>As someone deeply involved in his music since forever,
>I don't quite believe this. Dylan has made it clear he doesn't
>want to be appropriated by anyone else or reduced to any
>particular cliché. Nor does he want to get drawn but so far
>into any causes.
You'd probably like this. This guy wrote a good book about Muhammad Ali too. Michael Mann used it a lot for his Ali movie:
http://www.sevenstories.com/book/?GCOI=58322100174020
Bob Dylan’s abrupt abandonment of overtly political songwriting in the mid-1960s caused an uproar among critics and fans. In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic.
Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aestheticanarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous.
Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. “He can no longer tell the story straight,” Marqusee concludes, “because any story told straight is a false one.”
Mike Marqusee is the author of a number of groundbreaking books on politics and popular culture, including Anyone But England, War Minus the Shooting, and Redemption Song. Born and raised in the United States, he has lived in London since the 1970s.
First published under the title Chimes of Freedom, now revised and expanded.
Click here to download a PDF excerpt of Wicked Messenger.
Press Reviews
Mike Davis In this remarkable reflection on the culture of the sixties, Mike Marqusee restores the forgotten moral and political contexts of Dylan’s supernova years. In doing so, he rescues one of the most urgent poetic voices in American history from the condescension of his own later cynicism. - Author of City of Quartz