Dylan (part 2)

Dylan - the singer-songwriter who spawned a hundred books, and will no doubt spawn a hundred more. The singer-songwriter who has inspired a million young singer-songwriters to write a million bad songs because they thought they could change the world with their music. To be fair Dylan, it has to be acknowledged, has also inspired plenty of good songwriters too, even some great ones. Dylan is unquestionably the single most influential songwriter since WWII. I can't think of one (white) songwriter who hasn't credited Dylan with being a main influence, from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen to Kirk Cobain. The 'white' caveat is extremely important, because I don't think Dylan has had nearly the same influence on black musicians and performers, and in fact, it's the black artists (the blues and gospel singers of the 20s and 30s) who influenced Dylan. But if you are going to credit Dylan for the good, you've also got to blame him for the bad, and there's been a lot of bad. By 'the bad' I mean all the half-baked, incomprehensible pop songs that take themselves way too seriously, the heady songs that aspire to 'high-art'. By bad I mean the thousands of pop music critics who got stars in their eyes under the misguided notion that they had something 'important' to say when they wrote reviews of pop music albums, Dylan's and other ones. By bad I mean the hundreds of academics who love Dylan, write about Dylan, and even teach Dylan; the so-called 'Dylanologists' (the term makes me cringe.) Academics, in particular, love Dylan to demonstrate why Dylan is 'important'. I recently listened to one lecturer, a classics professor from Harvard no less, (classics scholars in particular seem to have a thing for Dylan), who was positively giddy in comparing the work of Dylan to Homer. Even if Dylan sees himself as a modern-day Homer, most people don't care, either about the Greek one, or Simpson. I guess if some people like Dylan, for whatever reason, it makes them feel extra justified if they can connect him to the classics. By bad I mean Dylan fans, the 'aficionados' who are obsessed with deciphering what Dylan is 'saying' and tracking his career 'periods' (a la Picasso). But the average pop music fan doesn't care about that stuff. Dylan's 'significance' doesn't matter. They love the music because it makes them feel good, or makes them want to dance, or offers them a bit of comfort. The one thing, maybe the only thing, I understand about pop music, is that the notion of 'importance' is utterly antithetical to the very essence and spirit of it. Any effort to remove popular music from its common, humble roots is to my mind utterly absurd, like putting a urinal in a museum and calling it art. 

But separating Dylan's music - which is sometimes good and sometimes bad - from something we might call the 'Dylan phenomenon' for a second, by which I mean all the extraneous noise that surrounds Dylan's music. Here's another way of looking at it, and why we might even be a bit wary of all the fuss. It relates to what I pointed out earlier, that Dylan owes much of his inspiration and craft to the black singers of the pre-war period. Dylan pilfered from black artists, and he makes no bones about it. In this respect Dylan is one of thousands of white artists who derived inspiration from black culture. They pilfered because black culture possessed something that they lacked, an honest and genuine means to express an authentic experience. It reminds us that black culture has penetrated the culture of white society, but the inverse is not very true. Black culture has been absorbed and subsumed in white culture with the lion's share of the benefits (both cultural and financial) accruing to whites. In this light, one may consider the cultural apotheosis of Dylan in popular white culture, with academics providing the legitimacy of 'importance', an example of the way cultural colonialism works.