Your front-page article on the range of language used by various songwriters was interesting but showed little understanding of Bob Dylan’s greatness as a lyricist (Report, 24 July). One of Dylan’s major accomplishments is being able to pare down language to a minimum while at the same time achieving a richness of meaning comparable to that achieved by the metaphysical poets. The beauty of songs such as the superficially simple If Dogs Run Free in part derives from the contrast between an immense thematic complexity and the unencumbered precision of the language used to present it. It’s not always the breadth of the words that matters, but what’s done with them.
David Weir
Stroud, Gloucestershire
• It’s one thing to compare the lyrical vocabularies of artists who, like Bob Dylan and Kanye West, write most or all of their own output. It makes less sense to include artists who write very little of their own material: for instance, the vast majority of Celine Dion’s songs – whether in French or English – have been provided by other writers.
So it would be interesting to see a revised analysis, comparing the lyrical vocabularies of actual songwriters; and I would hope and expect to see the name of Smokey Robinson high on this list.
However, if one includes artists like Julio Iglesias and Andrea Bocelli who record in more than one language, it’s surely no surprise that they will feature strongly. After all, even “I love you” in six different languages is going to show up as 18 words.
Peter Halfpenny
Whitstable, Kent
• I’ve never read anything so daft as the use of vocabulary size to compare Kanye West favourably to Bob Dylan. A greetings card reproduction of a country garden doubtless contains more colours than Picasso and Rothko combined, and today I saw a frozen pizza with about 30 more ingredients than Nigel Slater would use. So what?
Brian Smith
Berlin, Germany
• You have compare Dylan with others, apparently on the basis that their work includes “hundreds more words”. This dumbing down of literary judgment is paralleled only by the 2nd Duke of Gloucester on the publication of another volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “Another damned thick square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr Gibbon?”
Christopher Frew
Edinburgh
• John Lennon once said Dylan was “Stuck inside a dictionary with the thesaurus blues again”. The best lyricists use the fewest words to the greatest effect. “To be or not to be…”
Roger Osborne
Scarborough, North Yorkshire
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