A self-made man. Val Wilmer/Redferns.
The American birthright entails both the freedom and often times the necessity of making yourself up from scratch. Many of America’s most famous heroes were self-made men, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. The same is true for the protagonists of America’s best-loved tales, from Huckleberry Finn to Jay Gatsby. Where Europeans defined themselves, both individually and collectively, through bloodlines and attachment to the soil, Americans defined themselves through a shared freedom from the past and an accompanying licence to roam.
Where Americans were born and who their parents are has always been much less important than how they greeted the present moment, with one eye fixed on the road ahead and the other on the stars. Walt Whitman’s great “Song of Myself”, written in 1855 and unfolding over 52 stanzas, including accounts of sea battles and slavery, mentions not a single word about the speaker’s parents, or even what their names were.
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which “Song of Myself” is contained, is the fountainhead of American poetics, particularly in the 20th century. Its distinctive echo can be heard everywhere after the Second World War, from the Beats to the novels of Saul Bellow, to the highbrow confessional poems of John Berryman and Frank O’Hara. In Rock and Roll music, Whitman’s greatest late 20th-century heir was undoubtedly Bob Dylan, who eerily reproduced both Whitman’s continent-spanning metre and his love of playful self-contradiction. Try reading nearly anything Whitman wrote in Dylan’s distinctive nasal tone, and the kinship will be plain.
James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is merely the latest of a series of films that have attempted to grapple with the sometimes gratifying, often alienating mixture of freedom and vertigo inherent in the American birthright through the character of the man from nowhere. If the bright side of this character can be glimpsed in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, arguably the founding work of American literature, in Whitman’s all-embracing cosmic self, and in the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger, the darkness that can accompany freedom from the past isn’t hard to find either. Natty Bumppo, the frontiersman-killer of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, is the precursor to the ambivalent killer-hero of nearly every Western. Jay Gatsby’s invented self is ultimately more loyal and virtuous than the Long Island snobs who attend his glittering parties; it is also lie that ends in death.
The character of Bob Dylan, the boy who ostensibly learned to play music from circus performers passing through Hibbing, Minnesota and then re-named himself after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (a fact that Dylan strenuously denied for years before admitting to in his charming autobiography Chronicles) was more or less fully-fashioned even before the young performer set off to New York City to find Woody Guthrie and set the often drearily earnest world of American folk music on its ear. America has never really known Robert Zimmerman, the man who invented Bob Dylan. It has only known Bob Dylan.
So why did the 19-year-old Zimmerman choose to become Dylan? The answer, as he told 60 Minutes interviewer Ed Bradley 20 years ago, was because those are the rules of American selfhood. “You call yourself what you want to call yourself,” Dylan responded. “This is the land of the free.”
Dylan’s self-invented character of a punk Woody Guthrie, or as a rock and roll Walt Whitman, was wildly influential in his moment, for reasons that take a moment to recover. Meanwhile, his best songs have lost none of their immediacy. Working in the genre of “original folk music” that he more or less invented, he set the rules for rock songwriting for the next half century while writing two or three dozen major and minor classics that uniquely merited the awarding of a Nobel Prize for Literature, despite the formal and functional gulf that separates song lyrics from novels and poetry.
The rules of a “Dylan song” have remained remarkably consistent over time, bringing together the worlds of Woody Guthrie, hipster downtown New York, American roots music, the blues, country and western, into a kind of primordial soup that Dylan could dip his brush into at will; he created deceptively off-hand-seeming compositions governed by a rueful romanticism and a bullet-proof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught.
It is also true that the alchemy by which singer-songwriters (itself an invention of the Sixties) do their thing tends to produce a period of startling peak creativity that lasts perhaps five years, often precluding the possibility of a second act. The Beatles produced all their great records within five years, as did the Rolling Stones. Jimi Hendrix’s entire career lasted four years, as did Kurt Cobain’s.
For artists who survive their creative peak, the reward is often an afterlife with lesser access to the divine. Part of Dylan’s spectacular self-awareness, which has only rarely faltered, is that he recognised the departure of the spirit much sooner than most; he never insisted that his newer songs were actually his best work. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs,” he admitted to Ed Bradley, of the classics he penned at his peak. “It’s a penetrating type of a magic, and I did it at one time.”
What’s left now, apart from the songs, is the distinctive voice, along with a repertoire of feints and dodges mixed with the occasional lip-curling hipster put-down. Onstage these days, the songwriter is often a gnomic shell, appearing to follow an internal logic by which he makes sense of himself to himself. Whatever those dialogues may be about, one suspects that the “real Bob Dylan” — whatever that means — of the singer’s youth was more sharper-edged and predatory than Timothée Chalamet’s cuddly, doe-eyed portrayal.
Still, Chalamet gets the look and the gestures right. He also nicely conveys the capacity for menace that the self-made man inherently contains. After all, if a person invents themselves from scratch, discarding their flesh-and-blood parents and origins in favour of their own self-invented mythos, then how much is that person likely to care about you? Not much. In his portrayal, Chalamet is notably faithful to the first and greatest portrayal of the character of Bob Dylan on film, which was by Bob Dylan himself, in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back — which smartly allowed Dylan to do the work of explaining himself. By contrast, I’m Not There, an annoying film by the supremely surface-orientated director Todd Haynes, a master of a colder type of irony, swallows the Dylan mythology whole, as some kind of sacrament of modern American selfhood — without understanding or explaining why that should be true, apart from the multiplicity and seeming discontinuities in the pop star’s character, which Haynes implies should each be respected individually, like a family of distinguished drag queens.
