one response i get when i rag on, say, springsteen, bowie, the beatles, or, especially, dylan, is you can't say that. (no one has tried that on eyeofthestorm, however.) it's almost like it's totally incomprehensible: people have gone whole lifetimes without hearing bob dylan criticized. they don't believe i'm serious, and once they see that i am, they are personally deeply offended. actually, i think this is a very bad sign, and i think that one reason dylan has been put above criticism is precisely because he so palpably sucks so bad. his cultists have to make it impossible even to hear the music in order to defend it, because it is indefensible.
if someone really regards 'the times they are a?changin' or 'blowin in the wind' as objects that transformed whole generations etc, i am puzzled, because i think they're just woolly and boring. but say they did. that could have had nothing to do with the profundity of the lyrics, the quality of the melodies, the quality of the singing or playing. it had to do only with the response, or the moment, or the effectiveness of his promotional team, or something. i think even as an emblem of that moment, there were twenty better choices. but for god's sake let that recede into history: 'mr. tambourine man' sucks, dude: all day every day, and it really doesn't mean anything about liberation or peace or equality (or, indeed, anything else), does it? it very nearly sucks so hard that it comes out the other end as humor or self-parody. waitin only for my bootheels to be wanderin indeed. patti page and the bee gees were emblems of their eras too: that doesn't mean you should listen to their records all day.
Though you might hear laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the sun
It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin'
And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're seein'
That he's chasing
whatever, dude. wait! i thought you were ready for to fade. any time you're ready for to. suppose that the answer to the question of how many roads a man must walk down before you can call him a man really were blowin in the wind; and suppose further that the wind, when not sighing 'mary', informed you in its windy way that a man must walk down 3.735 roads before you can call him a man. what then? finding the moments that are not just random pretentious nonsense is really very difficult, and the idea that you'd treat dylan as a literary figure refutes you because it can't improve him. so stop writing 500-page books on the man and find something else. you'd be better off having the very essence of your generation expressed by robert goulet.
