Unknowable and unbounded. Credit: Michael Kovac/WireImage
“Genius is a terrible word, a word they think will make me like them,” said Bob Dylan in 1966. Fifty years later, the Swedish Academy discovered that he had not revised his position on fulsome acclaim. When Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, he didn’t acknowledge the honour for two weeks, and then refused to attend the ceremony, reducing the Swedish Academy to the plaintive status of autograph-hunters waiting by the stage door.
He finally sent the committee a pre-recorded lecture just before the deadline, perhaps only because otherwise he would have had to forfeit the prize money. “I think it’s fair to say that his reaction so far has been rude and arrogant,” grumbled one academy member that October. “He is who he is.”
He is who he is. Bob will be Bob. For Dylan’s admirers, his freewheeling attitude to social niceties is not just part of the package but positive proof of his brilliance. The New York Times described his cold-shouldering of the Nobel as “a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like”, which would be news to the likes of Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney. All simpering sell-outs, presumably.
As Dylan turns 80 today, other writers will tell you how he single-handedly redrew the parameters of song-writing by giving rock’n’roll the lyrical ambition of poetry, etcetera, and they will be right. As an artist he is untouchable. But I don’t want to add to the mountain of praise that he finds such an awful burden. While I’m a great admirer of Dylan, I could never call myself a fan because I know what he thinks of fans and I’m not into unrequited love.
I saw him headline Hyde Park in 2019, which one Dylan veteran assured me was an unusually convivial affair because the great man was seen to smile occasionally and didn’t turn his back on the audience. Joan Baez has said that he looks on stage “as though he’d rather be in a dark parlour, playing chess; perhaps in a sense he is”.
Dylan’s fans are practised in lowering the bar. A crowd-pleasing set of beloved hits? Grow up. A hello, goodbye or thanks-for-coming? Dream on. He is the only artist I know of who routinely disfigures the melodies of his classic songs, often beyond recognition. At Hyde Park, my friend said that he was hoping to hear Make You Feel My Love and I had to inform him that Dylan had already played it. During the chorus of Like a Rolling Stone, the crowd staged a joyful mutiny by singing the standard tune regardless of what Dylan was doing on stage, but I sensed no resentment in it.
We all knew what we were signing up for and I had a good time. But I do marvel at his motivations. He must know that on any given night he could trigger an explosion of love with just a few words and a familiar melody, but he never does. He leaves it all on the table.
In interviews, too, Dylan is a master of not giving people what they want. Paul McCartney and Bono will melt the ice and pretend they’re having a friendly chat between equals. But Dylan, by all accounts, is very happy to impress on you that he is Bob Dylan and you are not.
David Hepworth wrote about a typically frosty 1985 encounter: “One of his great strengths is that he gives the impression of genuinely not caring what you or anybody else thinks of him. This must be a natural reaction to having spent most of your life surrounded by people who are desperate to please you.”
But I think that’s too kind. If it were natural, then every superstar would behave like that. Leonard Cohen — no less complex, no less great — was the perfect gentlemen in old age. Bruce Springsteen’s charm is legendary. One can always be decent.
It’s said that Dylan is extremely shy and awkward around strangers but he can be a cold fish with his peers, too. I once heard an anecdote about a rock star who met Dylan for dinner in an English pub with their respective girlfriends and spent almost the entire evening eating in silence. Driving home, the rock star’s girlfriend assumed it had been a mortifying disaster until he said cheerfully, “Well, I thought Bob was on great form.”
I’ve never heard anyone say he was surprisingly nice and down-to-earth, nor envied anyone who has met him. Digging around for evidence of kindness, I found Cerys Matthews once said that a thoughtful call from Dylan had helped rescue her from drug addiction, but I wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice.
Dylan’s personal unpleasantness has been remarkably consistent. As a hungry up-and-comer in the New York folk scene, he was a manipulative schemer who sought out people who could help him, only to discard them once they had fulfilled their purpose. According to folksinger Ian Tyson, who met him in 1961, “Dylan was a little obnoxious jerk in many ways.”
Once he became the scene’s unrivalled star, he had licence to be a bully. “He started using bayonets on people,” said the sister of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo. “He’d find their vulnerable spots, and just demolish them.” According to Baez, another mistreated girlfriend, “he was rarely tender, and seldom reached out to anticipate another’s needs.”
