On Nov 12, 2005, at 5:58 PM, Chuck0 wrote:
> Michael Hoover wrote:
>> Silent protest
>> Why are we still turning to Dylan for the soundtrack to our
>> demonstrations?
>> Ian Buruma
>> Saturday November 12 2005
>> The Guardian
>
> Let me guess--Mr. Baruma is an aging baby boomer who wanted to write
> about Bob Dylan and chose to write this ignorant article about
> American resistance culture so he could talk about Bob Dylan. That's a
> very redundant sentence, but so is Aruma's article.
>
> It wouldn't have been very hard for Buruma to turn up examples of
> contemporary American resistance culture. Folk musicians such as David
> Rovics, Utah Phillips, Holley Anderson, and many others tour around
> the country and draw good audiences. Folk/pop singers such as Ani
> Difranco have huge followings.
let's not forget that Ani DiFranco's followings can be justified with the fact that she's opened for Dylan during his 1997 tour. Anyhow, Baruma describes a fact. It could be said that Dylan has been the product of a time when "the people" (the mass, call it as you like) had a role and a "place", whereas now is the time of the multitude(s). There's nothing redundant about the article. Both Dylan's first installment of his biography and Scorsese's documentary shed some light, though not definitive, about Dylan's specificity. A couple of issues: his tug of war with his very "constituency" about the relationship between change and authenticity. In a way, about the concept of time. It reminds me of an old Negri's statement: "the revolutionary has no memory" (something that's never been fully understood).As a byproduct there's the issue of his annoyance for modern forms of personality cult (during his Woodstock's years).He won't say it, but in my opinion, there were two equally determining factors for his reluctance toward celebrity status. One is quite easy to relate to: let me alone. The other, never admitted, is "what's wrong with you when you come all the way just to camp outside a minstrel's home?" Simple stuff, but meaningful, for "you" means the very identity of a mass movement. He is not stupid, he knows/knew that "Woodstock" (something that happened several miles from the town) was chosen simply because he lived there. That's why he didn't participate then. The other, yet even more contradictory one, has do to with what he does, who he is, ultimately. He refuses to be considered a poet. He goes on and on, in his biography, describing how he developed his technique of guitar playing. To make it short, he believes that a song is a song is a song. It is the combination of music, text, and performance. That's why he keeps changing the way he sings a song (here we go again with the concept of "time"). In doing so, though, he demonstrate the fallacy of his conviction that text cannot be separated from music and performance for if you change the music and the performance but not the text it means that you're able to separate the text from the other components. So, he is a poet. He's a poet like Blake whose Nursery's Songs could be played by Dylan's friend Ginsberg and my friend Corso. In conclusion, the revolutionary has no memory. That doesn't mean that there aren't constants in the eternal fight between rich and poor (Marx hasn't "invented" class struggle, for instance), who governs and who's governed. Dylan, someone who changes constantly, is a constant as well.
ciao, alessandro