Joanna
alessandro coricelli wrote:
>
> 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
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>