Up to Me starts right off telling us that “money never changed a thing”  in this story we’re going to hear of love corrupted and lost and undying. But the song’s vignettes, so lacerating to the singer and so entrancing to the listener, keep coming back to money. He didn’t buy a ticket to follow her into the officers’ club where she entertains the troops, who apparently did fork over the price of admission, till the break of day. He needs an income: he works as a postal clerk, in a cage no less, and risks breaking the rules to protect the free but hunted fugitive.  One of them is going to pay the penalty of biting off more than they can chew, of taking more than they really need.  Crystal wants to talk to the pimp, Dupree, and the singer is too self-involved, too discreet,or  too high-handed, to keep tabs on whatever transaction might come of this. He assures whomever he’s singing to that the disguised and nameless girl with him isn’t his property, not anything he actually paid for and owns. And then finally  he takes  the song– this strangely poisoned and passionate and timeless world of Up to Me–and  tragically and brutally giftwraps it and hands it to her. His lone guitar played sweet for her this old time melody. This phrase is preposterous, following the intimations of whoring, the admissions of betrayal, the disillusionment. It seems like the terrible sad delusion of the grieving lover. Then the next line: “The harmonica around my neck, I blow it for ya free.”  He wears his noose or his shackle willingly, and indeed it’s his instrument, how he expresses himself, and without words.  ”I blow it for ya free,” could be a candidate for the single  nastiest line Dylan’s ever sung.  Here, he says, all the pain and everything else, it’s yours anyway, and no one could sing it but me–so, no fee.

What are things worth? The song is an awful gift, isn’t it? It degrades and punctures and demonstrates and yearns for love, with different kinds of ugly price tags all through it. If the song were for me, would I want it?  Would I want it because the song itself is Beautiful and True even though it has so much dirt and faithlessness in it?

I don’t know why, but this is what I thought about after I read Roy Kelly’s impressive essay on Bob Dylan’s plagiarism, titled “A Shiny Bed of Lights,” published in The Bridge. This was passed along to me by John Wesley Harding a/k/a Wes Stace, a person of varied accomplishment, playful identity, and consistent finesse, whom you may learn more about here: http://www.johnwesleyharding.com/.  I don’t have here the date/issue for the essay, and I apologize to Roy Kelly and anyone else for that omission.

Kelly takes on the vexing issue of Bob Dylan’s recent songwriting method, which goes under many names, or rather, people identify themselves through the word they choose to describe this songwriting method. If you call it collage, you reveal yourself as an unreconstructed fan, perhaps an insufficiently skeptical fan. If you call it plagiarism, an unseemly word which seeks to erect a distance between right and wrong, you may be trying to speak Truth to Delusion. If you call it theft, which has romantic outlaw connotations, you may be trying for a kind of higher ground where you consider the issue of originality in the clear light of day, and continue to admire  Dylan’s assaults on originality, as he lives outside the law in his own peculiar honesty.

Kelly begins by outing excerpts from Chronicles which were lifted from other sources. His article’s title appears on page 165 of Dylan’s memoirs, and formerly in Huckleberry Finn. He’s got a passage that appears on page 162 of Chronicles and formerly in Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. Kelly focuses throughout the essay on Chronicles and Modern Times, and he is informed, articulate, and unambivalent:

His songwriting now resembles desk research, where someone tries to gather various data from what exists and out there, and makes use of it commercially.

What seems to me to be different now is that hardly anything remains of the personal  in the words of songs on “Love and Theft” and Modern Times. …The words recede. There is the illusion of the personal because of his singing.

I think there’s a world of difference in both method and the outcome of that method, between being inspired and influenced by the world you live in and the path you want to follow, and in deciding systematically to go through work that already exists, taking out other people’s lines and words in order to fit around them songs that you will then call your own.

Now that I am forewarned that any particular use of words that I admire or think absolutely apposite may not be his, I am as it were, more likely withhold the sun of my affection.

Kelly takes on people like myself with the assertiveness that runs through the essay:

There is always a queue of Bob apologists itching to tell us that either there is no such thing as plagiarism, or if there is that Bob is certainly not guilty of it.

It seems to me that despite the world of fans and blogs and various aerated theorists queueing to post their reasons why these reworkings are evidence of his superior, cunning, creative ability to make something new out of other people’s words, by changing the context and thus the meaning, none of it refers to qualities we once prized and praised in him. If being a Burroughs-style, cut-up, collagist post-modernist is such an admirable thing, why did we ever once rate his being a new, original, contemporary voice so highly?

Kelly supports his arguments with well-illustrated  discussions of the ethics of plagiarism, the value of originality in literature, theories on the differing value of appropriation depending on who is doing the appropriating.

