[Cross-posted from today's entry on my blog,
Peace Tree Farm...]
My mother used to say that she didn't really notice her age, but that it amazed and surprised her when her oldest child reached 30, 35, 40 (sadly, she didn't live to see my 45th, 50th, and 55th birthdays). I'm experiencing something of the same feeling today, on the day when Bob Dylan becomes eligible for Medicare.
Not that I'm particularly concerned about which flavor of the Part D "benefit" he'll sign up for. Dylan has plenty of money and plenty of other resources, so it's of little matter that he may be getting screwed over by the greed of Big Pharma and its Republican cronies. The crime that is Part D is a subject for another day.
Further happy-birthday thoughts on Dylan below the fold...
Dylan and his music have been a part of my life for over 40 years.
That's what is giving me pause as we celebrate Bob's birthday. Over the years, his impact as a
current influence on me, on my generation, on the nation, on the world, has ebbed and flowed. When his perpetual self-examination led him to such destinations as evangelical Christianity, I found it well-nigh impossible to go there with him. Still, the immensity of his importance in the 1960s and early 1970s -- as an antiwar protest singer, as a musician who took rock-n-roll and made it both relevant and introspective, indeed as a cultural (countercultural?) icon -- cannot be denied, cannot be understated. From the late 1990s through today, Dylan has reemerged as a repository of the sweep of American musical genres, interpreting and reinterpreting both his own musical legacy and the stylistic history of song in our nation.
Richard Goldstein's cover story in the May 15, 2006 issue of The Nation discusses Dylan, in the context of his recently-started weekly program on XM satellite radio. Goldstein argues that Baby Boomers like me (and like himself, for that matter) have all but consecrated Dylan as some sort of prophet, parsing his lyrics into academic sterility. The exemplar for this assertion is Boston University humanities professor Christopher Ricks, author in 2003 of Dylan's Visions of Sin. I haven't read the book, and don't expect to ... although there's always a danger in going by selective quotations, from all appearances Goldstein is correct about Ricks's deconstructionist drivel.
Goldstein continues his analysis with an extended discussion of Dylan-as-misogynist, noting that he seems to appeal overwhelming to males. I don't have any real data on the gender distribution of his fans, and Goldstein has nothing empirical to present. In the half-dozen or so times I've seen him in concert (all since 1997, in venues large and small) I haven't noticed that the distribution was particularly skewed by gender. OTOH, it was apparent to me that Dylan's audience had a bimodal age distribution, consisting almost entirely of Baby Boomers like me and college-age (or younger) kids. Gen X was conspicuously absent from every Dylan crowd I've been in. Still, the charge of misogyny will probably stick ... anyone listening to, say, Just Like A Woman or just about anything on the album Blood On The Tracks would have to concur.
I can't speak for my fellow Baby Boomers as a whole. I don't know whether they have beatified Dylan as Saint Bob, ignoring the warts, glossing over the career gaps, pretending that he "speaks" for them and their youth. In the end, I agree with Goldstein's suggestion that
The most honest way to look at Dylan is the way his young fans do. They admire him, but they don't adore him. And they understand that his career over four decades has had dramatic ebbs and flows. Between 1975 and 1987 he produced some memorable songs along with many otiose ballads and those hymns aptly described by Alex Ross as "snarling gospel." The best you can say about these experiments is that they were sincere. But they suffered from the enervation that comes of disengagement.
As a young man, Dylan withdrew in rage from the burdens of progressive politics, and that rebellion galvanized his most important work. But as he aged, he withdrew from the social world itself, and his gift was lost in the ether of salvation. Then, somehow, Dylan found the world again, and in 1997 he created a wonderful album of spare, melancholy songs, Time Out of Mind. He was back, though as he's said, you can't come back in the same way again.
Now a new generation has discovered Dylan, but not for his late style. They flock to his concerts to hear the early songs, those still-gripping sagas of alienation and outrage written when Dylan was lost in the wilderness, and they come to hear how Dylan will sing those songs today, since he always performs them differently. They know Dylan as he should be known--as a striving, fallible artist, not a saint.
Goldstein mentions that the lyric he always thinks about whenever he's feeling the urge to over-elevate Dylan is the injunction from Subterranean Homesick Blues:Don't follow leaders
Watch the parking meters
For me, it's this self-snark from I Shall Be Free No. 10:Yippee! I'm a poet, and I know it.
Hope I don't blow it.
You didn't, Bob.
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In reviewing my blog archives, it surprises me that I've marked Dylan's birthday only once before, last year. That's certainly not due to failure to notice it.
Happy birthday, Bob, and many more...