What a dimwit. These guys are on college campuses all over the US.
Posted on 09/01/2006 8:45:07 PM PDT by NutCrackerBoy
Visions of Dylan
Though often associated with political activists like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or Joan Baez—both musically and politically—Bob Dylan was no Chief in the protest politics of the 1960s--he wasn’t even an Indian, Kemosabe. Bringing it all back home, it would be more fitting to call Bob the Lone Ranger: Dylan rode solo, as is made clear in Bob Dylan: the Essential Interviews. This entertaining review is written by Harvard’s professor of English, Louis Menand, and is found in the most recent issue of the New Yorker. Professor Menand quotes from one of Dylan’s interviews:
Mr. Dylan, how would you define folk music?As a constitutional re-play of mass production.
Would you call your songs “folk songs”?
No.
Are protest songs “folk songs”?
I guess, if they’re a constitutional re-play of mass production.
Do you prefer songs with a subtle or obvious message?
With a what???
A subtle or obvious message?
Uh—I don’t really prefer those kinds of songs at all—“message”—you mean like—what songs with a message?
Well, like “Eve of Destruction” and things like that.
Do I prefer that to what?
I don’t know, but your songs are supposed to have a subtle message.
Subtle message???
Well, they’re supposed to.
Where’d you hear that?
Dylan was nobodies' party-boss—a fact celebrated by lovers of music and pop-culture, but given today’s editorial by Andrew Rosenthal, lamented by the New York Times:
This, perhaps, is the ultimate difference between the Vietnam generation and the Iraq generation: When you hear Young and Company [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young] sing of “four dead in Ohio,” their Kent State anthem, it’s hard to imagine anyone on today’s campuses willing to face armed troops. Is there anything they care about that much?Student protesters helped drive Lyndon Johnson — in so many ways a powerful, progressive president — out of office because of his war. In 2004, George W. Bush — in so many ways a weak, regressive president — was re-elected despite his war. And the campuses were silent.
There was a brief burst of protest when America first invaded Iraq. But if there is a college movement against the war, it’s hiding pretty well. Vietnam never had the moral clarity that the 9/11 attacks provided to this generation’s war. But in Iraq that proved to be a false clarity, and a majority of Americans now say they oppose the war and no longer trust Mr. Bush’s leadership of it.
But because there is no draft — a fact that Graham Nash noted sardonically on Sunday night — no young person has to fear being conscripted into the fight. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Americans find it much easier to stay silent when there is no shared sacrifice.
Such is life in the new Millennium for the left-wing malcontent. Alas, today’s students spend their time in college studying and have little time or inclination left to get all muddied-up protesting for protest’s sake. Rather than celebrate this fact, Mr. Rosenthal is acting the naughty boy in Dylan’s classic Visions of Johanna: “Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously. He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously . . . He's sure got a lotta gall, to be so useless and all . . .”
Bob Dylan is overrated. Very unimportant in the music world. Malcontent. Stands for nothing.
Pinging from an old Dylan thread.
I happened to be in New York City amongst artist types in 1991 when the Gulf War broke. One fellow was all excited because he went to a protest rally. My thought was "Why??"
I disagree. You are mistaking him for a protest singer. He stands for nothing the way T.S. Eliot stands for nothing -- they're artists.
Here's another take from old thread.
Yes, he was - and is - just a performer. And refreshingly enough, that's how he seems to view himself.
I like his new album, btw. Anybody else heard it yet?
OK, I'll go out and get it if it will make you happy. (/grin)
Dylan is misunderstood because he is viewed through the rose colored glasses of the 60's, hippies have always tried to "read" him. He is just a guy that likes music.
Thanks for the ping! Yeah, Dylan was definitely his own man. Didn't follow the crowd at all. Probably didn't like his hippie audiences sometimes. LOL
He also drove interviewers and the press nuts! Questioning their questions. Very endearing. I'd like to see a politician do that nowadays.
Please do the world a favor and don't ever become a music critic or historian. You'd also be doing yourself a favor. Avoiding the embarrassment of everyone seeing your musical ignorance. It's only seen here. Keep it that way.