The two strongest currents activating the essay are the betrayal of a certain relationship between artist and audience, and the need for a theory that can guide our relation to Bob Dylan’s work. Kelly writes, “The question for Bob Dylan fans, and especially fans in these latter times, is to decide what we are meant to know, and how to think about the way he now works.”

Kelly’s essay is sound, superior, convincing, and I accept, without defensiveness, being the aerated target of Kelly’s contempt. There aren’t many points I would argue on rational ground: I think I could argue reasonably that Ain’t Talkin’ does not “attempt to do what Highlands does better,” but Kelly already predicts that people like me would say this. I do hear much that is “personal” in “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, but here I recognize that Kelly and I wouldn’t agree on what constitutes the personal, and that’s fine. Kelly mentions Dylan’s “box” of cuttings and clippings which he now picks through when the songassembling mood is upon him, and maintains a portrait of Dylan craftily inserting phrases here and there to modify or illustrate the topic at hand. I do maintain that much of anyone’s disillusionment and unhappiness with the result is a function of the uncannily invisible stitches. He does assimilate disparate registers into the song or the prose. But again, Kelly would justifiably argue that the impersonality he finds in the recent work is exactly a result of all this assimilation at the expense of inspired expression.

It’s the link between betrayal and theory that is the only thing I want to address in Kelly’s piece. His feeling of being disappointed, in a personal way, in his relation to an artist he’s admired for decades, is candid and emotional. He traces his feeling to ethics, and to  ideas of the experience of originality in art. He employs the ideas to create arguments about bad art that betrays a trust between maker and audience, and to assert that bad art particularly degrades his relation to Bob Dylan: he will “withhold the sun of his affection” and I believe that Kelly believes that matters. The cost of betrayal can matter to Dylan, and this cost is higher because Kelly can back it with the credit of reason.

Given everything I know, given the fact that reading Chronicles was the most intimate connection I’ve ever had with a narrator and now I know for certain that much of what shattered the frozen sea inside me was little axes that belonged to other people rather than one big axe wielded by one writer–this means I’m different, changed, and not Bob Dylan. I still feel deeply the shape of an aged life in Floater, and part of this shape is truthfully another man’s life.  As I listen to the song, and assimilate into myself  what I feel to be illuminating and lovely in it, then I also assimilate into myself Floater’s plausible fraud.

I think that to really relate to art is to assimilate it, and remain always conscious of what we’re assimilating, what we’re becoming as we listen or read or watch. The choice is always to refuse this assimilation if we identify a corrupting agent that we won’t tolerate. If I choose the fraud in Floater, I haven’t justified or excused it. I do believe Roy Kelly and I are both talking about loving art, we just see it from a different point of view.

 Here is a link to sharp piece written by Andy Moore for a site based in Madison, WI, called The Isthmus: http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=26410.  In it, Moore briefly enters the Twilight Zone of Bob Dylan’s private/public world. Dylan and his band rehearsed for several days at the Barrymore Theater in Madison, before launching the summer tour in Milwaukee. The staff of the Barrymore were sworn–and we do mean legally sworn–to NORAD-level secrecy, and Dylan originally wanted the building evacuated of all staff, but relented to the Barrymore’s  request to be allowed to carry on their business in the office. The secret rehearsals were amplified and, one nice night,  the theater’s doors somehow secretly opened,  and people eating at a diner across the street enjoyed the perfectly audible sounds of  a free top-secret Bob Dylan rehearsal. 

Moore does witty justice to the strange mixture of insolence, cojones, professional discipline, irreality, and image-making that only Bob Dylan can pour into three days in Madison, Wisconsin. 

Just a few weeks later, I attended Bob Dylan’s concert in Bethel Woods, NY. As a non-driver, this treat entailed a 3 hour bus ride from Manhattan to a lovely scenic spot high above any human settlement, a 5 hour wait for Bob Dylan to take the stage. High points of the energetic show for me were another glorious tragic Forgetful Heart, a strong Workingman’s Blues, and a lively  Tweedledum/dee. Then followed an hour’s wait in the bus as the parking lot emptied, the ride back to Manhattan, the manifold charms of the MTA at 3 AM, and the final  arrival home in Brooklyn at 4 AM Sunday. 