It’s hard, therefore, to put his rudeness down to the intolerable pressure of being worshipped as the voice of his generation. He was cruellest to those who were nice to him. In Don’t Look Back, DA Pennebaker’s classic documentary of his 1965 UK tour, Dylan’s murderous disdain cuts down Baez, Donovan and any journalist who crosses his path. “What a jerk Bob Dylan was in 1965,” wrote Roger Ebert when the film was reissued in 1998. “What an immature, self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey.”
Of course, there are plenty of people who watch Don’t Look Back and see the ultimate incorruptible renegade sticking it to the phonies who would waste his time and dilute his art. Around this time, Dylan’s personal unpleasantness became intertwined with his artistic integrity. Brilliant artists were expected to be jerks, or at least their jerkishness was not held against them. Sarcastic John was cooler than genial Paul. The Rolling Stones were positively demonic.
Dylan came of age in a period coloured by existentialism, when an untameable, solitary outlaw was the thing to be. Being difficult meant that you refused to conform to the norms of a corrupt society — and a sense of humour, even when it’s weaponised, goes a long way. (Peter Grant, 1973: “Hi Bob, I manage Led Zeppelin.” Dylan: “Hey man, I don’t come to you with my problems.”)
Perhaps, while songwriting is the core of Dylan’s genius, rudeness is his superpower. A more people-pleasing character would not have been able to break the hearts of the folk community that had nurtured him by going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and turning his back on protest songs, nor write songs as groundbreakingly ruthless as “Masters of War” and “Positively 4th Street”.
His musical contemporaries, like his wives and girlfriends, discovered that his obsession with personal freedom outweighed any sense of commitment or loyalty, and the rest of us, safely outside his blast radius, got some phenomenal music out of it. To thine ownself be true — and fuck everyone else.
I find it impossible to imagine a new artist getting away with behaving like this. It may seem paradoxical now that public discourse feels so much nastier, but celebrity culture is far nicer than it used to be. Today’s stars are expected to join James Corden in Carpool Karaoke, cheerfully read out abusive tweets on Jimmy Kimmel, play well with others on Graham Norton’s sofa and generally impress on the public that they are gracious, collegiate souls who owe everything to their fans.
After a celebrity dies, the anecdotes that go viral are usually tales of selfless generosity and self-deprecating good humour, while the classic “troubled genius” gets increasingly short shrift. Consider the recent canonisation of Dolly Parton, once a figure of fun, now an avatar of decency who funds literacy programmes and vaccine research. Kanye West is perhaps pop’s last jerk-genius and he doesn’t get half as much leeway as Dylan.
I hope I don’t sound moralistic. In this current period of reckoning with the bad behaviour of artists, being simply rude feels like a minor offence. But nor do I understand the masochistic compulsion to make excuses for the man and interpret his failings as an index of ethical purity.
I am trying to state what seems to me to be an obvious fact, which is that we will never again see a star on this scale who gives so little and is so widely admired for it. By making it abundantly clear that he doesn’t need any of us — not journalists, not fans, not peers — Dylan remains unknowable and unbound in a way that I suspect some modern celebrities secretly envy. That is a unique kind of power, albeit faintly inhuman.
So happy birthday Bob, you magnificent jerk. I’m sorry I called you a genius back there but, in my defence, I don’t want to make you like me. You are who you are.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI just hope one of the candidates will have the guts to talk about Covid and what it did to us (and I am not talking about the virus itself).
What is it you want to hear them say?
I think the reaction to Covid was the single biggest affront to civil liberties imaginable and fiscally we are reaping the rewards now with a trashed economy.
Neither of which are conservative policies as far as I’m concerned.
Hearing them acknowledge even half of what you just said would be good.
I would like to hear the leadership candidates acknowledging that much of what we are facing now is a result of decisions, and those decisions were not good ones, and certainly not conservative ones.
We have to understand that the deception was almost worldwide and that we were just one of many countries who fell for it mainly through fearmongering. Boris did what he did at the time but we fared a lot better than some of the countries. There is the other side to it that not many understand even now.
A lot of us now know the full truth aside from main media. The country was virtually bankrupted because of a kind of flu. Millions of us have had covid now with no great harm. The flu affected the same people that Covid did but at least they had a proper vaccination to deal with it without this mRNA contraption which wasn’t a real vax and which has caused it’s own harm if the truth be known. .
