joanna wrote:
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> I would say that in the early period, his music is so entwined with the
> zeitgeist
No more so than Shakespeare's drama or Beethoven's music. It's pretty meaningless to say that x is "intertwined with the zeitgeist," and usually even false. His songs represented a small minority -- a very small minority -- at the time they were written and sung. By the time they began to represent the feelings of a _large_ minority (but still a minority) he had already 'gone on' to the kind of music that offended that original audience.
Of all the labels for Dylan (regardless of how one judges his music) "poseur" is the most far-fetched one imaginable. I mean it is really a pretty brainless epithet for someone who so obviously was responding to inner urges. That's why I say that a negative judgment of him would have to be based on the deep linkages between his thought and feeling and the Emersonian tradition in the u.s.
"Poseur" is (1) a moral not an aesthetic judgment and (2) a judgment implicitly grounded in a claim to be able to read another person's private intentions. See Hamlet's response to those who would try to 'play him.' So Dylan could respond to you.
Leftists today should stop basing their knowledge of the '60s on mere rumor.
Carrol