When I listen to Real Live, I hear a terrific guitarist in the act of figuring out how to integrate his gifts into the peculiar demands and energies of performing with Bob Dylan. Mick Taylor’s gorgeous streams of note-bending solos sometimes upstage Bob Dylan’s vocals. Sometimes Taylor comes in too soon. Sometimes I can actually hear him pause, expecting Dylan to resume singing,  then Dylan lets the moment go longer than Taylor’s timing, and a little edgy pause, a moment of vertigo,  happens in the music onstage. These awkwardnesses are surely awkward. And because we’re listening to two great performers, the arguable  ill-matching can also give a tension and life to these performances that would be absent with weak performers. For me,  it all works in I and I, and partly because Dylan wrote the song with the voice he’s singing it with on this recording, so his phrasing  here has a particular strength and confidence and the trade-offs between the vocals and Taylor’s solos are thrilling and not clumsy.

Then there is the Tangled Up in Blue on Real Live, where Dylan takes us through  the song like a wormhole, you hold on for dear life, I think I know this song and now it’s exactly in the moment of shattering but never coming apart, the scans and rhymes impossibly holding together, the song impossibly depositing you in an alternate universe that is still Tangled Up in Blue. And I wonder whether night after night of singing alongside Mick Taylor’s guitar playing, the tortuous and insistent solos–could that kind of musical improvisation have influenced Dylan’s verbal improvisations, so that somehow this relation between music and words answers for  one small part of the outrageous inventiveness of that Tangled Up in Blue?

Of course one of the reasons Bob Dylan’s 1984 appearance on the David Letterman show is galvanizing, hilarious, and addictive is because of his audacious playfulness with the time constraints of live  television. In Jokerman, he turns his back to the audience, dithers about for a harmonica, steps off the raised portion of the stage, abandons The Plugz to a trial by fire they do indeed pass–this is all nerve-wracking even for the viewer, and marvelously exposes the nonsense of “live” television.

Well, these were the thoughts I had when I read Alan Light’s piece in the Cambridge Companion on Bob Dylan the performer, and Martin Jacobi’s piece on collaboration. Both are solid overviews, largely chronological, that offer a catalogue of Dylan’s stage lives, and the musicians and writers Dylan has worked with, covered, ben influenced by, plundered from. The issue of  whether or not we dignify the plundering, and how we dignify the plundering once we’ve decided to dignify it, is de rigueur in *serious* Dylan studies, and Jacobi takes it on briefly and cogently in his conclusion, making fashionable references to performance studies. This is what we want from a quasi-academic survey of the influences and collaborations of a serious popular artist: a skeletal but accurate catalogue that the whole range of his work merits attention, a nod to the idea that Bob Dylan’s plundering matters more than someone less serious, and the nod ennobled by fluency in sophisticated critical theory.

Light surveys the performing career in the metier of a smart, knowledgeable music critic: there is a certain immediate, contingent value to a live music performance. Dylan and the Dead is “abysmal.” “Whatever one thinks of the content” of the gospel material,”there is no question that Dylan and his tight little band were making some glorious music.” Farm Aid was a “tough and rocking” performance. This is what we want from a smart music reviewer, thumbs ups and thumbs downs, respectful fluency in the vernacular of popular music, a comprehensive overview of an important career.

But if some of the members of the high culture board of admissions seem to be  at a stage in Bob Dylan’s career where they want to admit him to the club–examine and locate him as a central culture-making figure–does the fact of his performing career get in the way? Do we just not have a language that suits the special synthesis of composition and performance that’s just intrinsic to what Dylan does? A language for the way different musicians may have created different aural environments that impacted the timbre and phrasing of Dylan’s voice, and even the lyrics he composes? What about his manipulation of his appearance, his distinctive consciousness of being 0n-camera as opposed to being on stage? What about the idea of a performer’s relationship with his audience? What about the evolution of Dylan the musician? In the context of this kind of criticism, is it enough to say that Real Live is mediocre and Dylan and the Dead is abysmal?  Why not examine the role and influence of other musicians on these performances, the state of Dylan’s own musicianship in these tours,  if indeed they are stations in a career that merits the attention given the most significant contributors to cultural and intellectual life?

I know I’m just shadowboxing here. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan is not an adversary, in one way it’s just a bunch more voices about Bob Dylan and ion another way it is not.  It’s a signal publication in the effort to yank this man into the inner circle of  significant contributors to cultural and intellectual life.  My boredom and frustration with so much of this signal publication comes from the fact that I’m not witnessing the messy birth pangs of a new kind of critical writing that does justice to the ways Bob Dylan plays with–tortures–categories:  performance/composition, image/identity,  authenticity, publicity.  So much else to say…. Let’s try to make the language to say it, and let people in 2249 talk about significant contributors to cultural and intellectual……….

