Dylan the particularist

Paul Cella has an appreciation of the innovativeness and Americanness of Bob Dylan’s language—of Dylan’s love of America, focusing on his most recent albums. Sadly, for me, Dylan’s recordings of the last 20 or so years, whatever their merits may be, are a closed book, because I simply cannot bear listening to what his voice has been during that period—half dead-man’s-croak, half affected-talking-through-his-nose. I’d rather pound rocks in the sun than listen to that freaky noise.

On Dylan’s patriotism, RightWingBob quotes this passage from Cella’s article:

Dylan would go on to hurl many scornful polemics at the generation which was as ridiculous as a mattress on a bottle of wine, the 1960s—as he would at many targets. Then, the bitterest cut: he would consummate his defiance of the 60s by releasing in the year 1968 an album of simple country songs, of sincerity and regret, which uttered hardly a word about war when the Vietnam War was all his peers seemed to care about.

I fancy what really turned him against the 60s generation was its anti-patriotism. So many of these people found America in a basic sense hateful. He could never accept that. Even as a Leftist Bob Dylan was a particularist, which is the first and most vital step in patriotism. He could never hate his particular native land. And when the system or philosophy of the 60s got done with its platitudes and abstractions, when it finished with street theater and clownish posturing, it was going to destroy America. It may yet accomplish our ruin. But the man who is sometimes foolishly said to have put this 1960s philosophy to song, the proclaimed Voice of a Generation, very certainly repudiated it. He repudiated it using the same sneers by which it was made. Now that, I venture, is experimentation, hospitality to novelty, and carelessness of precedent which Mencken could appreciate.

[end of quote.]

I would add that the apparently leftist or anti-American meaning of the words of many of Dylan’s songs is often belied by the feeling of those songs. Take “Hurricane” as an example. On the literal level, the song is a harsh (and by the way utterly false) denunciation of white police for framing the black boxer “Hurricane” Carter for “something that he never done,” and a denunciation of America in general for its oppression of blacks. And yet, the feeling of the song has never struck me the way your usual leftist attacks on America affect me. The song conveys a love for America. And the same is true of many of Dylan’s songs. I can’t explain this at the moment, it’s just true.

I’ve made a similar observation about “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”:

I can’t explain why the line cuts into me the way it does. It’s the totality of it, the words, the melody, and the unique feeling conveyed by Dylan’s voice. To me the song is not primarily about oppression or injustice or people’s moral blindness. It’s about life, the beauty of life.

- end of initial entry -

Mike Berman writes:

When liberals carried around their “Ban the Bomb” signs, Dylan goofed on them with:

And people carried signs around
Saying, “Ban the bums”

From the Wikipedia entry for “My Back Pages”:

“My Back Pages” is a Bob Dylan song from the album Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). It is stylistically similar to his earlier protest songs, with only a solo acoustic guitar. However its lyrics and in particular the refrain (“Ah, but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”) seem intended to mark a rejection of much of Dylan’s earlier personal and political idealism, and disillusionment with the “protest scene” with which he was associated.

Dylan’s disenchantment with “the movement” had surfaced in a ranting speech he gave in 1963 when accepting an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC) in New York.[1] Mike Marqusee writes: “No Song on Another Side distressed Dylan’s friends in the movement more than ‘My Back Pages’ in which he transmutes the rude incoherence of his ECLC rant into the organized density of art. The lilting refrain … must be one of the most lyrical expressions of political apostasy ever penned. It is a recantation, in every sense of the word.” [2]

[end of quote]

The parents of my friend, Peter Wolf, were there that night. Pete told me that Dylan was brutally insulting to the audience. He was saying things such as that they were so old that they all had one foot in the grave. I think he was referring to their ideas as well as their bodies.

LA replies:

I think the slogan “Ban the Bomb” was from the early 1960s. The Dylan song you quote, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” is from 1965.

March 27

LA writes:

Here is a webpage that goes through “Hurricane” verse by verse comparing it to the facts of reality, with which the song is wildly at variance. How then are we to think of “Hurricane”? It depends. If we think of the song as claiming to state what really happened, then Dylan and his co-writer Jacques Levy are lying (or deluded), anti-white, anti-American, anti-police, pro-black-criminal propagandists. If we think of the song as Dylan’s and Levy’s construction of their own poetical fiction out of the materials of reality, then it’s a poetical fiction that draws on, but is radically different from, factual reality, and doesn’t claim to be anything else. But, if it is only a fiction, isn’t it still the case that the fiction is anti-American, negative, and objectionable, and therefore the song does not “work”? The answer may be a matter of taste. If the falseness or negative quality of what the song is saying is paramount for you, then the song will not work for you. If the words, music, instrumentation, and Dylan’s singing all add up to create an emotional world with its own integrity and fascination, then the song will work for you, giving aesthetic pleasure, despite its literal falseness and its negative message. At the same time, it would seem that, because of the song’s falseness, a shadow hangs over it, and even given the most favorable listening it can never completely “work.”

Or here’s another way of looking at it. Even though the song’s claim that Hurricane Carter was framed by police for the murders in that Patterson bar in 1966 is literally and damnably false, it remains the case that other people in history have been framed, treated with terrible injustice, wrongly imprisoned. In that sense, the song is true, it is telling a factual untruth to convey a larger truth about injustice, and Dylan just happens to be using the (false) story of a black man framed by white police to convey it.

At the same time, as I’ve said before, Dylan would never use the story of a white person mistreated and oppressed by blacks to convey such a truth.

LA continues:

By the way, lest all this close analysis (or, if you like, tortured intellectualization) create the impression that the song “Hurricane” is very important to me, I haven’t listened to it more than a few times in the last 15 or more years. Rather, the song’s factual falseness raised difficult questions as to the value of the song as a song and how one should listen to it, and I tried to address them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 26, 2009 01:15 PM | Send