Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown into the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt’s paintings.
—Bob Dylan, Interview with Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, 2004
People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act. Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts.
—Dylan, “Idiot Wind,” Blood on the Tracks (1975)
Bob Dylan is a mystical and mysterious person. On reading Chronicles, his nonlinear memoir, one is struck by repeated instances of magical realism—otherworldly impulses, feelings, and occurrences that took place in his life—as if Dylan were guided by forces beyond his control. The feelings and emotions he writes about seem ghostly and unreal, but completely spot-on for him.
While many people use imagery to describe how they feel, like dark clouds filling in for sad days, Dylan seems to embody these ideas and actually feel them. The mysticism dates back to the earliest days of his career, when he believed he channeled early blues and folk musicians and can also be heard in the way he talks about songwriting as just popping into his head, more or less fully formed. For others, it is a process called writing, but for Dylan, it is more like transcribing from a furtive fountain that spouts creativity.
At one point in the late 1980s, for example, Dylan experiences an epiphany that enables him to reimagine the way he performs, explaining, “I had a gut feeling that I had created a new genre, a style that didn’t exist as of yet and one that would be entirely my own.”1 However, he then suffered a horrifying injury to his right hand, which placed his career as a guitarist in jeopardy. Returning home from the hospital, he says, “[S]omething heavy had come against me. It was like a black leopard had torn into my tattered flesh. . . . I was staring into the dark where all things seemed to be coming from.”2 These examples demonstrate how central narratives, even what one might consider real or imaginary, are not part of Dylan’s way of thinking.
After countless hours listening to Dylan’s music and reading interviews, biographical accounts, and essays about him, one can see postmodern impulses in his worldview. These ideas come out in the songs he writes, the way he positions himself within and outside culture in interviews, and in anecdotal information about him as an individual. Yet, there is no way to know definitely what Dylan feels about postmodernism, just because it might feel appropriate to use that terminology.
The irony is not lost on scholars, historians, philosophers, and others who attempt to turn Dylan’s words into something potentially more than they are. One might simply ask: when is a rose, just a rose? Scholar Kevin L. Stoehr, for example, explains, “The most revealing, and ironic, fact about many of Dylan’s songs, perhaps, is that the ambiguity which emerges from his wordplay seduces us into trying to generalize or universalize something that resists this very attempt.”3 For decades, as a result, people have been able to analyze, sort out, and assess the subjects of Dylan’s songs, constantly wondering about the thinking behind the lyrics. People often look for a measure of clarity in their popular culture, yearning for an answer or collection of keys that may lead to some brand of entertainment and enlightenment. Dylan contests linear interpretation, but in his case, that defiance has bred an industry eager to find a clue to unraveling the mysteries at the heart of the man’s work.
Even as Dylan developed into the voice of a generation, he sought to distance himself from the label. By the mid-1960s, he openly criticized the tag and lampooned what it meant. For example, in early 1966, Dylan told interviewer Nat Hentoff that he did not think of himself as a “protest” singer and that he personally had never used the term. In refuting it, Dylan explained, “The word ‘protest,’ I think, was made up for people undergoing surgery. It’s an amusement-park word. A normal person in his righteous mind would have to have the hiccups to pronounce it honestly.”4 This kind of verbal pitter-patter and circular logic helped create the image of Dylan as an intellectual trickster, a kind of poet of the absurd. One sees this kind of verbosity on display in the documentary Dont Look Back and replicated in the Dylan bio film I’m Not There, with the brilliant actress Cate Blanchett playing a version of Dylan as he barnstormed England in the mid-1960s after turning closer to rock music.