Below I’ve pasted most of a comment made by Schuyler Lake (hope I didn’t blow the name here) in response to my post regarding Richard Goldstein’s 2006 essay on Bob Dylan. I like so much the emphasis here on the error of pigeonholing any aspect of Dylan’s work, and the description of this work as a totality that is “both magnificent and self-contradictory” is simply terrific. Magnificent and self-contradictory–the deeper and longer one listens to Dylan the more transparent this becomes, and it is exhilarating  work to engage the contradictions without trying to resolve them, and also without making the sophomoric mistake that the contradictions add up to one big nihilism. I love the catalog here “(c)ompassion, humor, rage, humility, sensuality, delicacy, brutal honesty…all coexist within the canon.”  They all coexist in Idiot Wind. 

 These comments strike at something crucial to me in Dylan’s art–it may be experienced as a collage of emotions and values, in which love or faith or time or honesty or compassion or humility are viewed in hundreds of different lights, from hundreds of different perspectives, and listeners form their own narratives from the glimpses. I think the challenge is to accept the “totality of effect” of this collage of songs and performances, and not see it as a Magic Eye game in which some fundamental and essential shape–Bob Dylan’s political disillusionment, or Bob Dylan’s real religious belief, or Bob Dylan the American icon–emerges for you and everyone else has got to see it too. If I start squinting around for the naked parts in Duchamps’ painting, I’ve stopped seeing with Duchamps’ eyes.

Let’s say I consider this painting misogynistic. The women here flaunt a sexuality that’s unconstrained, enticing, intimidating. Can’t compete with this. At the same time, they live in a treacherous world of sharp edges and their faces are devolving into masks that make their heads primal, grotesque, emblems of savagery, ritual, desire that is obscure and forbidden. This female sexuality is both snare and weapon, it is pictured as idealized and dangerous, and it’s the women’s own fault for being so….so much what they are. Misogyny–as opposed to the reactionary or the patriarchal–seems to me to happen when the feminine is depicted as treacherous and destructive at the same proportions as it is seductive. It makes women feel shitty. It can make women feel both inadequate and toxic at the same time. This feeling  is not something I find much of at all in Bob Dylan’s work. I find it often in Leonard Cohen, and in Philip Roth, for comparison. Is it in Sara? The real woman turned into a fantastic mystical-mythological ideal and set repeatedly against images of motherhood and actual ordinary life? Is it in Man of Peace, where the singer introduces a silent and apparently trapped woman to the evil lurking in the world, and brings himself to the brink of identifying with that evil, all as a kind of seduction? 

Most often I feel women something like this in Dylan’s songs. Women who are yearned for, supplicated, spurned, cajoled, and who remain their silent selves, in important ways free of the singer and of the song, as Hopper’s partly undressed, exposed woman is both offered to the viewer and protected in her psychological space. Dylan’s women travel to Spain or Tangier without him; they sleep and dream their own dreams while he watches them; they have faith stronger than his that he craves like love; they don’t even look anything like their own passport; they are on their way out the door, leaving him behind. 

 What Schuyler Lake’s comments here helped me think about is pretty much this: if you don’t want the whole messy awful gamut of human life, best leave Bob Dylan alone. You’ll find plenty there that’s not very pretty, and it’s tempting to start thinking you’re too good for the ugliness. That’s when you’ve missed the whole boat.

HERE’S THE PORTION OF THIS COMMENT THAT WAS POSTED ON JAN 12 AT HARD IS THE FORTUNE OF ALL WOMANKIND. THANKS AGAIN.

“Taken as a whole, Dylan’s work is nearly impossible to classify. And while there certainly are elements of the mysogenistic in it, of the patriarchal, the reactionary…or what have you…these elements in no way add up to a totality of the effect that Dylan has created.

“Goldstein takes umbrage at the fact that Dylan’s work has recieved so much more attention than that of Lennon, Cohen, Simon, Mitchell, et. al. I agree these are all superb singer-poets, deserving of more attention than they’ve had, but they aren’t in the same league as Dylan. I’d be prepared to back up this assertion, but it would take a lot more writing than I’m willing to do at the moment.

“There has always been a strong prophetic element in Dylan’s art, an almost Old Testament aspect to it. But this aspect no more defines it, than many other elements define it. Compassion, humor, rage, humility, sensuality, delicacy, brutal honesty…all coexist within the canon. To regard this entire body of work (which as a whole is both maginificent and self-contradictory) in light of just one or two ideological stances, misses the point of it.

“It seems to me that here, Goldstein is conflating Dylan (as a man) with Dylan’s art. Many critics do that, but it’s a mistake. An artist’s work (if he is a good artist) stands wholly independent of his person. Or in Dylan’s case, that would be personae.