What Haynes misses, and Pennebaker viscerally understood — and Mangold clearly intimates, without wanting to emphasise it too strongly — is that Dylan, in both his music and his persona, found himself at the centre of the great intergenerational battle of the Sixties over the American gospel of individualism. For Dylan, the young man from Hibbing, the self that he invented out of his own materials was at once an entirely personal creation and at the same time represented his connection to a shared vision of America. He was a distinctly American individualist, just as Whitman was, and most great American-born artists are.
The materials he chose to work from were coded in ways that the young Dylan didn’t entirely recognise, though. Woody Guthrie wasn’t just a great American songwriter who spoke and sang in his own half-invented popular. The way that the young Robert Zimmerman might have imagined him. He was also a member of the Communist Party, which had its own uses for Guthrie’s persona and his art. The same was true of the parents of Dylan’s Greenwich Village girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who Dylan credited with educating him about racial discrimination and labour politics and other subjects that the young singer-songwriter professed to “not know much about”. While the great folk archivist Alan Lomax, whose materials became Dylan’s, was not a Communist, he was undoubtedly a preservationist who saw folk music not as raw material to be mined and re-mixed by a future rock and roll Whitman, but the rightful property of the oppressed.
In other words, as Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centred around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.
In doing so, Dylan turned his back on the certainties of Leftist politics in order to more fully become what he wanted to be in the first place, which was himself. Aside from being a singer-songwriter, who that person was was entirely his own business. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he once told a press conference at the height of the mania surrounding his decision to become a rock and roll artist and release “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna”, instead of additional helpings of Leadbelly covers. Neither Dylan nor the gathered reporters seemed able to disguise their glee at the proposition that he could simply make music, free of politics or the demands of being a prophet. “Elvis, I could easily see myself as him,” Dylan mused more than once. “But a prophet? Nah.”
It is only fair to Bob Dylan, the man, however self-made, to acknowledge how much the decision to break free from the heavily politicised aesthetics of the American Left, and the expectations and demands that came with it, must have cost him, both as a human being and as an artist. The assertion of the greater truth of his own art over the demands of the collective must have been, in many dimensions, a never-ending nightmare. Such was the price of the creative freedom that he sought and gained.
Was it worth it? For Dylan and for America, the answer is yes. Dylan’s legendary Basement Tapes with the Band, which surfaced as a lost corpus of songs from somewhere deep in the American imagination, continue to speak to us now, as much as his albums from his creative peak do. The fact that he maintained his place in the national imagination up through his 80s, speaks to a personal strength that is uniquely visible now, and makes it possible for his music to be heard by a new generation. In an era in which cookie-cutter Leftist politics similarly declares its pre-eminence over the aesthetic whims of mere artists, whose job is to bend the knee and crank out Shepherd Fairey-like propaganda in the interests of the Party, Dylan’s struggle again resonates.
Dylan himself would most likely have as little interest in being portrayed as a refusenik against the demands of proto-wokism as he would in continuing to sing worker’s protest songs. He was more interested in being Elvis. Yet, his example feels especially potent now for the obvious reason that we are once again living in an age when the threats to the integrity of the self, and to artistic expression, from both the Left and Right are very obviously real, and it takes real courage to say no.
Dylan’s triumph in that fight was total. No one has ever been cooler than Bob Dylan, and no one since Walt Whitman wrote better lyrics that encompassed more of the American spirit. The folkies who wanted Dylan to continue to play acoustic folk and demonstrate for CORE, and who saw albums like Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks as betrayals of the party line, are plainly ridiculous figures, even as their present-day kin are easy to spot.
For those who knew Dylan, and who in one way or another had reason to see themselves as his peers, Dylan continues to represent the highest mountain in their American songwriting. Jimmy Webb, the great American songwriter, told me once of meeting Dylan at a party, whereupon Dylan pulled out a guitar and played Jimmy his version of “Wichita Lineman”, a Jimmy Webb song that could have also perhaps have been written by Dylan. When he was done, he looked at Webb expectantly. “What, now I’m supposed to play you one of your songs?” Webb shot back.
It’s weird to think that at 83, Bob Dylan is as relevant as ever to the country that gave him the freedom to invent himself. But it’s plainly true. That’s because America remained his greatest inspiration, and the place in the mind where he was always most at home. As he explained it, obliquely, in a long poem he wrote upon the death of his hero:
“You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital
And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown”
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SubscribeThere are a few odd typos/weird constructions in this piece.
” more sharper-edged ” for example.
Sounds fine to me.
The “more” is entirely unnecessary.
If several things are “sharper-edged”, one may be “more sharper-edged”, without being “most sharper-edged”. Or a “sharper-edged” blade can be further honed to become “more sharper-edged”. Perfectly fine construction.
Yes, with such verbiage you can allow a picture to form in the mind.
Cretin.