Whilst i agree with your contention about the affront to civil liberties, why use the phrase “a trashed economy”? It’s very, very far from “trashed”. Yes, of course we’re in an inflationary cycle and have a huge burden of debt, but that’s not the economy – which is the ability of a country to produce goods and services which are needed to fund public services and provide sufficient scope for private enterprise. Latest reports indicate that of the G7, the GDP of the UK is outperforming the other member states.
Give it time, and an end to the conflict in Ukraine, or at least a means by which the global economy can come to terms with it should it take some time. In the context of who should be the next PM and what that means for Conservatism, i’d contend that we’re pretty handily placed in comparison with most first world nations. Talking ourselves down with such phrases as “trashed economy” is not the way to go. We need realism of course, and to steer ourselves clear of a Labour+X others coalition. Whatever Conservatives do to prevent that, and provide a vision for future prosperity and secure defences, will be the new Toryism.
Agreed, yet there is little evidence that a day of reckoning is coming anytime soon. Regarding policies, the conservatives implemented all of the covid rules and are solely responsible for the fallout. The fact that other parties may have been even worse is immaterial, as is the excuse that they were somehow pushed along the path by the media and public opinion. Lately, I have noticed some of the keen lockdowners, maskers, compulsory testers and shielders making a very unwelcome reappearance. Looking back on Jeremy Hunts previous pronouncements on how to handle covid makes me shudder at the thought of what may come this Winter. I also recall Sunak being interviewed about furlough, when questioned about possible fraud he replied “nobody would take advantage during a time of national crisis” Javid and Gove were pushing for tighter covid restriction in December 2021, the list goes on.
If this is really what Sunak said then god help us all if he becomes PM.
The contrast with other parties’ policies is hardly ‘immaterial’! That is just an assertion. In the real world there can be better or worse policies, and we have often to choose between greater or worse evils. For all the hyperbolic comparisons with China – we were a long way from that – and even many of our European neighbours. We do actually need to give some credit to many in the Tory Party, one of the few parties in the entire western world which at least had an open, albeit often nasty debate, and even Johnson to some extent. It could have been very, very much worse. We were always allowed to go out for exercise for a start. My French friends were forbidden to use parks or markets.
Here is the Chinese approach: you are not be allowed to leave your home for ANY reason, you depend on rations from the state, you may be forced into a covid camp, and and even your children may be taken form you.
That will mean admitting mistakes and taking responsibility for them, which they will never do.
I don’t know. I think some might now be emboldened to speak the truth without Boris there. Obviously those who backed the narrative might want to save face but there are others who have nothing to lose and indeed a lot to gain by speaking the truth.
To the contrary, the world is well stocked with politicians willing to take responsibility for *someone else’s* mistakes, and a change in leadership opens up this option for all the new candidates for PM.
Quite so. Getting out of the frying pan was only half the battle. We still have to avoid falling into the fire.
Boris’ finest hour was when he said we (or they?) needed to “recalibrate”. If he’d actually done that as soon as he realised the need for it, perhaps he’d have held on to the Tory leadership.
It seems to me that both the Conservatives and Labour are struggling to define their purpose and direction.
Which is ludicrous, given that in Britain we literally put the clue in the name when it comes to politics.
Every election cycle, when the parties cast around with pointless polling and focus groups to try to come up with policy ideas I get so infuriated. JUST TURN AROUND AND LOOK AT THE SIGN YOU ARE STANDING IN FRONT OF DANG IT!!
It’s not a riddle, wrapped in an enigma. Conservatives — implement classically conservative policy, and conserve the financial and social resources of the nation. Labour — implement policies that benefit the working class… you know, the labour.
Muppets, one and all.
The Heritage party sounds good although small and encapsulates all the policies that I think are important.
Perhaps many have lost their own direction in life and can hardly lead the country.
The article lists Burke’s early interests as promoting religious toleration and self-determination, refusing to avow violence against the state, and opposing monopoly power.
It then bizarrely states that “It is hard, then, to find in Burkean principles the origins of conservatism.”
Really? The positions listed above give a decent summary of mainstream conservative thought.
