--- Travis Fast <tfast at yorku.ca> wrote:
> No I am just mad at Bob for selling my parents
> protest music to the
> banks.
Hey, he has a lot of kids to support. Actually he did one of the funniest things in this department I've ever seen -- let Victoria's Secret use Lovesick, "I'm sick of love, I wish I'd never met you." His sense of humor isn't what it used to be, but it still has an edge.
Oh yah and far be it from anyone to demand
> anything from the
> genius artist. Ralph.
Well, he is a genius artist, sorry. But actually I think the rest of us have no right to demand and no business demanding anything from any artist, genius or no. Their responsibility is to create something true and meaningful and beautiful, not to rally the masses or criticize the government. Bob always said he never wanted to be "the voice of the counterculture" or leading anyone in anything. If he'd tried, he probably wouldn't have been as great as he's been for so long. Others may have that calling, let them follow it, and if you prefer that sort of thing, that's OK too. If you don't like Bob because he's not doing thats ort of thing, don't listen to him. But it's terribly wrong to say he ought to be doing it, that it is somehow his responsibity to continue in that groove.
Incidentally, he occasionally has done protest music post Bringing It All Back Home -- there's George Jackson, Hurricane, on a much lower lever Union Sundown, and what may he his last great song, Blind Willie McTell, which actually is political.
How about a screed against
> social realism.
Socialist realism deserves a screed against it. "Social realism," I don't know what that is.
Um
> ah or do we dislike that aspect of Dylan's original
> aesthetic
No, I like his protest music as well as the next fella. He still plays Masters of War in concert, btw. I don't know how Blowin' In The Wind and The Times They Are A'Changing stand up. They're great songs, but sort of period pieces today.
and
> celebrate his narcissistic muse.
Please yes, let's do. If my narccissitic you mean his being responsible to whatever moves him to create -- even if it's Jesus. His overt Hal Linsay religiosity in that phase was pretty icky, but he produced You Gotta Serve Somebody, Every Grain of Sand -- some genuinely great gospel music.
Me, my favorite Bob is the most "narcissistic," hallucinogenic stuff of the mid-60s, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, the Basement Tapes. That's the stuff I return to again and again from a really absurd Bob collection (every legit recording and 50-some bootlegs).
Bob is a great tragic poet whose themes are love, loss, and death. He's really in the tradition of "that old wierd America" (Greil Marcus) of Harry Smith's Anthology. Along the way he was inspired by Woody Guthrie _among others_ and wrote some great protest music, can't you be happy with that? If you like protest music, be grateful for what he gave us, It's childish to bitch and moan that he found other things to talk about -- trivialities like love and death. He's not Woody Guthie, Phil Ochs or Pete Seeger. There's nothing wrong with them or liking them or liking them better than Bob, but there is a lot wrong with insisting that he givfe up his vision to conform to your politics.
Sounds right for
> the times. Spare us
> the cultural revolution indeed.
>
> Travis
You know, the cultural revolution was a real disaster and socialist realism a vicious farce. They were artistic as well as political and human disasters. I can think of only one genuine SR masterpiece, the vitriocally anticommunist Lige and Fate of Vassily Grossman, suppressed as unpublishable in the old USSR.
AS I;ve said, artists whose muse is fed by protest should do that and some do it all their careers very well. Artists who find other inspirations should not be criticized as narcissistic or misguided or sellouts because their muse is different. That will produce only bad art. But you don't have to like their work, just don't gripe because they're not doing something else.
Incidentally I also love jazz, Frank Sinatra, Broadway show music, and Stephen Sondheim, who is in a class by himself. Sondheim has done political, even protest art -- Assassins, about the hollowness of the American Dream, Pacific Overtures, about imperialism, Sweeney Todd, about class oppression (among other things). Does that mean that it's bad of him to do something solely about, well, love and death, like Passion? Or Love and sex, like A Little Night Music? (That's about class too, but very subtly). Or love and marriage, like Company? Or art, like Sunday in the Park With George? This is narcissism? These aren't issues that are important to people even if they don't involve protest? If they think not, I'm sorry for you.
jks
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> >Carl, are you still mad at Bob for giving up
> protest
> >music? Do you really think he or any artist owes it
> >to, I dunno, the proletariat or something to "serve
> >the people," even if his own muse tells him to
> serve
> >the White Goddess (Desire), Jesus (slow Train
> Coming),
> >or just to play strange old folk tunes (Good As I
> Been
> >To You)? I think it is time to stop the Cultural
> >Revolution stuff.
> >
> >--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >>Carl Remick wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> who hasn't done anything but follow his own whim
> >>>
> >>>
> >>for decades.
> >>
> >>Carrol's right - he's a modern Emersonian. So
> why's
> >>it ok for RWE, but not RZ?
> >>
> >>Doug
> >>___________________________________
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> >
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