Ah, Dylan Shmillan. His greatest success was always suckering so many eloquent Boomer fanboys to gush endlessly about his ‘genius’ (And it always is boys who gullet the popular culture ‘genius’ bulldust and never ever spit it out, isn’t it; fangirls tend to rip the scales off their own eyes the moment they ruefully realise the ‘genius’ shtick was just garden-variety knicker-dropping grift). Sure, he wrote some very great songs indeed. And sure, he wrote an awful lot of utter dreck & sludge. He also, shamelessly, stole and rebadged as his own more than is usual in popular music, and was as cynically opportunist in his marketing and his careerism as any of his time. It’s always mystified me why Boomers so thoroughly drunk the Zimmerman Koolaid. I’m more than happy to ruefully respect him, mostly as just another nice middle-class Jewish kid who wanted to be rich n’ famous and in Show Biz. But I’m a*sed if I’m going to fall into cultural line like a doe-eyed groupie and lick his backside with the ‘timeless voice of a people’ guff. I don’t think he ever bought that himself. My hunch is that he would have put the phone down after getting the Nobel call…and p*ssed himself laughing, astounded that all these idiotic Germanic goyim still hadn’t got the very thickly laid-on joke.
I say all this as a fan. And as a gigging musician. The best Dylan is always just a pure joy to play, and people know it and love it, too. But the same applies to some of the songs from…Neil Young, the Stones, Taylor Swift, Radiohead, Stephen Stills, Childish Gambino, Billy Eilish…I dunno, insert whoever from popular music – historically or now – you personally happen to like. Whetever artistic genius springs from popular music – popular culture as a whole, really – comes much more from its collective audience’s projected responses, not its originating auteurs. I go nuts over the Beach Boys for exactly the same reason I get turned on by any girl called ‘Lisa’. On the whole the ‘cultural revolution’ metrics are upside down: what made that entire generation of ‘artists’ artists (and a few of them ‘geniuses’, or more commonly these days ‘iconic legends’ etc etc) was nothing more substantial than…mass production, mass distribution and mass (self) advertising. Sure, you had to have basic talent and craftsmanship – bluntly, Dylan is one of the least capable singers and guitar players ever to become a famous guitar-playing singer – but what you really need, to become recognised as a ‘genius’ in your own artistic lifetime…is a gullible/easily-impressed advertising and marketing arm.
If Dylan was a master of anything, it was the last of that triumvirate: advertising. In that sense he was in and of his times…a legend indeed. Maybe, sure, the ‘highest mountain’ of The Age of Narcissism.
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
All this sounds plausible until you try doing it yourself. How many people could write just one of those songs, let alone thousands.
You poor Boomers, you still don’t get it, do you. Your entire cultural world view was a banal trick of mass media marketing and epistemic narcissism. Good grief, you lot are more obtuse than Pavlov’s puppy.
**
Hey ChatGPT: Write the lyrics to a three minute ‘pop music’ song, on the theme of ‘musical genius in popular music forms of the 1960s’, in the style of Bob Dylan.
Title: Echoes of the Sixties
(Verse 1)
There’s a jukebox spinning in a corner café,
Whispering tales of a brighter day.
Lennon with his glasses, strumming up a fight,
Brian Wilson dreaming in the dead of night.
The colors burst, the vinyl turns,
Electric hearts and minds that yearn.
From a smoky room to the open skies,
The genius blooms, it never dies.
(Chorus)
Oh, the echoes of the sixties, they ring so true,
Where the poets and the rebels painted skies so blue.
With a six-string revolution, they rewrote the lines,
The chords of a century, in perfect time.
(Verse 2)
Dylan with a typewriter, words like a storm,
Hendrix bent the strings, broke the norm.
Motown’s rhythm made the whole world sway,
While Joni sketched life in shades of gray.
Oh, the Stones kept rolling, wild and free,
And the Beach Boys sang of eternity.
Each note, a spark, each beat, a flame,
Legends carved in the hall of fame.
(Chorus)
Oh, the echoes of the sixties, they ring so true,
Where the poets and the rebels painted skies so blue.
With a six-string revolution, they rewrote the lines,
The chords of a century, in perfect time.
(Bridge)
The Greenwich Village whispers, the Haight-Ashbury calls,
London’s swinging madness, breaking down the walls.
It wasn’t just the music, it was the fire inside,
A kaleidoscope of genius on the rising tide.
(Verse 3)
Now the world turns faster, but the songs remain,
A melody’s power is a timeless chain.
From the heart of the past to the dreams of now,
The genius of the sixties still shows us how.
(Chorus)
Oh, the echoes of the sixties, they ring so true,
Where the poets and the rebels painted skies so blue.
With a six-string revolution, they rewrote the lines,
The chords of a century, in perfect time.
(Outro)
So let the record spin, and let the voices play,
The genius of the sixties is here to stay.
Through the static of the years, the truth survives,
In the echoes of the music, the spirit thrives.
**
Hugh, I bet you a zillion bucks that if a half-decent Bob Dylan lookalike whined out that machine-generated slab of bilge on a ‘Legends of the Sixties’ World Tour stage, 99.9% of the Baby Boomers who could afford to fork out for the $650 Nostalgia Gold Class moshie seats would wet their pants in orgasmic bliss at the ‘genius’ of the man.
It was a trick of the mass media light, Hugh. There was the usual tinsy generational smattering of genuine genius in Dylan’s cohort. But he sure as sh*t wasn’t one of them. Brian Wilson, maybe.
Or maybe this. Maybe some wannabe modern era Lester Bangs – ‘gunslingers’, I think NME used to call rock writers, which is essentially a hip way of saying ‘pretentious w*nkers’ – can explain to us all why this machine-generated version isn’t as ‘genius’ as Bobby Z’s undergrad-horny original, but equally banal, blather:
**
Hey ChatGPT: Write the lyrics to a three minute ‘pop music’ song, on the theme of ‘sad eyed lady of the lowlands’, in the style of Bob Dylan
Title: Sad-Eyed Queen of the Shadows
(Verse 1)
Oh, the lamps glow dim in the harbor town,
Where your veil drifts soft like a tattered gown.
