> Frankly, I've always thought Dylan was an exceptionally good poseur. If
> he had been anything more than that, his art would have matured, which
> it never did.
>
> 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
>>
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