In the modern world, they would be opposed by neo-feudal despots, not conservatives.
Yup. And his association with the 18th century Whigs also doesn’t undermine the ideological continuity of his thought with modern conservatism. Also, I’m pretty sure US conservatives are well aware of his sympathy for the American revolution – that’s surely part of the reason why he’s popular among US conservatives.
Richard Bourke provides evidence that undermines his own case. Maybe the reason why Bourke can’t find “conservative principles which have retained their integrity through the ages” is because he chooses not to see them.
Bourke’s book on Burke is excellent, but marred by just the problem you mention. It is impossible for a certain sort of academic (well, almost all academics) to credit conservatism with any positive qualities. Thus Burke’s admirable support for the American Revolution, opposition to the EIC’s greed, and concern for the Catholics of Ireland, are evidence that he couldn’t possibly be an inspiration to conservatives. As someone who is conservative and reveres Burke precisely because of his passionate positions on the issues above, I see no such conflict.
Thatcher was essentially hi jacked by the Orange Lodge Unionists in Ulster, and their mutual lower middle class identity, … and lower middle class dislike of Catholics also alive in Britain even then: this skewed her attitude to The Troubles, and was just ammunition to the PIRA.. and its recruitment, to heavy cost to The Army over many years.
Not so I’m afraid; By the time (Lady) Thatcher appeared, the war in Ireland had well passed its peak, with 1972 being by far the bloodiest year. By 1979 things had reached “ an acceptable level of violence” and would continue to do so until the end.
Incidentally ‘most’ of the Army rather enjoyed themselves in this novel little war, and it cannot be counted as a “heavy cost” as you would have it.
It also rather neatly solved the problem of what was the Army going to do after the withdrawal from Aden in November 1967.
Then why did secret peace talks have to be held by former Coldstreamer Whitelaw and ex Blue Channon with McG and A? without Thatcher’s knowledge?
Yeah, the influence of the left-wing caricature of conservatism, very popular in academia, may explain Bourke’s baffling characterisation of the causes Burke supported as somehow inconsistent with the conservative tradition.
Those causes appear to be based on principles which came to define the actual limited-government conservative tradition, but maybe not the caricature of conservatism popular in academia, and Bourke may be using the caricature as his comparison.
One cannot have a static policy based on some idea of conservatism. Life isn’t like that. There are no well worn tracks. Basically honesty and commitment and putting in those who have a good track record and who know the difference between good and evil will surely help us. I don’t know in these days that even a good education will work judging by what they are serving up these days.
One thing that’s perfectly clear is that whoever gets the top job now, regardless of what they say they’ll do if elected, once in office they’ll implement the same Globalist WEF policies, just like Boris Johnson, just like Theresa May and just like David Cameron. The Tories and Labour are both completely and utterly polluted with Globalist dross, and unless the British people wake up and stop voting for them, then we’re finished as a nation and a people.
I wonder how the ‘Red Wall’ views all this sanctimonious nonsense?
Johnson may well have been a feckless buffoon, but at least he had charisma. Do any of the other candidates have even a glimmer of the latter? All Johnson has to do is start acting like a real Conservative, which should not be difficult for such a naked opportunist.
Perhaps he should really call an unprecedented General Election, or are we yet again to repeat the disgrace of the Thatcher- Major putsch? And waste another five to ten years?
Heraclitus apparently believed that everything changes. From which you can argue that things eventually change into their opposites.
So Labour appear to be moving away from aligning with the working man and the Conservatives appear to be moving away from aligning with the gentry.
Boris seemed to realise this but he was (now obviously) unable to bring the conservative Conservatives along with him.
At the moment both Labour and the Conservatives appear to be contending for the middle class, with the activists pulling for the extremes. It will be a brave PM that can pull it all together.
No, Boris was unable to govern. Had he been he’d still be PM
Was Thatcher “able to govern?”..
As students of the history of ideas will recognise, the most basic lesson is that we have to do our own thinking for ourselves. While interesting and useful in many ways, the study of figures like Burke, Rousseau, and the American founders just reveals how alien their world was to our own. What, really, can the Tory party gain from orientating its politics to what Burke thought about the East India Company, or the French and American revolutions? It’s as strange as thinking that they should constantly be in thrall to Churchill and asking ‘What would Winston do?’ about things like coronavirus. It’s bizarre.