With your secrets wrapped in a silver thread,
And your tears unspoken, words unsaid.
The wind hums a tune only you seem to know,
Sad-eyed queen of the shadows, where do you go?
(Chorus)
Sad-eyed queen of the shadows,
Dancing where the wild winds blow.
With your crown of thorns and your trembling hands,
You’re a stranger in these forgotten lands.
Oh, sad-eyed queen of the shadows.
(Verse 2)
The clocks are frozen, the bells won’t chime,
You wander through the ruins of borrowed time.
A poet’s verse falls from your lips,
Like a sinking ship on a sea that slips.
Your heart’s a mirror cracked and bare,
Sad-eyed queen, does anyone care?
(Chorus)
Sad-eyed queen of the shadows,
Dancing where the wild winds blow.
With your crown of thorns and your trembling hands,
You’re a stranger in these forgotten lands.
Oh, sad-eyed queen of the shadows.
(Bridge)
The moon hides behind a curtain of black,
As you trace your steps on a fading track.
The prophets whisper, the gamblers pray,
But no one dares to ask you to stay.
(Verse 3)
The world turns gray where you tread,
With dreams unraveling like threads of red.
Your sighs linger in the midnight haze,
A riddle unsolved, a ghost ablaze.
The stars fall silent, the rivers run slow,
Sad-eyed queen of the shadows, what do you know?
(Chorus)
Sad-eyed queen of the shadows,
Dancing where the wild winds blow.
With your crown of thorns and your trembling hands,
You’re a stranger in these forgotten lands.
Oh, sad-eyed queen of the shadows.
(Outro)
And as the dawn begins to rise,
You fade into the weeping skies.
Your song remains, a haunting plea,
Sad-eyed queen, are you truly free?
**
The machine can even Lester-Bang itself (“The lyrics blend vivid imagery, poetic mystique, and a wandering rhythm reminiscent of Dylan’s Style…”) Why, you’d best give yourself the Nobel then, GPTChat!
Dennis Potter got it right when he pointed out that ‘popular music’ gets its power and potency from the audience’s reflected and re-projected emotional imperatives. That’s why some people’s favorite ‘genius’ album is Astral Weeks, others prefer Highway ’61 Revisited, and still others…The Very Best of Buck’s Fizz.
There’s always something in a ChatGPT pastiche that gives the game away. Even Ed Sheeran would be embarrassed by the last four lines above. Pure McGonagall.
I think the second pastiche isn’t too bad. The first one doesn’t ring like Dylan at all to me (unless it’s what he’s been writing lately, which I don’t know.)
Ed Sheeran wouldn’t be embarrassed by anything, Hugh! Not even the lyrics of ‘Wiggle, Wiggle’, or the undergrad gaucherie of ‘Lenny Bruce’. The Geenyus One was eminently capable of even more wince-inducing guff, too. Pluck almost any self-replicating, AI-esque couplet off every other song from most of the 80’s albums for starters, Hugh…!
You stick with your AI generated crap, Jack. I’ll carry on listening to real music. By the way, how do you think Chat GPT learned to write in the style of Bob Dylan?
We need to call it AP, not AI: Automated Plagiarism.
Exactly. I’m no fan of Dylan, probably because I’m too young to have been there at the time and his originality had been copied so much that by the time I heard it it was a bit clichéd. But it wasn’t a cliché when he wrote it, and ChatGPT can only copy style, not generate it itself, unlike Dylan (or any other artist).
How do you think Bob Dylan learned to write in the style of Bob Dylan, RM? By AI-training himself using Woody Guthrie’s (et al) existing ouvre. How do you think Mozart learned to write in the style of Mozart? By Artificially-Intelligently training himself on Bach et al…the only didactic difference nowadays is digitalisation’s speed and catchment reach. Oh, and yes the touch of divine genius. But you never know who has it until they – and their deafening contemporaneous cheer squad – is long dead.
If I really had to back in a nice middle class Jewish boy with a towering self regard and sh*tty technical chops as a legitimate pop music genius….it’d be Cohen, not Zimmerman. Let’s see who the kids are listening to in 2100!
What I find truly satisfying is that the real subversion of AI is turning out to be the way it’s teaching/reminding us (by imitation) that 95% of all alleged human creativity and intelligence is, actually, regurgitated pastiche, populist recycling, reflexive plagiarism and epistemic pragmatism. ‘Popular’ culture: by definition. Writing sophisticated treatises on a trite three chord platitude-ditty like ‘Blowin in the Wind’ – yes, Rocky, like AI I could knock up a passable facsimile in 5 minutes and sing it better than Dylan ever did – doesn’t make it great art. Projecting generational emotions and lived history onto it might make it culturally profound, but it will only be so to others who can likewise project such personal ballast onto it. (Or it’ll propagate its profundity over generations strictly via its…self-perpetuating fame, in the way that we’ve all come to be bludgeoned by cultural history into regarding The Godfather as a genius film, etc.) Art as pure narcissism. The opposite of authentic inclusive universality.
The ‘voice of his generation’, indeed, then…Bob Dylan, the Poet Laureate of Me, Me, Me.
I’ll stop trolling you Boomers now 🙂
Ask ChatGPT to write a pretentious, long winded critique of Bob Dylan that relies heavily on large words and ideas from pop psychology. You’ll swear you wrote it yourself!