What a dimwit. These guys are on college campuses all over the US.
Here's Dylan making some exelent points on Folk/Protest group mentality:
Reprinted from IN-BEAT MAGAZINE, May 1965
(snip)
Q: Whatever happened to Blind Boy Grunt? (A name Dylan used to record a couple of his first folk sides -- for Broadside Records.)
Dylan: I was doing that four years ago. Now there are a lot of people writing songs on protest subjects. But it's taken some kind of weird step. Hey, I'd rather listen to Jimmy Reed or Howling Wolf, man, or to The Beatles or Francoise Hardy, than I would to any protest song singers -- although I haven't heard all the protest song singers there are. But the ones I've heard -- there's this very emptiness which is like a song written saying, "Let's hold hands and everything will be grand." I see no more to it than that. Just because somebody mentions the word bomb, I'm not going to scream, man, and start clapping.
Q: Is it that they just don't work anymore?
Dylan: It's not that they don't work, it's that there are a lot of people afraid of the Bomb, right? But there are a lot of other people afraid to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine down the street, you know. There are a lot of people afraid to admit they like Marlon Brando movies. Hey, it's not that they don't work anymore, but have you ever thought of a place where they do work? What exactly does work?
Q: They give a groovy feeling to the people who sing them. I guess that's about it. But what does work is the attitude not the song. And there's just another attitude called for.
Dylan: Yeah, but you have to be very hip to the fact about the attitude -- you have to be hip to communication. Sure, you can make all sorts of protest songs and put them on Folkways record. But who hears them? The people that do hear them are going to be agreeing with you anyway. You aren't going to get somebody to hear it who doesn't dig. If you can find a cat who can actually say, "Okay! I'm a changed man because I heard this one thing -- or I just saw this one thing..." Hey, it doesn't necessarily happen that way all the time. It happens with a collage of experience in which somebody can actually know by instinct what's right and wrong for him to do -- where he doesn't actually have to feel guilty about anything. A lot of people act out of guilt. They act because they think somebody's looking at them. No matter what it is. There's people who do anything because of guilt...
Q: And you don't want to be guilty?
Dylan: It's that I'm not guilty. I'm not any more guilty than you are. Like, I don't consider any elder generation guilty... I can't make that, but I can't really put it down. Hey, I can't put anything down, because I don't have to be around any of it. I don't have to put people down who I don't like because I don't have to be around any of those people. Of course, there is the giant great contradiction of What Do You Do? Hey, I don't know what you do, but all I can do is cast aside all the things not to do. I don't know where it's at, all I know is where it's not at. And as long as I know that, I don't really have to know, myself, where it's at. Everybody knows where it's at once in a while, but nobody can walk around all the time in a complete Utopia. Dig poetry. You were asking about poetry? Man, poetry is just bull, you know. I don't know about other countries but in this one, it's total massacre. It's not poetry at all. People don't read poetry in this country. If they do, it offends them; they don't dig it. You go to school, man, and what kind of poetry do you read? You read Robert Frost's "The Two Roads", you read T. S. Elliot -- you read all the bull and that's just bad, man, it's not good. It's not anything. It's not anything hard, it's all soft-boiled egg... And then, on top of that, they throw Shakespeare at some kid who can't read Shakespeare. Hey, everybody hates Shakespeare in high school, right? Who digs reading Hamlet, man. All they give you is Ivanhoe, Silas Marner, A Tale of Two Cities -- and they keep you away from things which you should do. You shouldn't even be there in school. You should find out from people. Dig, that's where it all starts. In the beginning -- like from 13 to 19 -- that's where all the corruption is. These people all just overlook it right? There's more V.D. in people 13 to 19 than there is in any other group, but they aren't going to ever say so. They're never going to go into the schools and give shots. But that's where it's at. It's all a hype, man.
Q: Relating to this: If you put it in lyrics instead of poetry, you have a higher chance of hitting the people who have to be hit?