That’s what I think as well. These figures may inspire us but we need something within us as well. If we haven’t got that we shall be just copying someone else which isn’t an asset.
The nub of the economic debate seems to revolve around requests for higher cap-ex spending for the north versus the clamour for tax cuts elsewhere. .
Surely tax-breaks for all businesses are good, whether in the north or south? And wouldn’t intelligent cap-ex projects in the north further add to its economic output over time?
Can someone please enlighten me please?
The north was the birth place of the industrial revolution, the Manchester School and free trade. Perhaps we need to change the conversation with regard to the north and stop treating it as a state supplicant.
Surely we want all regions of the UK to be as powerful and self-reliant as possible. The north-south divide has been an open wound across the UK for far too long.
The south is partly made up of lots of northerners who do well (and even Scots and every other ethnic minority) so a geographical division is not always that helpful.
Dumping Boris Johnson will save Conservatism, not destroy it.
I agree, Rob. In my humble opinion, Johnson was a clever opportunist, not a conservative.
Thatcher was a transformational PM. I will never agree with her or her methods, but she had fresh ideas, and huge energy, which helped her to push through her modernization of the UK economy. In his way, Blair was a similar leader, with great energy end drive. Of course, Blair’s transformational project ended in a pile of sand in Babylon. Thatcher’s ideas and Blair’s ideas were very much of their time – tax-cuts and stamping out trade unions, or public-sector expansion funded by taxes on the City. These are now very dated ideas. The fact that the main contenders for the leadership of the Conservative party are reaching for some of these stale ideas shows just how empty the Conservatives’ intellectual cupboard is. At this rate, they are heading for a long spell in opposition.
I think the easiest dichotomy to keep hold of as being the origins of the Tory party, is the “Court” and “Country” groupings (it would be anachronistic to call them political parties) of the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries: the “Tories” were the country grouping – essentially the landed aristocracy and gentry who did not seek (or at least receive) the patronage from the Court under the control of the Whiggish Robinocracy of Walpole. Thus in origin the Tories saw themselves as standing for the old country against the centralising and legislating government, a theme which has remained fairly consistent as the grouping evolved into a political machine in the nineteenth century, notwithstanding that the Whig monopoly on power was broken by then. Burke’s position as somebody who saw that the Revolutionaries of France would quickly become a terrorising central power is a classic Tory position. Margaret Thatcher, as is often remarked, although she had some Tory traits (an affection or nostalgia for local civic action for example) was in economics a free-market liberal. Its rather difficult to judge how “Tory” the current candidates are because they are all trying to frame themselves by reference to whether they are tax cutters or tax raisers, rather than expressing any wider view of the relationship between government and society. Kemi Badenoch sounds like she is probably a Tory; I think Rishi is a Whig. No idea about the rest.
Here’s a good gauge for determining today whether a political leader, media organization, university, corporation or other high-impact person/institution has any credibility: does she/he/it take Chinese money? If the answer is yes, and it usually is, then all the Tory vs Labour, Democrat vs Republican, Left vs Right palaver is moot. Is our future going to be a Black Mirror dystopia? Are we going to suffer THE EVENT few will survive? The answer rests with our response to China’s ambitions. All this other BS – the political tribalism, the culture wars, the addiction to tech – are deliberate distractions that weaken the West, which is just how China likes it. Will they prevail? Depends on who’s cashing their checks.
I cannot but think, and perhaps believe, that a very large number of modern Conservative Party supporters and voters are actually far more ” Fox Whiggish” and ” Old Liberal” as was Churchill at one stage, than ” Tory”? I am, but perhaps the critical issue here is the sequestration of the term Liberal, in and by the ‘ Meeja’ to mean ” Freedom to stop and prevent the expression of all that we do not like”….?
Burke broke with Fox; so should the Conservative Party.
What we have here is a history lesson which doesn’t really affect our present or future. There is nothing magical about Tory. It is more about honesty and lack of deception even the deception picked up by MP’s about woke and so called zero carbon etc. I am greatly surpised that gay marriage came from the Tories. Yes it has changed drastically. We can no longer rely on what we used to concerning the Tories. We can only pray and hope that the country stays on the right road.
No mention of Peel, or did I miss it
Tory Covid conspiracists running riot here.