Ewan MacColl, Sing Out, 1965:
"At their best, our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists, working inside disciplines formulated over an extended period of time. It seems to me that the present crop of contemporary American songs has been made by writers who are either (a) unaware of these disciplines; (b) incapable of working inside these disciplines; or (c) are at pains to destroy them.
"'But what of Bobby Dylan?" scream the outraged teenagers of all ages. Well, I have watched with fascination the meteoric rise of this American idol and I am still unable to see in him anything other than a youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such 10th rate drivel. "But the poetry!" What poetry? The cultivated illiteracy of his topical songs or the embarrassing 4th grade schoolboy attempts at free verse?
I have dealt with Dylan at some length since, for, me, he exemplifies contemporary American song writing, a movement where journalism is more important than art, where flabby sentimentality and shrill self-pity take the place of passion."

"Folk music is a word I can't use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people." -- Bob Dylan, interview with Nat Hentoff, 1966.