While verbally sparring with journalists provided a great deal of entertainment for the singer and his entourage, Dylan’s postmodernist thinking is most noticeably on display in the lyrics he crafts, which are usually full of symbols, metaphors, and other devices that enable the listener to interpret and infer multiple meanings. When one looks at the cast of characters in his catalog, from Paul Revere’s horse and Miss Lonely to Babe and Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, the cumulative effect is a mishmash of influences that reveal no central pattern or universal truth. Philosopher Jordy Rocheleau explains, “The individual becomes lost in a baffling society and suffers seemingly meaningless violence. . . . The icons of Western reason and culture are made to appear ridiculous, or perhaps, all used up.”5
If one looks to his most famous tunes, like “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “The Times They Are A-Changin,’ ” the words create an opaque narrative. In the former, racism and oppression are never directly stated as the evils one should rise against, but by using the ocean, white doves, and mountains as metaphors, the listener can assess the song within the context of the times and come away with multiple interpretations. Similarly, in the latter iconic song, Dylan calls out those who might stand in the way of progress, such as national legislators, critics, and even parents, but he never claims what standing in the way of change will manifest or why exactly the older generation should fear its children. These uncertainties can then be viewed as both a call to arms and an open-ended plea. Is the listener supposed to rise up against the barriers in a violent way or through peaceful means? These anthems, though clear and distinct as music, also contain anger, though more or less masked in the soothing accompaniment of the acoustic guitar.
What may surprise contemporary readers the most, ironically, is that Dylan’s early songs seemed to be written as protest, but were not exactly composed with that idea in mind. Although he was a reflective person living in the midst of a chaotic era, as a young man his mind filled with music history and harkened back to turbulent times in the nation’s past. In his memoir, for example, Dylan recalls spending a great deal of time in his early New York City years at The Folklore Center, run by Izzy Young. There he studied classic, old-time folklore that addressed historically important themes. Dylan writes, “The madly complicated modern world was something I took little interest in. It had no relevancy, no weight.”6 Instead, the singer looked to history, even taking jaunts to the New York Public Library to hunt for ideas.
Biographer Howard Sounes describes Dylan’s early songwriting as taking place in a fairly disciplined way with chunks of time devoted to writing in general. Other times, Dylan awoke in the middle of the night, inspired to sit at the typewriter and compose. The young man looked for places to retreat from onlookers, which drew him to Woodstock, New York, then a kind of creative enclave where one could go for a degree of solace.“He went through a phase when he spread photographs, postcards, and other pictures across the floor and walked around them, looking for ideas,” Sounes explains.7 Stories also abound, however, of Dylan slipping into manic bouts of writing when it did not matter where he was or how many people were around, he composed regardless of his surroundings.
There are even hints of a competitive streak in Dylan when it comes to songwriting and creating a new brand of music all his own. In Chronicles, he recalls listening to folk singer Mike Seeger and realizing that he had to up his game if he wanted to reach Seeger’s level. This realization led Dylan to concentrate on his own songs, which meant exposing himself to a new kind of thinking. He cryptically explains, “Up ’til then, I’d gone some places and thought I knew my way around. And then it struck me that I’d never been there before.”8
Dylan’s songwriting infused a spirit of the past, in the vein of traditional folk music and Americana, with the desire to write songs that made a difference. He pulled this off via deep study and a willingness to open up to different approaches. Thus, one would be remiss if not tying together the self-taught degree in American folk music Dylan earned through study and interaction with the scene in New York and his later ability to write songs that spoke to listeners about current topics. Plus, he mixed the postmodern, metaphoric-laden work with more direct attacks, such as “Masters of War.” For an example of how this song contrasts with the ambiguous lyrics, one simply can compare “Masters” with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” In the latter, Dylan uses repetition and an intricate layering of visual imagery to convey the ills of a world gone wrong. While critics and others at the time viewed the song as a reproach against potential nuclear holocaust, on reexamination, the lyrics could actually describe many eras in American history, with no markers indicating that its narrative is set in the early 1960s.
Music writer Andy Gill sees “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” as the song that established Dylan atop the folk scene, even more than “Blowin’ ” did, despite the latter’s widespread popularity. Gill explains, “Its strings of surreal, apocalyptic imagery were unlike anything that had been sung before . . . [its] rejection of narrative progression in favor of accumulative power lent a chilling depth to its warning.” For the growing folk movement, “It was the closest folk music had come to the Revelation of St. John, and every bit as scary.”9 Howard Sounes, however, detects some degree of hypocrisy in Dylan, though, since his cryptic lyrics seemed to be written for his specific era, yet were more strident than he appeared to be. For example, Dylan did not allude to specific politicians or world events. According to Sounes, Dylan even told folk queen Joan Baez that he wrote “Masters of War” because he thought it would sell well. The biographer assumes that Dylan said this to provoke Baez, but there may be some truth to the claim.10
Even here, though, we have an artist constantly alluding to one thing or another and simultaneously evading all attempts at being pinned down. We have certain facts at our disposal, like Dylan being coerced into going to a rally in the South to see what segregation really meant at the time, actually placing his own life at risk, and his appearance and performance at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech. Still, Dylan’s friends and confidantes from the era have since questioned his commitment to political activism at that time.