‘Ramona, come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Will pass as your senses will rise
For the flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike sometimes
And there’s no use in tryin’
To deal with the dyin’
Though I cannot explain that in lines
I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better than no one
And no one is better than you
If you really believe that
You know you have
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you gotta be exactly like them
I’d forever talk to you
But soon my words
Would turn into a meaningless ring
For deep in my heart
I know there is no help I can bring
Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I’ll come and be cryin’ to you’
Bob Dylan, unlike the other musicians you mentioned, captured personality in all its contradictions, and he was playful about it; he was ironic with, and in, it. His thoughts were strong and well-constructed but they lived side by side in contradiction with each other and were fully aware of each other. Perhaps we are too ready to lionise those who wouldn’t in honesty recognise the effigies we make of them, so what? What follows needn’t be your view, nor the post-coital view of the in-this-case hormonally-guided girls. There are those who equally try to bring down Beethoven, pointing to the various social conditions that constructed him, but as with a Stradivarius violin and a copy of the same, the difference exists just as it does between the lyrics above and whatever ChatGPT or indeed a contemporary might have come up with in imitation.
‘ His thoughts were strong and well-constructed but they lived side by side in contradiction with each other and were fully aware of each other.’
Good grief, Matthew: classic Dylanalia. Supreme ‘gunslinger’ wristery, the squirm-inducing lexical spectacle of space-filling grift-patter disguising itself – in its own nonsensical verbal diarrhoea – as ‘deep’. The History of Dylan Cultism in one thin streak of evacuated tripe, etc etc.
This classic ‘cultural revolution, man’ business, by which equivocation, opportunism, cynicism, self-advancement and above all narcissistic arrested development is transformed into ‘creative genius’…goes something like this:
Ooh woo, ooh woo, Bob says black is white and up is down ooh woo deep but now oh look he also says down is up and white is black ooh woo genius man and hey Bob also says joker clown man with the bearded sedan is frowning his guns at the clock on the wrong side of the mirror, man. Oh wow blow my mind man voice of a generation man hey look a rhinosaurus. (Also, that shiksa in the second row has stellar jugs man, someone go ask her if she wants to be spiked by a genius after the show…)
One can cheerfully admire the grift, love the better songs, and ruefully concede extreme jealousy of the truly spectacular lives of comfort, privilege and self-centred hedonism Dylan’s Boomer cohort of multimillionaire pop culture superstars managed to craft out of their self-advertised ‘genius art’.
But one isn’t obliged to sully those vital words by relinquishing either of them to any of them.
I’m sure there are many boomers (which, btw, I’m not, being barely in my fifties) who would be taken in by this derivative drivel. Boomers always have been prone to thinking what they were told to think. But I’m not one of them. If you can’t tell the difference you should maybe read a little more widely.
John Lennon at least admitted to being something of a fraud, or ‘con-artist’. Dylan wrote a lot of songs, some good, but mostly not memorable. His most lasting quality was in preserving his ‘mystique’.
Bingo, MG. The deep ring of honest true words, as from an old solid bell.
We’re all children of the sixties.
Trapped ones at that, David. Imprisoned in and by the screeching mediocrity of its loudest voices.
If you can advise my (and younger) generations how to rid ourselves of that accursed juncture…please do!
Me, I am doing my Oedipal best to metaphorically slay my jailers, one bullying cultural icon at a time… mother muse needs some grown-up artistic attention again, after half a century of self-absorbed juvenalia…
You mean as widely (and quickly and comprehensively) as AI can and routinely does, Hugh? Not sure I can keep up, mate! 🙂
.
Oh, please don’t! I know there are ages of greatness and ages of mediocrity, but when you start to make actual comparison it’s pretty depressing.
In the blue corner: the bedroom scene with Donna Julia from Byron’s Don Juan
In the red corner: Norwegian Wood, by the Beatles
Now I actually like the Beatles but ….. and just think of who else was around at the same time as Byron.
You can’t write one eloquent below the line comment, let alone a song as eloquent as the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.
Popular music: all a matter of taste, BW, so as with G_d, favorite colours and physical attraction, it’s fairly pointless arguing over it!
The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll by Bob Dylan
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel, society gath’rin’
And the cops were called in, and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder
But you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears
William Zanzinger, who at 24 years, owns a tobacco farm of 600 acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
In a matter of minutes, on bail was out walkin’
But you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears
Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen
She was 51 years old and gave birth to 10 children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
And you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face for now’s the time for your tears
“If Dylan was a master of anything, it was the last of that triumvirate: advertising.”
More a product thereof and not a “master” but point taken just the same. He was no more “self-made” than was Presley. Both were products of a mass media industry, which had already taken off in the 20s with the advent of the radio and motion picture media, only to accelerate starting in the late 40s with the emergence of television. Presley, Dylan, the Beatles–right down to Taylor Swift–constitute entertainers of the masses who don’t know a sharp from a flat and don’t care. With all due respect to Mr. Samuels, a man with whom I usually agree, the subject of his essay was hardly Walt Whitman (or, for that matter, Steven Sondheim or Johnny Mercer)–he was Robert Zimmerman a/k/a “Bob Dylan”, Entertainer of The Masses.
Agreed 100%…the art in great art is, so often (if not always), in the technical and craft and material mastery of the form. The deep, applied master-skill of making something that…only mastered skill can make.