Below I’ve pasted in full Richard Goldstein’s April 2006 essay in The Nation which exposes  the limitations to Bob Dylan’s art, the flaws in Bob Dylan’s character, and the follies of Bob Dylan’s fans,  who are unable to judge his work with real critical acumen because they see him through the dark glass of idol worship. Goldstein punctures the Dylan myth through what could be the most sustained and impressive feat of critical shadow-boxing I’ve come across.  He avoids close readings of songs themselves, and depends on hyperbolic generalizations to describe what we talk about when we talk about Dylan, and obviates argument. There is no point in arguing with a man who sees “consecration”  instead of “appreciation” in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There: he is welcome to consider consecration a kind of misguided excess. And I certainly was brought up short by the observation that drugs are not mentioned in either No Direction Home nor Chronicles. True in both cases–so much swept under the rug! There goes credibility! If Richard Goldstein claims that  people  consider Joey to be “of a piece” with Like A Rolling Stone, then I am sure he has met these people and confirmed their opinions and we now have solid evidence that these two songs are “of a piece.”  Renaldo and Clara is “endless and tedious.” This statement I understand to have the same truth value as “Renaldo and Clara was shot in color and its cast includes Joan Baez and Harry Dean Stanton among other performers.”   Goldstein notes that at the time of his writing, Amazon.com listed  398 books about Bob Dylan, and Goldstein refers to this quantity as “Rolling Tenure Review.”  I assume that earning tenure through published critical studies of Bob Dylan is further evidence that his work has been elevated far beyond what it merits on its own, and this proposition is unique to Bob Dylan’s work. He uses Alex Ross as an ally in his contempt for this kind of work, and quotes Ross as damning the excess to which Dylan’s work inspires some critics. The many kinds of registers in which people have tried to write about Dylan’s work is an interesting topic that says something about conventional boundaries between popular, academic, colloquial, formal, and personal languages of critical writing. But Goldstein asks us to see that an essential weakness in Dylan’s work  is responsible for some floundering discussions of it.  

Goldstein feels  that Dylan criticism–and Christopher Ricks is the unfortunate standard bearer–deflects attention from other popular musicians because it creates a force field of elitism around Dylan’s work and then by default keeps all others out of the inner circle. Dylan is more “literary” than Joni Mitchell according to an elitist and conventional definition of literary, therefore he deserves the kind of scrutiny a man who built his professional reputation on studies of Milton and the Romantics gives him. Goldstein creates the definitions and standards he needs to ridicule Dylan’s status and then boldly carries out his circular arguments.

Well this is all fun so far, and then the fun stops very quickly when Goldstein arrives at  moral high ground.

 It is me Richard Goldstein wishes to rescue from Bob Dylan! He asks the  question “Is there any great artist who appeals to only one sex?” and I just have time to consider all the presumptions (starting with the presumption that sexual difference is clear and essential)  he collapses into this preposterous question before I am lectured, with paternal compassion and urgency, on Bob Dylan’s hostility to women. 

Now, Goldstein’s arguments here are, simply as rhetoric, no stronger than the ones he marshals in the first portion of the essay. For one, he shows the same meager knowledge of Dylan’s songs. In a funny display of Goldstein’s carelessness, one of the two lyrics he quotes are the lines from Sweetheart Like You which appear in Lyrics, yet are not the words Dylan sings in the recorded versions of the song, commercial or bootleg.  Has he listened to this song? He also claims that one of Dylan’s themes is “suspicion of worldly women–and therefore the world”–this is the kind of  elementary rhetorical error that nullifies an argument. When Goldstein starts in on When He Returns, and writes,  ”The rod of ages he clings to–and his worshipers cling to–is a phallus,” we all need to fan ourselves and take a little rest. 

But I want to stop here with any counterarguments of my own. Taking his points on his terms is something I wish to avoid. If I start opining that the women in Dylan’s songs are not submissive, I am only acceding to Goldstein’s definitions of sex and sexism and also to his disingenuous offense on my behalf. This of course is a familiar position in the intellectual and political  worlds, when one group condescends to protect another group perceived as vulnerable. I’m not going to stand outside  my own responses to Dylan’s work  as a female fan and prove that I live up to Richard Goldstein’s standards of raised consciousness. 

He plays into my hands, though,  when he asks another awful question ‘What do women think of this shit?”– here he is riffing on a writer he admires, Greil Marcus, and the opening line of Marcus’s notorious review of Self-Portrait. Goldstein is right when he says we don’t really know, since rock criticism is dominated by men, Bob Dylan criticism is dominated by men, and Bob Dylan audiences have often been dominated by men. And indeed we are talking here about straight men who may see Bob Dylan enjoying an embarrassment of the kind of riches they are accustomed to coveting: the love of millions, the esteem of the cultural elite, piles of women, uncountable wealth, a near-guarantee that his work will endure long past his life, an intense and productive lifelong struggle with  the most profound questions of human existence. Historically, these have been men’s territories to fight over and claim, and this fact affects what men talk about when they talk about Bob Dylan.

