tv tanned

Ordinarily I'd not have bothered with this, but the recent revelation that Dylan is giving exclusive selling rights to Starbucks for his new albums makes this article a bit more palatable. Still not sure about some of it though.

The answer, my friend, is that it’s a load of old hype

Melanie Reid September 27 2005



Which of the following statements do you agree with:
1) Bob Dylan is as iconic as Jesus and more influential than Shakespeare. I am lucky to have lived on the same planet as him.
2) Bob Dylan is a self-regarding old money-machine who has been successfully taking the mick for at least three decades. I think he should retire and give us all peace.

If you answered 1), read no further. As you are in all probability a professional, white male aged over 45, and possibly in possession of several woolly jumpers, you will be susceptible to the increased risk of high blood pressure.

If you answered 2), you are probably young, or female, or both. Welcome to one small refuge against Dylan hagiography, that irradicable disease, resistant to all known anti-viral drugs, which is at present recording a serious outbreak in Britain and America.

Last night and tonight, BBC2 is host to Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour documentary about Dylan, an event described portentously as "the first simultaneous broadcast between the globe's foremost public broadcasters": in other words, it's being broadcast on PBS the same day.

Regardless of the merits of the programme, reviewed by my colleage Ian Bell on page 15, these details alone tell you what you need to know about the vast, inflated Dylan industry, all of it based on the uncontested premise that the man is a genius.

The involvement of Scorsese, another monstrously over-celebrated talent who did his best work 30 years ago – has anyone got to the end of Gangs of New York without being paid to do so? – is symbolism enough. But the hyperbole involved in this transatlantic, public-spirited, nearer-my-God-to-thee Dylanfest, as if venerating some living western saint, marks a high-watermark of pretention. The whole concept is flabby with self-congratulation.

At the heart of the Dylan affliction, of course, is the sly old fox himself, he who has been playing games with his adoring public ever since he first picked up a guitar.

His skills as a wordsmith, good as they once were, have long ago been subsumed beneath his marketing skills. At the age of 64, Dylan has become an intriguing parody; he is either a giant ego rendered genuinely incapable of giving up the stage, or a man so amused by the fact that he can still con people into paying to see him, that he can't stop. Or maybe he's a toxic mixture of both.

And so the older he gets, the more productive he becomes. Last year he published an autobiography, so oblique it failed to reveal anything as mundane as facts, and played more than 100 live gigs. This year, he's still on the road. His tour, he has vowed, is never-ending: a sensation sadly familiar to anyone who has actually been to one of his concerts in the past 20 years.

The audience of loyal middle-aged fans go to hear their favourite songs; the tragedy is they won't be able to tell whether he's played them or not. Today's Dylan concerts are existentialist things, but in the wrong way: a parallel universe where the Great Man starts a song – well, you assume it's a song, because he's making a droning noise and the band are playing – and everyone starts cheering. This wall of indecipherable sound goes on for about five minutes, during which time you try very hard to recognise the tune, if only to avoid embarrassing yourself in front of all the aficionados around you.

This is impossible, because a bored, impassive-looking Dylan is just going "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" and the band, apparently as confused as the audience, are hedging their bets. Eventually, after about 10 minutes, you can just make out the chorus of Mr Tambourine Man, or some such, by which time the song is over. This procedure is repeated several times and then it's time to go home.

So, is it all a game, the tired mischief of a man with a healthy sense of the ridiculous? Or is it – the most terrible option – the product of a man who takes himself so seriously, who is so devoid of a sense of the ridiculous, that he believes he has semi-divine status?
I fear the latter. And for this, we must blame the fans, awash in nostalgia, who keep consuming no matter how bad he is.

For many people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, Dylan wrote the soundtrack for their first love affairs, their birth of political awareness, their first revolutionary stirrings. His lyrical genius was to create pop poetry that caught the glory of being young and preserved it in amber.
Hence the notion that Dylan is heroic. Or that he is intellectual. Hence the cringesome sight of fogies in suits eager to tell us what their favourite Dylan song was. When we get to the point where politicians are lining up – Rosie Kane, Maggie's Farm: "it's about slavery, working for the bosses, being under the cosh"; George Galloway, Tangled Up in Blue: "he's the greatest writer since Shakespeare" – it really is time to strap on the parachute and bail out.

The reality is, yes, that Dylan was a great balladeer of his time, but one who proceeded to become the most over-rated global act of the past 50 years. He is the pop equivalent of trainspotting; he has fostered a particularly acute type of nerdy, intense, sensitive fan: men of arrested emotional development who can quote the lyrics of his songs verbatim and have mythologised him into some kind of Arthur Rimbaud.

There has been more pseudo-cultural dross written about Dylan than about almost anyone else on this planet, with the possible exception of Diana, Princess of Wales. In response to demand, Dylan created a brand which he has been flogging, in a surly way, ever since.
So if we are kind, we read irony into his motives; if we are not, we anticipate he will end up like Frank Sinatra, a dismal icon touring unto death.

Artists are always best separated from their art. To confuse creator and creation is to invite crashing disappointment. A fan may love the work; they should, in my experience, stay well away from the creator, for they are likely to be let down. J D Salinger was right: give the fans nothing, and threaten them with a shotgun if they bother you.

For artists, in real life, have a tendency to be grumpy, ordinary, arrogant. They have weak voices and unkind eyes. They like money too much. They are rarely sensitive or special enough to deserve the undying love their fans wish to give them. Those who adulate Bob Dylan, the pop musician who wrote some wonderful songs but then forgot to retire, would do well to remember that.