AI is simply the manifestation of the thuddingly obvious and logical endpoint of the history of ‘popular culture’ in its entirety. That’s why it is so despised by mediocre but popular exponents in mass media; especially the most successful and famous mediocre ones.
A James Patterson…an AI bot…there is zero epistemic difference in either the ‘artist’ or their ‘art’.
I think that is just glib nonsense.
A song like It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) is hardly insubstantial MOR entertainment-culture fare.
What this endless blah blah about Dylan gets totally wrong – all the ‘was he a protest singer’; ‘was he the voice of a generation’ blah blah (all tiresome six decades of it) – is that 90% of Dylan’s songs are love songs – about relationships with women. And always were right from the start.
Dylan’s lyrical range is broader than any other songwriter.
So, although most songs by any artist are love songs, this is less true of Dylan than any other writer.
Pete Townshend.
This is baloney
‘Song of Myself’ gay anthem
No Revolutionary War in the ‘Leatherstocking’ ? Natty Bumpo fought for the enemy Brits
More apt is T S Eliot’s ‘Wasteland”
You seem to have got yourself in a muddle here and are replying to the author of the article, not my comment (I said nothing about any of the things you mention).
I should point out that ‘90% love songs from the start’ is a touch OTT: you set me off on a check-through (always fun with Dylan). His first two self-penned albums are Freewheelin’ and The Times They Are A-Changin’. Freewheelin’ does contain several love songs among its 13 tracks, but half are protest numbers: Blowin’ in the Wind, Hard Rain and Masters of War being the ones that have resonated down the decades. And ‘The Times’ has only one love song, a couple of ‘state of mind’ lyrics with passing reference to girls, plus seven solid protest tracks. At the start, that boy was a protest singer, first and foremost. Love songs later continued to be scattered among many other themes – probably only on Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks did they hit the 90% mark. Dylan would have been hard-pressed to establish the reputation he has, had he been 90% a love-song writer, I think.
Bringing It All back Home – about 3/11 love songs.
Highway 61 Revisited – about 3/9 (very loosely) love songs
Never was a fan in the day but now at 78 have come to appreciate his work and agree that his love songs are his forte. I’m a player and singer and am having a great time “rediscovering” his work.
Well yes, but that compares with most other singers where near 100% of their songs are love songs. And the remaining 10% of Dylan’s songs that are about other stuff do tend to be the ones everybody is referring to in this context.
It struck me that his aim has always been to capture his times. Through the decades he maintained a social conscience in doing so, evidenced by protest songs like Hurricane, about a miscarriage of justice in the 1970s, then pointed political messages in a couple of his ’80s records like Infidels and Oh Mercy!
From the 90s and onwards, he turned a little more philosophical and, if anything, focused on American history when he turned away from the personal songs.
I disagree. And I’ll tell you why. In 1967, a year after his electric run culminating in Blonde on Blonde, at a time when the rock world was turning to psychedelia and hard electrick rock, Dylan released a proto acoustic folk album called John Wesley Harding. And the point is that he marches to his own drummer and frequently runs AGAINST the tide of his times.
I liked the song, but Dylan was wrong about Rubin Carter. I saw it as the kind of things artists do. A little infuriating at the time— about as accurate as the condemnations of the Duke Lacrosse players.Never believe Lefty reports of facts or events.
Dylan was never going to be the mouthpiece of the boomer left because the principal characteristic of that class is its childishness and lack of self awareness – and Dylan has never been childish or unaware.
So, you dismiss a quarter of the population of the UK as childish and lacking in self awareness. That would also include two-thirds of the contributors to UnHerd. Why are you wasting your time?
Two thirds of Unherd readers may be boomers, but they’re sure as hell not on the left.
Lost the Dreams of their Youth for financial security
It’s a generalisation, and I think limiting it to the left is both unfair and inaccurate – but Hugh is hardly the first person to notice that our culture has become more infantile since the sixties. We tend to glorify youth, and either get stuck in our own version of it or emulate the currently young.
Growing up and maturing without simply becoming a stuffy old fart seems to have become something of a lost art.
His sweetheart had an abortion and it racked his politics
Dylan succeeded because politics and causes eat the songs.
His rival in the 60s, Phil Ochs, failed because he did go political and lost his identity and flexibility due to his political adherence to leftist wackadoodletom.
So true – the anarcho-punks of the 70s and early 80s wanted to educate their listeners about global and local political problems – eg Africans starving with their govts in debt bondage, femicides all over the world, peasants dying because big farmers feed cows better than their people. Didn’t help record sales at all – and in a final insult the likes of Geldof and Bono got to chum up to the Mengistu regime and gain massive, career saving PR by adopting other peoples ideas whilst avoiding tax AND telling the rest of us the sad case of Starvin Marvin is the fault of the little people. No mention of the IMF, Worldbank, Cold War or even the genocidal Mengistu. Sometimes politics and music work together but mostly they don’t.
A lot of truth in this article, but at least two errors worth correcting:
1) Woody Guthrie was a fellow-traveller, but never a member of the Communist Party (despite him claiming that he was).
2) Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie was written in 1963, four years before Guthrie’s death.
Dylan is narcissist.He is awarded the Noble Prize but can’t make the ceremony but still keeps the prize money.
Spot on. His, like that of most ‘artists’ in the mass media/celebrity age, is a profoundly solipsistic world view. And that has and can never produce truly genius insights into, and thus universal, inclusive expressions of, humanity.
