[lbo-talk] Why are we still turning to Dylan for the soundtrack to our demonstrations?

[Louis Kontos]

People have always felt the need to project their own failures on Dylan.
He's like a screen. I mean the man has written over a thousand songs (!),
reworked several genre of music and changed the way most of us understand
music -- not just protest music. None of this can be denied. Yet many people
still feel the need to say the kind of stuff Mike B says below. Mr. Jones
(Ballad of a Thin Man) is about people who seem to know everything and
really know nothing. Mr. Jones would say things like 'I like Hollis Brown
and, of course..' as if his likes and dislikes are supposed to mean
anything. Mike B, Joanna, etc., can you tell us what makes any of Dylan's
early music better than the albums Blood on the Tracks, Desire, Street
Legal, or any of Dylan's recent albums? What makes Hollis Brown more
political than Political World, Changing of the Guards, Dark Eyes, Cat's in
the Well, etc. etc.? It's a lot easier to label a single artist as a poseur,
sell-out, religious fanatic (did I miss anything?) than to come to terms
with real failure. 

 


> 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
> *******************
> 
> He lost the plot--at least as far as I was concerned-- after his near fatal
> motocycle accident.  Trauma can do that.
> 
> http://www.classicbands.com/dylan.html
> 
> I still love "Bringing it all back home" and "Highway 61", "When the ship
> comes
> in", "Hollis Brown" and, of course "Mr. Jones", who he increasingly became,
> more or less, after '66.
> 
> Regards,
> Mike B)
> 
> 
> 
> Read "The Perthian Brickburner":
> http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
> 
> 
> 
> 
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