From an even wider lens, one might wonder whether it even matters. Dylan did not ask to be hoisted up as the generation’s folk hero. Is there a way in American culture for a person to aspire to make music and write songs and remain true to oneself, even as the industry and culture take over? In other words, the important issue centers on whether one is responsible for what happens in the wake of wanting to perform. Dylan’s authenticity or lack of it may be an issue to people who put him on a pedestal, but that does not amount to much for him as a person or performer.
Dylan performs at the “All Star Celebration Honoring Martin Luther King Jr.” at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 1986. From left to right: Paul Stookey, Bob Dylan, Mary Travers, Stevie Wonder, and Peter Yarrow.
(AP Photo)
Long after Dylan left the protest mode, he continued to write songs that had postmodern overtures. He explains:
Sometimes you say things in songs even if there’s a small chance of them being true. And sometimes you say things that have nothing to do with the truth of what you want to say and sometimes you say things that everyone knows to be true. Then again, at the same time, you’re thinking that the only truth on earth is that there is no truth on it. Whatever you are saying, you’re saying in a ricky-tick way. There’s never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did.11
What one latches to, time and time again, with Dylan is this skill he possesses in looking at and through ideas themselves. It is as if he holds a special sensory skill that not only makes everything visible, but he can see what shifts through the wind as well.
Dylan concerts today and in the recent past often leave fans scratching their heads: who is this old man pretending to be Bob Dylan? For the uninitiated, seeing Dylan perform is an odd spectacle. Perhaps they expect to hear the young man of 50 years ago or some version of Dylan that exudes from CD. Maybe listeners are remembering the crystal clear voice of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Instead, what concertgoers get is a musician who relentlessly reworks his songs on stage, which ultimately leads to new stylings and sounds that fans do not expect.
One could speculate that the only reason Dylan gets away with this is because of his iconic legacy. Taking into account how every other artist or group performs, it is clear that fans want to hear the hits or highlights as closely as possible to the single they heard on the radio or downloaded from iTunes. With Dylan, however, fans grumble (particularly the uninitiated) about his raspy voice and how the band drowns out the sound, yet he remains true to the road and the literal “Neverending Tour,” which began in 1988 and continues on well into the 21st century.
After a September 2012 show at the newly refurbished Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, for example, New York Times music-critic Jon Pareles wrote at length about the way Dylan transformed on stage. Sometimes his voice, the main instrument one would expect on display at a Dylan show, seemed “impossibly ramshackle, just a fogbound rasp,” which contrasted with other instances when “willful phrasing and conversational nuances come through.” Reworking old songs, according to Pareles, “was sly and transformative: sometimes backdating the music to well before the original recordings, sometimes viewing his past selves with avuncular pride and amusement, sometimes staring into the abyss, sometimes tempering youthful spite with empathy.” This shifting ground throws many fans for a loop, whether they are longtime listeners or newcomers.12
Dylan’s ties to postmodernism is apparent in the way he shifted from folk music to rock in the mid-1960s, but it may be even more direct in his commitment to touring. The grind of being voice of a generation in the early part of his career soured Dylan on touring, since the fans and prominent attendees wanted a piece of him, as if he offered some macro truths or revelations for them to carry on their lives. It took Dylan several decades to ease into a place where he could tour on his own timeframe. Most noticeably, though, the songs he performed on stage would follow the arrangement he preferred.