Bob’s art is…all about Bob. His life’s work is a cult, not art. The Boomer (and subsequent) generations are overwhelmingly children of the age of narcissus, and can’t grasp it. It’s not really our fault, but the only way we can tear our introspective dead souls out of our cultish cultural paralysis is to stop being hypnotised by Fame.
Isn’t that true to some extent of lyric poets too. Pretentious and narcissistic – but immensely talented too.
Well yes, quite. But ‘talented’ at what, exactly? Often it’s mostly talented (deft, attentive, strategic, pragmatic) at reading the cultural winds, at artistic careerism, at creative networking, self-promotion and advertising. (Dylan’s alternatively diffident/mercurial/enigmatic/ambivalent posing is one of the great achievements of sustained mass self-marketing of our age – bravo!). There are always journeyman and even mediocre artists who never-the-less achieve huge contemporary popularity in their lifetime…only. It’s just that we quickly forget about them. True artistic genius takes generations to reveal and secure itself as that. I’m not well schooled enough in the more obscure historical examples of once popular and famous but now largely forgotten lyrical poets to know which one to equate Dylan with, but any genuine worth will only become clear once his armies of eloquent fanboy-groupies and ever-edging breathy fetishists have died off. Right now, like most of his pop culture ‘iconic’ generational colleagues, he continues to be revered as a ‘legend’ and ‘genius’ mostly as…a matter of received orthodox wisdom; famously genius for being a famous genius.
This is popular culture, so we’re all equally right and we’re all equally wrong, and anyway it doesn’t matter a bit. Except insofar as dull-witted orthodoxy about art tends to bleed into a generation’s thinking about everything else. I just don’t buy 90% of the horsesh*t Summer o’ Lerve Hippy refugee Baby Boomers spew about their own annointed ‘great artists’ of that allegedly disruptive (actually painfully conformist and corporate-orchestrated) moment, is all.
One can enjoy Dylan’s best music without needing to big it up with projected metaphysical malarkey, one’s critical faculties dazzled into poshboy-Beatlemania by the trick of epistemology we call ‘fame’.
Dylan was seemingly an introvert as well…
I’m not qualified to say whether any of Dylan’s psychological traits show a narcissist. But the quality of the art, both musical and visual through his paintings and iron work so redolent of America for me, means that I just don’t care. I’m not sure that I could vouch for the psychic health or even the character of any of my favourite writers, musicians or painters. I love Eric Gill’s work for example, despite what people tell me about his character.
I thought Dylan thought he was redolent of Rimbaud.
David Samuels – thank you – brilliant
“That’s because America remained his greatest inspiration, and the place in the mind where he was always most at home.”
Maybe…..or….
Well my heart’s in The Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There’s a way to get there, and I’ll figure it out somehow
Well I’m already there in my mind and that’s good enough for now
American boomer here. Dylan is a force of nature. His collection of songs has many, many really good ones. He also puts on a good show.
Whether you call him simply a performer with an edge or a poser or a genius or a self-involved egoist, he’s been enjoyable and at times uplifting for me to listen to over the past 60+ years that I’ve followed him. There are few others I can say the same for.
I very much liked this essay. Pretty close to hitting the nail on the head from my perspective as well.
yep, I’d second all that Neal. (UK boomer here) . I’m a life long Dylan head. My only quibble : I’ve seen him live a few times and comparing the first concert I saw at Slane Castle (Ireland) in mid 1980’s he was still majestic. But when I saw him a few years ago in Italy ,well , let’s be kind..he was poor. But hey, at that age , which of us doesn’t lose some of our faculties. He still uniquely interesting.
Though the beats, in whose footsteps people like Dylan trod, felt themselves to be inheritors of French existentialism rather than of a uniquely American heritage.
Camus maybe. Not otherwise. Anyway, the American claim made by the author here is correct.
” . . . and no one since Walt Whitman wrote better lyrics that encompassed more of the American spirit”. I like that and agree wholeheartedly. But now we are blessed because for the last 20 years or so, we have had Dylan’s paintings and sculptures. The paintings show and reflect the essence of America. The sculptures, and sculptural gates, are literally made from America. His iron work is welded retrieved farm equipment gathered from farm sales and architectural antique warehouses all over America. I cannot look at the art works without hearing his songs and his voice and dreaming of America.
Recommend anyone who liked this article to read Greil Marcus books on Bob Dylan.He also wrote the sleeve notes the ‘The Basement Tapes’
The temptation to cherry pick (sorry–‘edit’) evidence in order to get a point across can lead to some curious anomalies. Here, the writer wants us to believe that the character of “self-made” Americans owes nothing to ‘blood and soil,’ as in Europe, while going to considerable lengths to show that the emergent features of literature and song, from Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby to Dylan’s lyrics, somehow owe a great deal to bloodlines and nurturing soil of their own.
If we were to trace the development of American character to its roots as diligently as the writer attempts to do for Dylan’s lyrics, wouldn’t we discover that those roots lie in Europe? What was the American Revolution, after all, but a rebellion by people of European heritage on one side of the Atlantic who wanted the same control over taxation enjoyed by their compatriots on the other; and what is America’s constitution in the end but John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, writ large? Are we truly to believe that Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman are any more uniquely original, adventurous or self-made than Shakespeare and Goethe; or, conversely, that the character and achievements of these individuals don’t all in equal measure owe debts to the cultural soil that nourished them?
More original? No, but there is a certain nomadic, individualistic character to America that simply doesn’t exist in modern European consciousness.
