It would be hard to be a less-qualified critic of Bob Dylan than Maureen Dowd. She’s within her rights to criticize Dylan for appearing in China and agreeing to have his set-list pre-approved, but she goes far beyond that to explicitly call him a sell-out in every area of his career. She pulls out quotes to suggest that Dylan only played folk-music to make a living, that he didn’t represent the counterculture of the 60’s, and that he didn’t really mean any of the anti-establishment things that he wrote.
Bob Dylan has said a lot of things. He’s a bitter man in many ways. Dowd should have known that from reading his lyrics. Has she never read the lyrics to Like A Rolling Stone or You’re a Big Girl Now or Just Like a Woman?
Dylan’s not a saint. But he is America’s master wordsmith. He may have complained about being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent,” but that is exactly what he has been for the last 50 years. So, he doesn’t want to be your monkey performing The Times They Are A-Changing for the forty-millionth time. Show me someone today who is capable of writing such a song.
Dylan doesn’t have to sing songs of rebellion to be subversive. His entire existence is subversive. And Dowd doesn’t understand any of it.
Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out.
The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.
I think Dylan would respond, It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding:
While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless himWhile one who sings with h[er] tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That [s]he’s inBut I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please h[er]Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony
When Dowd shows that she understands that Dylan was singing about people like her and her peers, she’ll be qualified to criticize Bob Dylan’s career and art.
And she thinks he’s going to care one bit of what she has to say? What an idiot she is.
There was no bigger Dylan fan than me in the Sixties. But Dowd is absolutely right. He was always after the money and the fame. He says as much himself:
I’ve known all this for quite a while and can laugh about it now. It would surprise me not at all if Dylan is a Republican.
That’s utter bullshit.
Dylan was crucified when he went electric and fought back.
He was crucified when he converted to Christianity and started writing religious songs. And he fought back.
He was crucified when he made some bad records and he fought back.
He’s pissed off, but he’s not a sell-out. They’ve been calling him a sell-out since 1964 or 65.
So, he lashed out at the folk music scene. They couldn’t appreciate an album with:
Queen Jane Approximately
Ballad of a Thin Man
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
Desolation Row
Like a Rolling Stone
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry
They deserved to get dismissed as Fat People.
As for the counterculture, Dylan toured with the Grateful Dead into the 1990’s. The counterculture turned on him, too, and he was bitter about it. But he never abandoned them and he never stopped playing for them.
I wish Dylan didn’t hate his critics so much, but he does.
was an album I wore out from overplay. I loved that album.
But it doesn’t change Dylan’s motivation. He was in it for the money and political causes never meant anything to him.
And I don’t think Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez and Tom Paxton are “fat people”.
In it for the money?
Maybe you could say that about Rod Stewart. Bob Dylan? That’s ridiculous.
As for Pete Seegar and Joan Baez, I don’t think they called him a sell-out.
As for political causes, Dylan saw them all as flawed and phony. He sang about it.
You don’t believe Bob Dylan on Bob Dylan.
I got no answer for that.
Even if you take him completely literally, he didn’t say his art was made just to make money. He said that he played folk music when he got to Greenwich Village because he had to make a living but that he never intended to play folk music forever. Did you ever arrive in a new town with no money and no job? As for folk, we’re talking about a guy who idolized Woody Guthrie. When he disparages folk, he’s disparaging those who thought he should stick with the genre rather than making some of the best records ever made and the best songs ever written.
Just to revisit this a bit, here’s Dylan on Pete Seegar:
Now, my point is that this excerpt is also “Dylan on Dylan.” And it doesn’t sound like he thinks Folk Music is for fat people. It sounds like he’s putting it on a higher plane than his own rock and roll music. You see, with Dylan it all depends on what mood he’s in. And if he’s pissed off at someone he’s likely to say something hostile. That doesn’t mean that he won’t say the exact opposite thing the next day.
So, pulling quotes out of his past to make him seem like he has no allegiance to anything or respect for his legacy or his fans, is just dishonest.
Beautiful quote. It’s so obvious that Dylan turned his back on any commercial entity he could have become – even to me and I don’t know that much about his life, just some of his music. And I assume Dylan idolizes Woody Guthrie – not just the songs but Woody Guthrie the person as is the case with all Woody Guthrie fans including Pete Seeger. No one ever pretended they could be Woody Guthrie, but he stands as an example of someone who, with all his human imperfections, walked the walk, which is what it seems to me Dylan strives for.
Wow, what a sin. Being an artist AND wanting to make money. Who could think of such a vulgar thing. Actually MAKING MONEY on your songs. How vile, how middle-class, how bourgeois!!
I don’t think he has made a nickle that is not deserved. An artist SHOULD cash in. After all, his descendents certainly will. Look at the woman who is the widow of Dr. Seuss. He was dead no more than 10 minutes, and she was cashing in like a vulture.
I applaud any artist who cashes in. It is their art, and they can decide best what to make of it.