Dylan spoke about the missing piece on stage in Chronicles, explaining, “For the listeners, it must have been like going through deserted orchards of dead grass. . . . I’d been following established customs and they weren’t working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it’s not like I didn’t know it.”13 The master narrative of being Dylan overpowered the actual performer. “My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch their raw nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore. . . . I was what they called over the hill.”14 At the end of his performing rope, Dylan needed a miracle to overcome his ailment.
One day, skipping out on a rehearsal with the Grateful Dead in San Rafael, California, Dylan recalls walking into a bar and hearing a jazz combo play. Listening to the singer, some past emotion welled up inside him and burst forth. Suddenly, though, in rejecting what he thought entailed how he should perform his songs live, Dylan came across a new way of thinking. “I became aware of a certain set of dynamic principles by which my performances could be transformed,” he writes.15 Mentally, the singer entered a better place, which then reflected on his tactical ability. “The angles I was using were unwieldy but highly effective. Because of this different formulaic approach to the vocal technique, my voice never got blown out and I could sing forever without fatigue.”16
By discarding the routine of going through the motions, which he probably could have continued for the rest of his career—basically cashing checks for being a walking karaoke machine—Dylan says that he experienced a “metamorphosis” that left him revitalized: “I had a new faculty and it seemed to surpass all the other human requirements.”17 For the first time in 30 years, he claims, he entered a new way of thinking, a kind of different pedagogical approach that gave him the energy and will to continue. Rather than rely on the tried and true, Dylan turned on universal truths and recreated a new portrait of how he would entertain audiences—a thoroughly postmodern mind-set.
One of the most perplexing aspects of postmodern Dylan is that this guise merges with the trickster in him and leads to confounding results—again, Dylan not allowing himself to be pinned down to one idea or image. Bursting onto the scene in early 2004, for example, Dylan not only allowed his songs to be used in television ads selling Victoria’s Secret lingerie, but he himself appeared in them. The shock at seeing the venerable rocker selling out to hawk underwear turned into a news item of its own. The ads unleashed competing tirades of frustration among longtime fans and bemusement for others. It is as if one side asked, “Why would you do this to us, Bob,” while the other wondered, “Is he that hard-up for money?” One advertising reporter spoke for many people, asking simply, “Am I hallucinating? Seriously, I think I’m hallucinating. . . . Why on earth would Bob Dylan do this?”18 Many people were left scratching their heads.
The notion that Dylan simply sold out for the cash and the opportunity to mess with people’s image of him is enticing. However, a deeper cultural implication might have also been at play, which centered on how an aging rocker remains relevant in the 21st century when the average lifespan of a new band, singer, or hit song seems to equate to that of the adult mayfly. Journalist Seth Stevenson relates Dylan’s commercial to similar ones featuring classic rockers, such as Sting, James Taylor, and Michael McDonald. He explains, “Yes, in exchange for publicizing their art they sacrifice some integrity, but this is basically an understandable tradeoff. And Dylan even gets, in the terms of his deal, a mix CD of his songs sold at Victoria’s Secret stores.”19 What may really be at work in Dylan’s stint as an underwear pitchman is the relentless desire for new, young, and hip musicians crowding out older, established stars within the broader context of an unyielding churn brought on by commercialism and the Internet.
The intersection where consumerism, demographics, branding, marketability, and technology collide is an important facet in how musicians (even of Dylan’s iconic stature) must operate in the 21st century. One of the few bands that can breathe the same rarified air as Dylan is the Rolling Stones. To celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary in early 2013, for example, Mick Jagger (about 600,000 followers), Keith Richards (about 250,000 followers), and the band as a whole (about 625,000 followers) all established Twitter accounts. The very notion that Mick and Keith are pounding out 140-character missives is almost too much to ponder, yet this kind of social media marketing is a necessity in the contemporary music scene. The official Bob Dylan Twitter account, linked to the BobDylan.com site, boasts about 200,000 followers.
The challenge for musicians and artists is that so many forces compete with each CD released, new video generated, or ring tone created. These events, which used to drive media coverage, are now part of broader convergence. As a result, the white noise produced in a culture that churns on and on nonstop becomes overwhelming. The idea behind convergence is that lines between media channels no longer exist. For instance, where does viral marketing for a band begin and how does that intersect with traditional forms of advertising?