You’re throwing some whopping names out there. As an American, I certainly don’t claim our great thinkers created the philosophical wheel but they did have unique insights due to taking part in a new nation with a vast landscape.
Yes.The sense of space and landscape you get in many American songs could never have come from anywhere else. When you add in the other Americana inputs it hugely adds to the mix – eg Jazz to make something unique. American music always has such freedom. Sure you could trace the root of some types of blues say, back to Irish/Scottish tunes. One of the things I’ve always admired in American lyrics is the ability to convey complex notions simply .
Excellent point, to defend Europeanness. One must also acknowledge the infusion of African-Ness in American music since always. Pure folk of the kind Dylan moved on from may be the only American music devoid of African influence. Just as the hypocritical progressives would have it.
What a refreshing, beautiful and insightful article. Thank you.
This is a wonderfully written and thoughtful article. Thank you! You’ve made a subscriber of me just so I could comment and express my disagreement. I believe that Dylan’s songwriting gifts, along with his powers of delivery, did not abandon him in the 1960s or after “Blood on the Tracks.” In fact, I think they’ve grown stronger.
You write that “Dylan’s spectacular self-awareness, which has only rarely faltered, is that he recognized the departure of the spirit much sooner than most; he never insisted that his newer songs were actually his best work.”
I must be one of the few human fans who disagrees with this. Albums like “Oh Mercy,” “Good as I Been to You,” “World Gone Wrong,” “Time Out of Mind,” “Love and Theft,” “Modern Times,” and “Rough and Rowdy Ways” arguably surpass the depth and feeling of his earlier efforts. It’s a different Dylan, to be sure, but one that I continually find as compelling and mysterious as ever.
My millennial son, Henry, who recently saw the Dylan movie, commented when asked about his thoughts on Dylan’s music: “I’m a fan of his earlier stuff, but when his voice got all weird later in his career, that’s when he lost me.”
To be honest, that’s precisely when Dylan truly got me. His lyric from “Stayed in Mississippi” sums it up:
I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town.
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.
Preferred Leonard Cohen myself. The only Dylan album I bought was the one where he was walking with a girl in the cover. The songs on that were good.
Cohen though was exceptional.
You should really give a listen to some of the stuff he put out in the 1970s. Blood on the Tracks, Desire and Street Legal are standout examples, and the 1978 Live at Budokan album is wonderful.
Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic, is masterful telling of the story behind “The Basement Tapes”. Marcus, quotes Bob Dylan: “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death”
I started listening to Dylan when I was about 15 and haven’t yet stopped.
In my opinion he is the best singer/songwriter in the history of recorded music. I realise of course that many people either do not like him at all or are simply indifferent, but that’s true of every other recording artist as well.
And when I say singer/songwriter II do include the singing part deliberately. Many people who hear Dylan’s nasal, rasping tones wonder if he’s singing at all and it’s true that he sounds nothing like the other singers with more classically-obvious voices. But the way he sings is unique: although there are loads of covers of Dylan songs, none of them are performed the way Dylan performs them because his style is completely unique.
Not a gushing fan of Mr. Zimmerman. One thing missing here from Mr. Samuels …I ‘ve gone through this twice, the word Jew or Jewish. He may have reinvented himself as far away from his Jewishness as he thought while his music reflects the prophetic heritage of the Jews in the Hebrew Bible….and I don’t think that this is lost on him. “the dreary” folk music scene…really?….it was thoroughly exciting to me….just lost a member of Peter Paul and Mary. Joan Baez dreary? Better part of this fawning biopic is her telling him what an asshole he is. Different side of her, I’ve never seen. Doe eyed Mr. Chalomet came alive like Frampton at the penultimate scene at the Newport Jazz Festival…otherwise he droned his way through his portrayal. He didn’t use Jewface like Bradley Cooper in the Bernstein biopic. Looks nothing like Zimmerman. When I was a teen he was one of a number of people I listened to ….far more influenced by the Beatles, Stones and Hendrix….”.have you ever been experienced?”…that really charged me to find myself and live my life. As beautiful as Lay Lady Lay and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowland are I had to find some self affirmation of my being in Whitman’s homeroticism. And that’s why I was intrigued by Bowie’s music and photo on Hunky Dory (whatever his sexuality was)….that’s something I never got from Zimmerman. I will always enjoy Blonde on Blonde. Not a hero to me.
The only thing we can safely conclude from the comments is that Jack Robertson comes across as more than a little pretentious. He claims to be a ‘gigging musician’, but has anyone ever heard of him? He rambles on about how Dylan’s admirers are just blind to the fact that Bob’s success is mostly due to mere ‘marketing’, but at least we’ve heard of him. Who is Jack Robertson? You may be able to con people for a short time, but it requires talent to have a career as long as Dylan’s. My opinion doesn’t matter to anyone, so I will just make the point that it is better to judge Dylan’s worth by how many of his peers in the music business are great admirers of his abilities, significance and output. This would include The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and a long list of other highly talented artists. How many of those people have declared their admiration for Jack’s great musicianship and contribution to popular music? Also, as a fan of classical music for over 40 years, I know the difference between the merits of Bach and Mozart etc and pop music. Similarly, I can enjoy reading a modern thriller and know that it is not Tolstoy. In other words, I don’t feel lectures on the relative merits of popular culture and ‘high’ culture are necessary or helpful. Whatever Jack (or anyone else) thinks of Dylan and his era, I am confident that I am not alone in thinking that today’s music doesn’t compare with the music produced at that time.