This is where I call out to, well, non-straight-men as awkward as that sounds, to weigh in with new voices describing deeply felt relations with Dylan’s art, which really has been corralled by a certain demographic. How do you hear and feel and think about these songs, if indeed they have been important to you? What kinds of intellectual and sensory attention do you bring to hearing these songs that can show us different ways of hearing them? It’s not about whether the female presences on Blood on the Tracks are or are not submissive, but how you relate to the songs, not being a *brother* to the singer. I am sure someone will take that last sentence as an example of the wretched excess of Dylan-criticism, but I’ll take my hits and keep on going.

Goldstein is right when he recognizes hero worship in Dylan’s fans, and his essay is an important invitation to new voices in Dylan writing, he’s just himself unnecessary in what he has to say about the topic. And I am simply very sorry for him that he will never hear the version of Born in Time on Under the Red Sky the way I do. Richard, you are never going to hear the lines “Not one more night, not one more kiss/Not this time, babe, no more of this” the way they should be heard, and I pity you. 

That voice, softened by the erosion of age but still the sensate rasp that Joyce Carol Oates once compared to sandpaper singing. Even when it’s prattling on, that voice reaches into the synapses of my youth. I’m a Dylan baby; I trekked down from the Bronx to hear him in his Greenwich Village hootenanny days, and I still have the program from his 1961 Carnegie Hall debut. E-bay beckons, but I won’t sell it, or forget the moment when I first heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” on Top 40 radio and realized that the times were…need I finish the line?

Now it’s trickier. There’s Dylan the artist in cap and gown, and Dylan the brand, hyping the new line at Victoria’s Secret; Dylan the Nobel Prize nominee, and Dylan the franchise whose product is being diversified into a tribute musical by Twyla Tharp. And now there’s DJ coming to the XM pay-radio network. Starting May 3 he’ll go head to cred with Howard Stern, chatting up guests, answering e-mails and spinning platters of his eccentric choosing around selected themes (e.g., weather, dancing, whiskey). Those who knew him as the most inspirational voice of the 1960s can tune in to reconnect with their memories through this show. Those who fell away when he found God can hear what’s most admirable about Dylan now: his musical erudition and his bond with what critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America,” the land of dusty 78s and desperate dreams. XM is betting that Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan will draw a very desirable demographic: haute boomers who are used to paying for premium channels and premium everything. 

You could do worse than pass the drive time with one of America’s most important pop artists. But to describe Dylan as merely important may seem paltry, even philistine. To his most fervent admirers he’s not just another artist, certainly not a song-and-dance man, as he’s often called himself. He’s the emblem of his generation’s splendor. Beatified in his youth, he’s cruising toward sainthood today.

Like any holy man, Dylan is surrounded by a cultural guard that sings his praises and keeps his secrets. His recent autobiography,Chronicles, Volume One, doesn’t deal with drugs (though they were abundant in his entourage), and neither does Martin Scorsese’s definitive Dylan doc, No Direction Home (2005). That’s the kind of tell-some treatment Dylan expects, and he’s always gotten it from artists who hone and honor his myth. Todd Haynes is making a film with four actors playing avatars of Dylan. This is a sign that something other than appreciation is at work. We’re witnessing a consecration.

As Dylan’s original fans age, some feel a need to make the icon of their youth into an eternal object of worship. Things that last forever aren’t subject to ups and downs, so the former consensus about Dylan–that his later work is quite uneven–has given way to a conviction that his oeuvre is one unbroken flow of genius, a gospel. Prophets don’t have flops, and neither should Dylan. His woeful ode to assassinated mobster Joey Gallo (“What made them want to come and blow you away?”) has to be of a piece with his master song “Like a Rolling Stone.” His endless and tedious 1978 film Renaldo and Clara must be seen as an underrated masterpiece. This failure to distinguish between awesome and awful Dylan is evidence that his reputation rests less on his recent music than on his enduring status as a fetish.

Dylan has always inspired an awe that obtruded on and ultimately betrayed his songs. Back in the tie-dye days, those lyrics were read like the entrails of a certain sacred bird. No one searches his garbage anymore, but the frenzy of interpretation remains. The result is Saint Dylan, the patron of bitter boomers. He sings of their retreat from utopian dreams, of their disdain for politics, fixation on domesticity, resentment toward demands that intrude on their prerogatives; he speaks to their longing for order, their love-hate relationship with their fathers and with God the Father; and he does this with a mastery of ambiguity that can dazzle when it doesn’t dismay. Those who once soared with Dylan and now face a sour senescence may be looking to leave something other than real estate for posterity. What better monument than the man who traced their changes?