Technological innovation and change go so completely hand in hand that one can practically chart the direct evolution over time from records and phonographs to MP3s. Each subsequent invention builds on its predecessor and subsequently revolutionizes music performance and consumer response. The intersection of performance (the music itself) and consumer response (people listening and/or purchasing) defines the music business.
A new CD release, for example, is no longer a single incident or merely followed up by the band touring. Instead, the release means availability through traditional purchasing and, more importantly, online availability. Apple’s iTunes significance cannot be understated at this point in music history. Imagine . . . a computer company refashioned as a lifestyle brand is now the most important player in the music industry!
The idea that Dylan is a mystery most likely derives from his combative phase in the mid-1960s when he cajoled, teased, manipulated, and burst out at reporters who asked him questions that he thought were inane. He also has managed to keep much of his private life out of the limelight, despite an existence perpetually in front of audiences and the immortality that being a musician brings as one’s life is poured out on vinyl, disk, or mp3. Ironically, while living this seemingly mysterious life, one finds that Dylan has given countless interviews, written a memoir, and engaged in a great deal of activities that one could put in the bucket labeled “creating a brand.” What is interesting here, as in so much of Dylanology, is that the man, as noted music writer Anthony DeCurtis explains, “is the very definition of hidden in plain sight.” Furthermore, DeCurtis notes, “He has perfected a version of himself that permits his being available virtually everywhere while letting very little of himself be known. It is a feat that would seem to be impossible in our media-drenched age, but he has accomplished it.”20 It is in this guise or existence somewhere between known and unknown that Dylan symbolizes postmodernism, essentially becoming a sign in an ephemeral world.
What the audience and fans see in all this is a constant willingness on Dylan’s part to reinvent himself. One could surely argue that Dylan’s shape shifting is at least, if not more, impressive than Madonna’s seemingly constant transformations. Yet, critics and commentators either deride or revere Madonna for changing with the times. Dylan, here, gets a free pass—at least if we forget the heavy religious phase (1979–1981), which almost no one seemed to accept or appreciate.
DeCurtis explains that the mystery in Dylan’s songs demonstrate that he is still searching for personal meaning. He notes a rare interview with Ed Bradley on the CBS television magazine 60 Minutes in which Dylan tells Bradley: “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. . . . Those early songs were almost magically written.”21 Of course, as DeCurtis wisely indicates, as the years have progressed, Dylan has provided insight on his writing process, how he lived his life, and what constituted his inspirations. Chronicles charts these issues and many more, which leads one to believe that the memoir is exactly that—Dylan telling us what Dylan wants us to know, and nothing more. As DeCurtis explains, “With Dylan, ultimately, the issue is escaping expectations, wherever they might come from, even from within himself.”22
Writer David Dalton, a founding editor of Rolling Stone, views Dylan’s emergence as an artist wrapped tightly with the 1960s’ counterculture and its legacy. “The phantasmagoria of his great mid-’60s albums is an expression of his inner turmoil,” Dalton says, “and mirrors the shattering of the culture.” In the writer’s assessment, then, Dylan “has an umbilical relationship to his time. . . . The public and private Dylans—his music, his times, and our perceptions of him—are inextricably linked, a sort of Zeitgeist Kid.”23 Although Dalton’s quest for the real Dylan rings true from today’s perspective, I can only imagine that Dylan himself would despise such a reading. He never wanted to be so closely tied to the past, instead seeing himself as a man of the future—holding a healthy respect for the past—but not being bound there, like a rotting corpse biding his time until the end.
Yet, as Dalton correctly concludes, Dylan never completely repudiates his past or his role in American culture.24 He is part of the mythologizing that takes place all around him, on every interaction with other human beings, through the speakers, and on the screen or paper when someone reads another post, a different review, or interview that promises a new perspective, but just simply mirrors the 10, 50, or 10,000 before it. Dylan is the ultimate postmodern paradigm. He is so outside the master narrative, not only in his personal life, but also as an artist, that he is spectral, the über icon of the modern world. We know everything about him, but still know nothing at all. If he floated by we might sense his presence, but we would never see him. No one ever has. But it is all in the music.