Wicked Messenger
Page 17
However wrongheaded the fear of rock ’n’ roll, the apprehensions about the impact of the increasingly powerful mass media on anything that might be construed as a people’s culture have proved well-founded. Dylan’s innovative fusion helped to identify a new record-buying constituency, and thus proved a stepping stone in the construction of today’s global music industry. Dominated by a handful of giant corporations, it is both more economically centralized and more socially segregated than ever, as executives calibrate the music to chime with increasingly refined demographics. Like the militants at the March on Washington, the defenders of the folk faith at Newport feared that their movement was being coopted by the blandishments of established power. Given the history of the sixties, and its treatment in after-years, Lomax and his allies ought to be given credit for their prescient insight into how, in a society dominated by corporate media, the cultural expressions of dissent could be transmogrified into profitable, politically malleable commodities. As the decades have rolled by, participation and collectivity—the roots of all vital popular culture—have been steadily replaced by passive individual consumerism. There have been repeated efforts to claw back the music from the corporate institutions: punk, hip-hop, acid house, outlaw/alternative country. All have found their destinies intertwined with the industry they rose to challenge. As Lomax feared, the demands of authenticity and political independence do, in the long run, clash with those of commerce. What he misidentified, in 1965, was the field of battle and the weapons to hand.
From Newport, Dylan himself went straight back into the studio, undaunted, and cut the bulk of the demoniac tracks on Highway 61 Revisited. The departure from the folk revival and the embrace of electric music seemed decisive. But Dylan soon came to regret the stampede he touched off. As he made repeatedly clear in interviews, his allegiance to the old songs, to the traditions, remained undimmed, and he never ceased plundering them. In recent years, he has often lamented the weakening of the folk tradition, the severing of the links with a pre-corporate past. As for rock ’n’ roll, he says in the Biograph notes of 1985, “it’s now a highly visible enterprise, big establishment thing. You know things go better with Coke because Aretha Franklin told you so . . . in the beginning it wasn’t anything like that. You were eligible to get busted for playing it . . . It’s all been neutralized, nothing threatening, nothing magical. . . . Everything is just too commercial.”8
Dylan returned to Newport, after an absence of more than three decades, in 2002. The Festival itself was no longer what it once was. Abandoned in 1970 (because of what its official Web site terms “growing social unrest”), it was revived in the mid-eighties, largely stripped of political aspirations. Today it occupies a cozy niche in the music industry. The title sponsor for the 2002 event was a company selling “natural juices” (it was also backed by Borders, the bookselling giant, and ABC television). Dylan donned a wig, false beard, and silly hat for the occasion, but played his usual set and made no reference to past events.
I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.
—Bob Dylan, 1965
Dylan’s performance at Newport has been compared to the 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Although the comparison is an expression of the persistent desire to fit Dylan’s work into the canon of high art, it’s not entirely far-fetched. In both cases, an unexpected concatenation of the modern and the primitive flummoxed audiences raised on neat musical categories. In both cases, the defenders of the mould-breakers claimed they were creating a music as violent and disturbing as the world it was made in. But where Stravinsky was a modernist intellectual toying with the primitive, Dylan was much more an anti-intellectual primitive toying with the modernist. In the proto-punk “Outlaw Blues” he’d shouted:Ain’t gonna hang no picture,
Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame.
Well, I might look like Robert Ford
But I feel just like Jesse James.aa
During this period, in both interviews and songs, Dylan champions the claims of popular culture against the presumptions of the elite. He named Smokey Robinson as the greatest living poet. In the sleeve notes for Bringing It All Back Home he refers frequently to the conflicting claims of elite and popular culture, and aligns himself with the latter:. . . the fact that the white house is filled with leaders that’ve never been t’ the apollo theater amazes me . . . if someone thinks norman mailer is more important than hank williams, that’s fine . . . i would rather model harmonica holders than discuss aztec anthropology/english literature . . . i know there’re some people terrified of the bomb, but there are other people terrified t’ be seen carrying a modern screen magazine . . .
Dylan rejects the notion that there are appropriate discourses for discrete categories of expression or experience. The boundaries separating high and low culture are blurred. The solemnity of public rituals is punctured and satirized. Expertise and specialization are seen as pretenses that substitute the part for the whole. Dylan’s democratic (and defensive) anti-intellectualism, his celebration of instinct, of change for its own sake finds its nemesis in academic lifelessness.