No one who ever set finger to fret has inspired the scholarly fixation that Dylan now does. Amazon lists 398 books by or about him–not just the usual photo relics, back stories, bios and ex-girlfriend memoirs but competing encyclopedias, philosophical treatises, bar-by-bar deconstructions and syntactical Baedekers galore. Welcome to the Rolling Tenure Review.

Can Dylan’s work sustain high scrutiny? Yes, if it’s placed in a particular cultural context. Dylan’s is a hybrid art, as Robert Christgau has observed. Synthesis is the key to its vitality. High and low are one; fishermen hold flowers. The best Dylan critics–e.g., Christgau, Marcus, Tim Riley–situate him in a musical/social tradition that includes, most notably, the blues. But there have always been intellectuals who insisted on yoking Dylan to the fine-art cart.

Consider Aidan Day’s analysis of the song “Visions of Johanna”: “a reduction of form to primal elements–as in an image that itself displaces Marcel Duchamp’s rendering of the Mona Lisa in the painting LHOOQ.” The music critic Alex Ross cites this groaner as an example of the wretched excess Dylan can inspire in inquiring minds. He always did. But lately this adoration has spawned a whole new school of Dylan crit, all the more powerful because it’s based in the academy. Young Bob should have wailed: Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you in a syllabus!

The dean of this veneration scholarship is Christopher Ricks, an important critic of (mainly British) poetry. Like many acolytes, Ricks admits that Dylan is an obsession. But unlike the garbologists of yore, he has the intellectual means to venture a close textual analysis of the work itself. The result is Dylan’s Visions of Sin, a formidable study whose flaws epitomize the problems with the discipline I’ll call Ph.Dylanology.

It’s a formalist school, and as such it privileges the syntax of the songs over their context. Taking this approach, Ricks finds not just hidden intricacies but significant connections between Dylan and the great poets, especially the Symbolists and Romantics. There are such connections, as there are for a number of rock artists from the 1960s. Consider John Lennon’s link to Surrealism or Jim Morrison’s debt to the Beats. Certainly Dylan is the most literary of songwriters, and he synthesizes the metaphorics of blues with the Western literary tradition in a remarkable way. It’s one thing to acknowledge this achievement, quite another to maintain that it makes him the singular genius of his generation. But the point of Ph.Dylanology is to render him as an exceptional artist who communes with the immortals and stands apart from the creative processes of the crowd. Elitism is a dirty word in formalist circles, but that’s what this is. And it doesn’t get at Dylan’s greatness.

He hasn’t had much influence on literature. Few contemporary poets write like him. Dylan’s major impact is on pop music, and his innovations–expanding the lyric line and infusing it with expressive, ambiguous imagery–are a mainstay of modern song. In pop, the sensual surface is every bit as important as the subtext, maybe more so. If you’re going to tackle the Book of Revelation, you’d better make it rock. These values set a standard for pop-culture criticism: erotics over hermeneutics, to channel Susan Sontag. But most Ph.Dylanologists are oblivious to the ways of pop–and they ignore the “old, weird America,” where Dylan’s imagination resides. Overlooking this tradition does a grave disservice to the collective genius of American music. And it removes Dylan from the company of 1960s song-poets like Lennon (whose late style is every bit as primal and more radical), Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon (all of them wiser about the vicissitudes of intimacy). Because these artists are less literary than Dylan, they are presumed to be less worthy, and a whole aesthetic movement is dismissed.

I once saw Ricks lecture on the poetics of unstressed (or “feminine”) endings in an early Dylan song called “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” He never acknowledged that such upbeat endings are common in American song, or that the “axial moments” in a Dylan lyric–when an image encompasses its opposite–appear often in rock. Indeed, ambiguity is central to the sixties sensibility, and not just because of Dylan’s sway. Ricks is hardly the first critic to be stuck inside of Mobile with the William Empson blues again, and I wouldn’t be so hard on him if his pop illiteracy weren’t the sign of a larger problem.

There’s a reason why formalism flourishes in conservative times. It stops the discussion of ideology. The appeal of this approach to Dylan–and the reason it’s taken hold, I’m convinced–is that it exempts his devotees from dealing with the troubling politics of his later songs: those reactionary attitudes and that unctuous, unforgiving theodicy. Formalism tells us that these values are not the source of Dylan’s power, that it’s all in the tropes. But there’s more to his lyrics than subtext. There’s a plain meaning, and it matters.

