greatness of rock music.

The heyday of rock music, the popularity of LSD and the height of the youth's idealism for freedom mix them all and you get an intensified era of creativity, revolution, greatness and acid rock.  Acid rock or psychedellic rock is a form of rock music in reference to LSD, acid being the slang for LSD and psychedellic being the term coined describing LSD's effects.  It can also connote music recorded under the influence of LSD or intended to be experienced in conjunction with LSD.  These associations can be a matter of the musicians intention, the listeners intention or even just a general perception of the person using the term.  The lyrics often deals with drug induced psychological themes as well as references to mind altering techniques often characterized by offbeat style, vivid imagery and sometimes musical or sound effects.  Acid rock contains that hypnotic groove that the musician singing it and the listener can "get lost" within a song.

Get trippin with some of the high-ly listened acid songs:

Purple Daze- The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Progressive Acid- Pink Floyd
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles
Light My Fire- The Doors
Brain Damage- Pink Floyd

We might not have LSD today(though we still have cannabis) but we still have the music almost similar to the effects of any drug meant to alter mental states.  Well as someone I cant remember said it before "music is a safe type of high" thats what we have today and in some ways I could say thats the edge of our generations rock music over the past sex and drugs rock music. Although I could also say that the discovery of LSD is certainly one of the defining moments of rock music.

Going back to the best songwriter, I'd vote for Bob Dylan.  How bout you?