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known
As Mr. Jones learns, art is no substitute for life, just as politics is no substitute, and an art or a politics that cuts itself off from life—ugly, ragged-edged, undefinable, unpredictable—becomes the enemy. In contrast, popular culture offers immediacy, spontaneity, energy and, above all, authenticity—an organic relationship with human experience. The contrast between the hollowness of elite art and the vivacity and soulfulness of popular expression surfaces as an explicit theme in “Desolation Row”: And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
It reappears in “Visions of Johanna”:Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
And in “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” Dylan spots “Shakespeare, he’s in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells . . .” marvelously re-creating the bard as one of his troupe of spaced-out street jesters. In “Tombstone Blues,” Dylan puts elite and popular art in bed together—expressions of refractory, authentically individual creativity—and identifies their common enemies in nationalist conformity, commercial exploitation, and academic institutionalization:Where Ma Raney and Beethoven once unwrapped their bed roll
Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole
And the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul
To the old folks home and the college
In an interview in August 1965, Dylan spelled out his current views on the place of art in society:Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out . . . Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.9
Thus, Dylan declared year zero of his cultural revolution, driven by the same tension between a democratic insurgency and the inadequacy of existing vehicles (institutional, ideological, cultural) that drove the SDS activists. Ironically, Dylan’s Picasso-in-the-diner dadaism restates Picasso’s own concern to rescue the life-e
nhancing, perception-changing power of art from conventional representation and the polite condescension of institutions. For the early twentieth-century modernists, both revolutionary and reactionary, Western civilization was in a death grip, and the bourgeois culture spoon-fed to the masses was soulless. In this, they were heirs of the romantic critics of industrial capitalism who first began the quest for the authentic as an antidote to the dissatisfaction of the individual in an impersonal society. In Dylan, this long-standing critique entered mass culture itself. He articulated it in a popular idiom, into which he incorporated some of high modernism’s box of tricks: fragmentation, allusion, ellipsis, rapid mood shifts, jagged juxtapositions, and challenging obscurity. Apart from the Beats, Dylan’s reading was sporadic and undisciplined, but he was a magpie, and even a casual acquaintance with Eliot, cummings, the French symbolists, and the surrealists left traces in his work. For all the strident populism, Dylan in this period is without doubt a self-conscious, avant-garde artist.
Dylan prided himself on his knowledge of and roots in popular culture. But in reality, the breach between Dylan and the musical traditions he drew on was as qualitative as the breach that separated the modernists from their sources—the art of pre-Renaissance Europe or of “primitive” colonized cultures. Recorded music enabled Dylan to ransack the American musical heritage like Ezra Pound at loose in a library of medieval manuscripts. Within that heritage, Dylan responded to strongly individual voices. But where these individuals had defined themselves within a given musical idiom associated with a regional or racial identity, Dylan drew simultaneously on many idioms: Appalachian and British folk, Delta and urban blues, country and western, gospel, Chicago R&B, southern soul, Woody Guthrie, Brecht and Weill, first generation rock ’n’ roll. His relationship with all these was one of choice and selection, guided by the driving desire to make something of his own. Despite Dylan’s multifarious sources, the one thing people didn’t call him was eclectic.
Dylan did not respond to popular culture with the bleached blank stare of Warhol; the best of it moved him, spoke more directly to him than anything else, the worst of it pissed him off. The irony that infuses his treatment of this theme is not a postmodern one; it’s firmly rooted in the individual’s search for the authentic in an inauthentic society.
The liner notes for Bringing It All Back Home begin and end with a parable on the absurdity of Dylan’s predicament:am standing there writing
WHAAAT? on my favorite wall when who should
pass by in a jet plane but my recording
engineer “i’m here t’ pick up you and your
latest works of art. do you need any help
with anything?”
After a lengthy aside, Dylan returns to the parable:an’ so i answer my recording engineer
“yes. well i could use some help in getting
this wall in the plane”
The dilemma for Dylan was how to retain street cred in an industry that packaged and gutted the true product of the street. Having seen at firsthand the voracity of the trend-spotting media he worried about the fate of a popular art—graffiti, in the parable—when it’s taken up by the corporate establishment.
Dylan was a college dropout with an audience of college students. He was an ambitiously avant-garde artist wary of pretentiousness and overearnestness , a self-conscious artist who aspired (like so many romantic poets before him) to unself-consciousness. He was keen to legitimize his own art and to do that he had to challenge the legitimacy of the barriers that fenced in the elite; hence the double-edged name-dropping, giving a wink to the educated, the literary, the sophisticated, and at the same time trashing their rarefied exclusivity.