Of course not. She’s so superficial that she can’t see the basic subversiveness in not only Dylan’s simply playing a show there, but in the setlist itself. I mean, look at it (via Rolling Stone):
Gonna Change My Way of Thinking
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
Tangled Up in Blue
Honest With Me
Simple Twist of Fate
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum
Love Sick
Rollin’ and Tumblin’
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
Highway 61 Revisited
Spirit on the Water
Thunder on the Mountain
Ballad of a Thin Man
Like a Rolling Stone
All Along the Watchtower
Forever Young
“Hard Rain,” “Watchtower,” and “Change My Way of Thinking” are metaphors so simple that even Dowd should get them. And then there’s “Thin Man”–but she doesn’t know something’s happening and sure doesn’t know what it is. The fact that the Chinese authorities approved those showed that they, understandably, don’t comprehend metaphors by foreigners. Kind of like us sometimes.
Anyway, I grew up on this stuff too–my dad played it all the time–but “Time out of Mind” came out when I was a junior in college and for my friends and I, it was revelatory. The cranky, croaky old Dylan is sort of like “our” Dylan, and those albums he’s released since (yes, even the silly Xmas one) are our favorites.
True, the old stuff still slashes up good. We saw him play in Oct 2001, when everyone was afraid of everything, and “Masters of War” made us jump out of our skin. But you know what? “Honest with Me” and “Tweedle Dee” are awesome grooves. China could do a lot with some awesome grooves.
And here is James Fallows on this whole nonsense:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/04/dylan-dowd-and-china-did-bob-really-sell-ou
t/237055/
If you want to unmask a fake/flake, you couldn’t do better than MoDo. She started out on the “society-gossip” beat 30 years ago and now after much cosmetic surgery she is now some sort of pundit? What a laugh…
You know, I just cannot click on a Maureen Dowd column anymore. It’s kind of like the new Times firewall, where you only get 30 stories a month and then you’re done. MoDo has gotten her ~150 columns, and now she’s done getting into my brain, at least for this lifetime.
Gawd, it’s Dawd again who set you off. It’s that New York Times op-ed page habit that you need to kick. Go read the sports section instead.
Some observations about this kerfuffle:
Who in the Chinese government approved Dylan’s set-list? How knowledgeable were they about Dylan’s music?
After a 50+ year career, I don’t think Dylan needs any defense. The work speaks for itself, is complex and very varied.
Dylan’s music rarely is polemic or didactic, even when it is pointedly political.
As stirring as “The Times They Are a-Changing” is, after 50 years some might wonder where is the change. Well, maybe not in today’s China.
It’s our projection on Dylan that he was singing about us. We decided that, not him. That’s what art is about.
It is tricky to gauge the impact of an artist from one culture in a dramatically different culture. It might turn out that the set-list profoundly changes China in spite of the censors. Might but not likely in a country of 1.2 billion people and a few thousand fans at a concert.
We should stop insisting that US artists be obligated to export US values. Sometimes personal values are sufficient.
Of course, he’s in it for the money and fame. Why is that a problem for some folks who’ve provided the support for his money and his fame? You wanted to pour that $15 down the sewer? Actually you really wanted him to get a bigger share of that $15 than he most likely did.
If Ai Wei-wei is in prison, how is it that the Chinese government thinks it’s a good idea to showcase Bob Dylan? Well that does answer itself, doesn’t it. A bow toward freedom of… what exactly?
Whether he now shares the sentiments of songs he wrote nearly a half-century ago or not, Dylan’s a lot more qualified to put politics in his art than Dowd is to put art in her politics. Of course, she’s not very good at the politics thing, either.
And it’s only fair to note that over the years Dowd’s performed for (and made excuses for) far more people with blood on their hands than Dylan ever has.
Saw that the column was there but didn’t read it – can’t bear to read her cols any more. Dowd is certainly against change, for her “The Times they are a Changing” is a nostalgia trip. Hope the NYTimes (which I like very much for the in depth stories and photojournalism) will be a changin’ and replace her with someone worth reading.
One of my favorite photojournalists, Tyler Hicks, just released/ escaped in Libya w. 3 others.
http://www.google.com/search?q=tyler+hicks+photography&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=i6e&
;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=ivnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&e
i=xO-hTa-xEMzTgAe3rdXkBQ&ved=0CDIQsAQ&biw=1400&bih=715
What’s interesting though is it’s not just the extraordinary photos it’s also the Times photo editor’s work (I’ve compared originals with Times version)
Bobby D. doesn’t seem all that bitter to me anymore. His recent albums, and of course the wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour, are about as lighthearted as it gets. Seems to me like he’s made peace with a lot of his old demons, and given how much he’s given us over the years, I’m happy for the man.
MoDo? Nogo.
LOL!!
Dylan rocked out in Saigon tonight.
You know what this all reminds me of?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6183228609282320854#
I guess Dowd is angling to get this called “MoDo’s verse”.