Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a-Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Dowd suggests that Dylan should have put some new lyrics to “Hurricane,” (his 1975 song about Rubin Carter) in honor of the detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. That might have been nice, but by expecting such a thing—and labelling the contemporary Bob Dylan a sellout—Dowd thoroughly misreads Dylan’s career, as Sean Wilentz argues in a vigorous rebuttal here at newyorker.com. Wilentz, whom Dowd quotes in her column, rightly points out that various critics have labelled Dylan a “sellout” at every point in his nearly fifty-year career. As to his song choices—which included “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Ballad of a Thin Man”—Wilentz notes that Dylan may have pulled a fast one on would-be Chinese censors:
Depending on whatever agreement he made with them, I’d argue Dylan made a fool of the Chinese authorities, while getting paid in the bargain. He certainly made a fool of Maureen Dowd—or she has made a fool of herself.
So, what to make of the scuffle? I’m tempted to put it simply that Dowd is wrong, and Wilentz (and others who have criticized Dowd’s column this week) is right—and be done with it. Dylan’s public persona has always mystified observers; he’s a matter of degree off for everyone—seemingly too smart or too dumb, too political or not political enough to suit people’s agendas. In that light, Dowd is not the first to get Dylan terribly wrong (and he’s devoted parts of his career, it seems, to steering people off course). Yet her central argument—that Dylan was once an admired protest singer who has now, in a grasping late-career incarnation, sold out for money, or prestige, or something (Dowd never specifies)—contradicts itself. Dowd correctly observes from reading Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” that the singer never joined in the most fervent of late-sixties anti-war protests, preferring instead to be a family man: “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.” Dowd then devotes a good chunk of the column laying out the ways in which Dylan distanced himself from the culturally assigned role of social activist, before again calling him a sellout for no longer being a social activist.
It’s worth taking a closer look at Dylan’s memoir, and to give his own words a more significant place in the argument.
In 1968, Dylan was living upstate in New York, with a life already at odds with what the wider culture seemed to want:
I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect. If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat—someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was—a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. I would have driven anybody mad."
via The New Yorker/continue reading
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