“Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about/You know it feels good to be alive.” So sang the band Jesus Jones in 1990 in “Right Here, Right Now”, an anthem about the liberation of eastern Europe. It’s a lovely line, but of course it’s wrong about Mr Dylan. In 1990 he wasn’t even at the midpoint of his glorious career; you can buy tickets now for his Rough and Rowdy Ways Worldwide Tour this year. He did have the fall of the Berlin Wall to sing about. He just didn’t do it.
Not to pick on Jesus Jones—it’s a great song—but the implication that Mr Dylan would have sung about the end of the cold war speaks to an enduring disappointment, or wistfulness, that he does not lend his genius and influence to great political causes. His early protest music created that appetite, at least on the left, and it has been whetted anew in every subsequent generation by reverential singalongs of “Blowin’ in the Wind” in elementary-school music classes and undergraduate sit-ins.
But Mr Dylan veered away from politics early in his career. That choice is downplayed in the diverting biopic “A Complete Unknown”, a contender for top honours at the Oscars next month. The film focuses instead on the musical choice Mr Dylan made around the same time, to disappoint the mandarins of folk music by exchanging his acoustic guitar for an electric guitar and backing band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. It’s too bad the film couldn’t explore his motives for both choices. The musical one mattered more, but at least in retrospect it seems like a no-brainer, and the political choice has more relevance to our own time.
Mashing fact and fiction, discarding some influences on Mr Dylan and inventing or exaggerating others, the film identifies him with left-wing causes and coyly leaves things there. After he arrives in Greenwich Village, a new girlfriend urges him to read a leftist writer and takes him to a civil-rights demonstration. Mr Dylan’s guitar acquires a sticker reading “This machine kills fascists” (though the only authorities he winds up confronting, folk purists such as Pete Seeger, are surely the gentlest fascists imaginable). As the Cuban missile crisis reaches a terrifying climax we see him before a small audience in a subterranean Village bar, belting out “Masters of War”, that didactic tirade.
For Lexington’s money, one of the film’s most moving scenes is when Mr Dylan performs “The Times They are a-Changin’”, supposedly for the first time, before a young audience that almost immediately begins to sing along with the refrain, in bright sunshine at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. That scene and others capture the ways Mr Dylan spoke to his moment and, by restoring his music to its context, they summon its urgency and power, which a wireless speaker in a contemporary living room tends to dissipate.
By 1964 the real Bob Dylan was turning away from activism. That year he told a writer from the New Yorker, Nat Hentoff, that he was done with “finger-pointing songs”. He didn’t want to be a spokesman for anyone, and he was “never going to have anything to do with any political organisation again in my life”. That was also the year Mr Dylan released “My Back Pages”, with its declaration that “I’d become my enemy/In the instant that I preach”, and its mocking, uplifting refrain looking back at more righteous days: “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now”.
What had happened? There is no reason to suspect Mr Dylan of the “Republicans buy sneakers too” calculation that Michael Jordan once said kept him out of politics. With his fierce curiosity and magpie ways, Mr Dylan has always prized the particular, not the mass, as well as his freedom from the loyalties or obligations beyond personal principles that he saw as constraining so many Americans. “I can’t tell them how to change things,” he told Hentoff, “because there’s only one way to change things, and that’s to cut yourself off from all the chains. That’s hard for most people to do.” Years later, in the first volume of his autobiography, Mr Dylan would reveal that his favourite politician in the early 1960s was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a right-winger who declared, when he ran as the Republican nominee for president in 1964, “Extremism in defence of liberty is no vice.” Just as, even after Mr Dylan went electric, his music would remain rooted in the American folk tradition, so did his personal politics grow from old American ideals, of self-reliance and self-creation.
Don’t need a weatherman
The political stakes seemed high enough in the America of the 1960s. In today’s hyperpolitical era, when social media has granted audiences new power and sharpened their tribal edges, artists seem to feel even more tempted or compelled to offer themselves as leaders, or political “influencers”. For the most famous to opt out can bring a hail of abuse, as Taylor Swift discovered when she failed to endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mr Dylan is more out of step than ever. One appraisal of “A Complete Unknown” in the New York Times zeroed in on Mr Dylan’s real-life “baffling neutrality”, noting that that attitude “most likely leaves you poorly suited to contributing to collective action”.
Surely that is the point. Mr Dylan felt sick, he once wrote, to witness his “meanings subverted into polemics”. His lyrics challenge listeners not to march together but to derive meaning for themselves. It is not hard to imagine a thoughtful musician, alone on a stage, staring out at a sea of faces chanting his words while he holds a machine that supposedly kills fascists, and feeling not just a thrill at his success but a stab of revulsion, even fear, at his power. He might wonder why his fans so clearly yearned for someone strong to defend them, whether they were right or wrong. Under those circumstances, it would seem not a nihilistic but an exemplary choice, a potentially enlightening one, to decide that that just wasn’t going to be him, babe. ■
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