I’m not suggesting that a reactionary artist can’t be a great one–remember Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower. I am saying that failing to confront the plain meaning of Dylan’s music as well as its morality is a sin of its own.

Is there any great artist who appeals to only one sex? This question shouldn’t be incidental to the Dylan discussion, but it is. Though most critics acknowledge his sexism–as in, So what else is new?–there’s been no real examination of his sexual politics and its relevance to the rest of his politics. Hostility to women is a recurring motif in Dylan’s songs, from “Like a Rolling Stone” to “Idiot Wind.” His love songs, and there are many, bask in feminine submission, as in the ballad on Infidels (1983) that asks, “What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?” and answers “You know a woman like you should be at home/That’s where you belong/Watching out for someone who loves you true/Who would never do you wrong.”

What do women think of this shit? We don’t really know, since rock crit (like lit crit) is such a male preserve. But it’s safe to say that Dylan’s current public is skewed toward the (straight) male end of the sexual spectrum. His heroic persona is a big reason why.

Take Dylan’s trademark elusiveness: The self is masked; nothing is revealed. This stance is a major signifier of machismo in American culture, always has been. Think of all those masked superheroes, or the hard-boiled guys in film noir whose eyes are shown in shadow. Think of Noah’s son, cursed because he saw his father naked. Dylan is steeped in that saga. He’s a keeper of the patriarchal flame.

Consider this roster of Dylan themes: suspicion of worldly women–and therefore the world; rejection of modernism, especially when it threatens old values; rigid, sin-burned religiosity; the falsity of social life; the corruption of love; and, lately, the perversion of divine order. These values resonate with the paranoid tendency in machismo. When Dylan was younger, they were tempered by his rebellion against oppressive (white male) power, but now it’s the disruption of godly rules and hallowed hierarchies that he rebels against, “infamy on the landscape,” as Dylan writes in the liner notes for World Gone Wrong(1993). He doesn’t work on Maggie’s farm; he lives there.

I don’t claim that Dylan is determined by machismo–there’s much more to him than that. But I will say that he reaches many men of a certain age and status on precisely these grounds. He digs beneath their ambivalent embrace of sexual equality, the insistence that they acknowledge their interests as a sex, and he proposes that these demands insult the fundamentals. Liberals won’t accept that regressive message when it’s wrapped in conservative politics, as it often is in country music. But because Dylan is as critical of injustice as he is of liberation, he overrides such reservations. And if you take a purely textual approach, it’s possible to forget that his mystique rests substantially on his sexual politics. Dylan is a liberal man’s man.

Nostalgia for the patriarchy becomes acute for many men when they age, as their fathers diminish and die. For Dylan this yearning is a kind of prayer. “The iron hand it ain’t no match for the iron rod,” he sings in “When He Returns.” The rod of ages he clings to–and his worshipers cling to–is a phallus. I’d say that’s the key to the cult of Dylan. He’s the holy writ in a phallic rite. It’s why he’s always inspired obsessive codifying and deciphering missions and why his songs are treated as sacred texts. They aren’t just poems; they’re parables from the mouth of… the prophet.

Faced with the nasty aspects of this artist, Ricks urges “faith in Dylan,” adding, “this needs to encompass his faith and our having faith in him.” That’s not criticism; it’s hagiography–and it violates the best of Dylan’s subterranean homesick injunctions, the one I think of whenever I sit down to write a piece:

Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parking meters.

The most honest way to look at Dylan is the way his young fans do. They admire him, but they don’t adore him. And they understand that his career over four decades has had dramatic ebbs and flows. Between 1975 and 1987 he produced some memorable songs along with many otiose ballads and those hymns aptly described by Alex Ross as “snarling gospel.” The best you can say about these experiments is that they were sincere. But they suffered from the enervation that comes of disengagement.

As a young man, Dylan withdrew in rage from the burdens of progressive politics, and that rebellion galvanized his most important work. But as he aged, he withdrew from the social world itself, and his gift was lost in the ether of salvation. Then, somehow, Dylan found the world again, and in 1997 he created a wonderful album of spare, melancholy songs, Time Out of Mind. He was back, though as he’s said, you can’t come back in the same way again.

Now a new generation has discovered Dylan, but not for his late style. They flock to his concerts to hear the early songs, those still-gripping sagas of alienation and outrage written when Dylan was lost in the wilderness, and they come to hear how Dylan will sing those songs today, since he always performs them differently. They know Dylan as he should be known–as a striving, fallible artist, not a saint.

I’ve learned not to overestimate the dude. That sandpaper voice still stirs the passions of my past, even when it’s singing of a present that would stifle me. But I don’t believe in Dylan. His words are not the Word. And I come not to worship him but to complicate him.