Watched the rest of the Dylan documentary in parts over the weekend.
Firstly I have to remark as to k-punk and blissblogger's bemusement in the face of Dylan, I don't understand what there ISN'T to get! I do respect their opinions and I know theres a great deal of integrity to their positions on it (I mean both Mark and Simon have followed and praised the denaturalised in music, the chrome, the plastic and more crucially the desubstantiated) but laying aside questions of the music's construction of its sonic as manifest and it has to be remarked that Dylan's music comes from as good a place as music can come.
I found the whole preamble to Scorcese's documentary fascinating. Dylan's blankness, his emptiness. Normally this lack of true musical character is kind of lamentable. S'funny to consider from a archetypically Rockist perspective, Dylan scores very lowly as the worst kind of rootless charlatan. However, there's such a sublime vacuity to the way in which he (as Ginsberg remarks he "becomes a column of air"), the way his charlatanism and naked opportunism leads him onto a path where he disappears and becomes a vehicle for whatever seeps through him.
I have to confess I found the late protest stuff almost unbearably powerful. The period at which he returns to Minneapolis from New York, initiated by his "Crossroads" experience and closed by the speech he gives to the bigwigs upon receipt of the Thomas Payne prize is marked by a snowballing intensity. At first, though great, he doesn't quite convince but by the end "A Hard Rains Gonna Fall" I was gobsmacked. Yeah I was really surprised by my own reaction because I'd always written off his earlier folk period and based my evaluation of him on Bringing It All Back Home > Highway 61 Revisited > Blonde on Blonde, but that early stuff KICKED ASS one hundred which ways. And dont be sidetracked by the bloody lyrics, i mean who cares (?) the delivery is EVERYTHING. That naked conviction and bloody intensity.
And I couldnt help but fall back on the most meagre of personal experiences. Firstly that the reaction to MIA's LP was pretty much exactly like the take people had to Dylan's electric work in the sense that, essentially both reactions were a defense of something as tricksy and mercurial as integrity. Folk integrity, because lets face it, sticking up for Grime>Crunk>Funk over what MIA represented was an archetypically "folksy" thing to do. I know Scorcese and practically everyone other critic under the sun invites one to pour scorn on the poor, wee, precious folk movement's reaction to Dylan going electric, but for the first time, really checking out the lambent power of those acoustic tracks with their pointedness, their specificity (all the later lyrical stuff is like blowing bubbles innit) well I really identitfied with all those pissed off people in Leeds and Bradford.
Yeah, what a fucking sell-out, and especially as when he buggered off there was practically no one as intensely EMOTIONALLY electric left, cos what he had been doing was dignifying the whole shebang. The rest of the folk/protest movement were hopeless. Pete Seeger comes over like a primary school teacher, the guy from the New York City Ramblers (sweet dude BTW) like your gauche cousin and Peter of Pater, Paul and Mary, well he was a total drip by comparison. Yes, Dylan lent the whole thing a gravitas, and they pimped off his aura, traded on a little second-hand cool. Added to which I thought all those later tracks which I used to cherish (and we got to hear quite a bit of "the classic" records) sounded by comparison floppy and kind of enfeebled. Aw what a mess!
My old mucker Luke Heronbone is gonna fucking hate me for dragging him into this too, but I kept flashing on the similarity of the process of Heronbone to that early period of Dylan's intensity and fecundity. I mean I could choose a thousand different examples, but why not this one? See Dylan almost certainly KNEW he was some kind of charlatan, that he was chancer, and he was kind of at once embarassed and gleeful that he managed (as he saw it) to "get away with it". I don't think he probably saw himself as a "talented person" (like, thank fuck....) and that he was getting away with it AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE was giving him even greater recklessness. It all feeds into the dynamic, he's in a state of near-insanity, every waking hour performing in his relations with other people in a way of magick abstraction (almost certainly cranked up by Marijuana which fosters this kind of divorcement from your manifestation, allows you to concentrate on your EFFECT and manipulate it). That he's making music whilst in this space, well its all part and parcel of the accumulation and generation of aura.
The thing about people who feel like they're getting away with it, is that the temptation grows to just throw up your hands and declare: "It ain't me babe" ("...No, no, no, it aint me babe, it aint me you're looking for babe" for the Dylan-deprived). As in: I took you in, you've been had, don't look to me for answers. Or like the last lines in Smoked Glass upon being prompted for his book list: "the answers aren/t even intersting... 1.maybe 20, how am i supposed to know?" (Ha which makes me laugh!) And it is, unfortunately the inevitable conclusion, because the other track leads swiftly to madness and certain death, and if you're brilliant enough to REALLY get to that hot place, then you're smart enough to be able to save your own skin.
Doesn't make them less rock n' roll tho. "Dependent on rhythm" is a very very very loose definition of r'n'r.