Two Bobs

In Competition No. 2502 you were invited to submit a review by a critic identifying the literary precursor(s) to a popular music star of your choice.

I was originally going to stipulate that the entry be in the style of a rock critic to winkle out the hipsters among you (although Christopher Ricks, whom I pegged the comp. to, was coming at Dylan from the perspective of an academic). But unsure how much of a crossover there would be between the readership of The Spectator and that of the NME, I lost my nerve and plumped instead for ‘critic’, which seemed to cover all bases. In general, the literary canon that rock critics draw on is fairly narrow — Ballard, Burroughs, Baudelaire, Baudrillard — but Jon Savage casts the net a bit wider in this month’s Word: ‘I mean, you read The Sorrows of Young Werther and it’s like a Smiths lyric.