Dylan’s work of this period should be seen as part of a larger cultural movement. In literature, the sixties witnessed an impatience with “the well-wrought urn,” a greater personal (and political) engagement, an invasion of informality—in the novels of Philip Roth or the poems of Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich. The same movement can be seen in the films of the French New Wave—where high-art traditions were refreshed by pop culture and politics. Retrospectively, Dylan’s work and his posture seem to have presaged a wave of canon-busting. By virtue of his artistic achievement and social impact, Dylan helped establish popular culture as an object worthy of academic study. Then, inevitably, the paradox of the authentic kicked in. On being informed that a museum of rock ’n’ roll was to open, Dylan commented, “Nothing surprises me any more.”
Hatred, to you I have entrusted my treasure
—Rimbaud, Saison en Enfer
Among the many remarkable features of “Like a Rolling Stone” is the fact that the song with which Dylan cracked the pop charts was one of unremitting spitefulness. Having done so once, he had a stab at the same thing twice more within a few months, releasing “Positively 4th Street” in September 1965 and “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” in December. Indeed, for the crime of pointing out the repetition involved in the last of the trio, Phil Ochs found himself banished from Dylan’s inner circle.10
One of the movement’s traits that Dylan carried with him into his post-protest phase was the combative self-righteousness he had claimed to spurn on Another Side. The exultantly vindictive note of the three singles of late 1965 was already there in “When The Ship Comes In;” “Masters of War” and “Hattie Carroll” had been unyieldingly unforgiving. But in the songs of 1965, the spleen is strictly person to person. It becomes, in a way, the real matter of the music. Dylan here unashamedly glories in the weakness or misfortune of others. This upfront indulgence in personal unpleasantness was a far cry from the demure, upbeat or sentimental attitudes favored by both folk and pop conventions. In more ways than one, it was a new kind of sound in mainstream white popular culture.
Muddy Waters, a onetime Lomax protégé, recorded his R&B classic, “Rollin’ Stone,” in 1951. At the time, its success was confined to the African-American market, but it became a cult item for young British blues fans and gave Jagger, Richards, and Jones the name for their band. The lyric is a declaration of personal independence—a macho disavowal of responsibility or permanence of affections:Well, my mother told my father,
just before I was born,
“I got a boy child’s comin,
He’s gonna be, he’s gonna be a rollin’ stone”
In the same year, Hank Williams released “Lost Highway”:I’m a rolling stone, all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by, all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway
Dylan’s song is informed by Waters and Williams, but he seizes on the inherited metaphor from a different angle. It becomes a punishment and a prison, but also a common fate, an underlying reality. From the snare-shot opening and the surge of organ and piano, “Like a Rolling Stone” is permeated by a kind of ecstasy of schadenfreude. The ensemble rises and falls on waves of bitterness. The guitar gloats. The voice taunts: “How does it feel?” In this sustained six-minute epic of vituperation, the writing is relentlessly single-minded, yet ever-surprising. The sense of millennial confrontation that riddled Dylan’s protest phase here takes on a life of its own, abstracted from any but the most personal context, and unleashed as a scornful, unpitying spirit—which was also a spirit of unmistakable freshness and energy. One of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” commands: “Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead,” and there’s something of the same diabolic exuberance in Dylan.
“Like a Rolling Stone” is addressed to someone raised in privilege who finds herself fallen among the dispossessed:You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it
In her heyday, the song’s subject used and abused the people around her, and mistook their service for personal
loyalty. Class resentment mingles here with the resentment of a rejected lover, and the eager triumphalism of an erstwhile outcast.
The seminal status of “Like a Rolling Stone” is about more than its impact on the rock ’n’ roll format. It’s about the song’s intimate rage and almost amoral assertion of personal autonomy—a defiant response to a world that insisted on tearing away that autonomy at every turn. “Like a Rolling Stone” was Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” broadcast on AM radio.
“Positively 4th Street” has always been seen as Dylan’s fuck-you to the folk set. It was indeed written shortly after the Newport clash, and 4th Street in the Village was full of folk- and protest-era associations for Dylan. But apart from the title, the song is deliberately unspecific; there’s no setting here, just the drama of the singer spurning false friendship. Compared to “Like a Rolling Stone,” its language is plain and its verse form simple. The song lambastes insincerity and opportunism (“You just want to be on / The side that’s winning”) but also displays a perverse preoccupation with social hierarchy and power relations.
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem
Sometimes, the status consciousness seems pure teen angst:
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back