Dylan: I do, but I don't expect anything from it, you dig? All I can do is be me -- whoever that is -- for those people that I do play to, and not come on with them, tell them I'm something that I'm not. I'm not going to tell them that I'm The Great Cause Fighter or The Great Lover or Great Boy Genius or whatever. Because I'm not, man. Why mislead them? That's all just Madison Avenue, that's just selling. Sure, Madison Avenue is selling me, but it's not really selling me, because I was hip to it before I got there.
Dylan's more recent work isn't,IMO,worth a whole lot but his first half dozen or so albums were enormously important throughout the 60's (the era of my musical "coming of age").
If,by chance,you believe that *none* of his work is noteworthy,I'll wager that you're under 50 and/or are blissfully unfamiliar with the musical scene of the 60's.
New album just out in the uk and my lad bought it for my Birthday.
Yep it's good. Very good indeed. The man got more talent in his little finger than.......
Ah, let's face it, I'm just gettin' old and grumpy.
I originally chose for my thread title a sentence fragment from the body of the entry (Bob Dylan was no Chief in the protest politics of the 1960s--he wasn’t even an Indian) instead of the entry title (Visions of Dylan) because it would form a whole idea in the FR thread listing and there wasn't a chance in h-e-double hockey sticks that someone else was going to try to post the same web log entry or search for it.
But rules are rules, I guess.
Uh, you forgot your sacasm tag.
Thanks for the ping
Here is LA press conference from 1965--
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE1Ab5zLbX4
“Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously. He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously . . . He's sure got a lotta gall, to be so useless and all . . .”
One of the BEST lines in the history of Rock & Roll.
Nope. He's one of a tiny handful of rockers to actually matter.
Dylan WAS a banner-carrying protestor of the 60's. To deny that means you were born after 1970 and your parents only listened to the Beach Boys.
Like many of us, Dylan progressed beyond rebellion and into a faith stronger than politics.
Dylan is hardly over-rated.
His longevity and sales can be used to prove that.
However, if you mean you didn't like his songs, then more power to you; it's America, land of choice.
I did like his words. I never did think him an accomplished singer, but he's a fine musician, lyricist, composer.
And like I said, he keeps selling records, booking tours, and making a living.
I don't say you are flat wrong. Did he write lines like "poison pellets are flooding our waters?" Yes.
But by and large, I would rather say his generation projected their aspirations onto him; that sort of thing happens all the time. They were very eager to interpret him as protesting. Banner-carrying would imply that it was intentional on his part. What was intentional that he was serious about his art, purposeful to create and perform, not with the idea of leading or even being a generational poet.
In the Scorcese documentary, he convincingly deflects the protestor label. For many people the civil rights marches and so on were part of a leftist political agenda. But let's not project that onto Mr. Dylan. Black people were wronged - there is no inconsistency with identifying as conservative, for example, and having participated.
That is now. Back then, it was a very different world and Dylan was a very different performer.
Not that those who rewrite history care much.
Dylan has a weekly show on XM now, and I've listened a couple of times. Nothing political, and nothing outside the realm of music. He talks alot, plays some of his favorite music, and all in all, I was mildly surprised at how focused he is on the theme he is presenting for the week, and the amount of show prep he seems to do. It's on Wednesdays at 10 am, and Thursdays at noon.
"...When you hear Young and Company [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young] sing of “four dead in Ohio,” their Kent State anthem, it’s hard to imagine anyone on today’s campuses willing to face armed troops. Is there anything they care about that much?..."
This is nonsense on various levels. The author of the article assumes that the protesters went out that day thinking they might be shot. Ridiculous. I was in college in Ohio at that time, and I knew people who later became mukety-mucks in SDS and even the Weather Underground, and not even these "leaders" ever imagined anyone would open fire on them. And not even after Kent State.
Fast forward to today: Well, American college students do graduate or leave college and plenty join the U.S. military and eventually face armed troops, Saddam's, al Qaeda's, the Taliban's....And they care enough to do so as "volunteers of America."
As for Dylan, I think he wrote lots of protest songs, and one of my favorites is Neighborhood Bully.
He buys obsolete weapons
And he won't be denied
Though nobody sends flesh and blood
To fight by his side
He's the Neighborhood Bully
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