Bob Dylan

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Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American recording artist and singer/songwriter known for his modifier-dense lyrics, an inscrutable persona, his liberal political leanings and a staggeringly wide range of vocal styles, invariably unconventional and often nasal or raspy. He is most notable for his huge impact during the 1960s and his on/off involvement in protest music.

Dylan is often credited, along with The Beatles, as being one of the major forces propelling rock-and-roll, and popular music generally, into territory where it could explore complex ideas about life, poetry, politics, religion and philosophy. Throughout his career he has changed his musical style, interests and lyrical focus repeatedly, prompting his fans and critics to repeatedly accuse him of betraying allegiances or selling out to commercial interests, particularly during the turbulent '60s. While seldom registering more than modest record sales or radio airplay, Dylan's impact has been widely respected.

He is one of several popular music icons (including John Lennon and Woody Guthrie) who are poster children for liberal values, given their proclivity for far-left political views often verging into outright communism and atheism. Dylan, however, has professed faith in Jesus Christ and documented this in his song “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

Biography[edit | edit source]

Growing up in the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota during the '50s, Dylan listened to blues, R&B, country and rock-and-roll artists like Little Richard and Buddy Holly. He was also fascinated with folk music, particularly Woody Guthrie. After dropping out of college, he began his musical career as a folk artist.

Dylan's topical subjects and lyrical style played well in the growing protest and civil rights movements of the 1960's.[1] His most famous song of the era, 'Blowin' in the Wind' was not only a hit for Dylan but numerous others including Peter, Paul and Mary. A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall is a direct reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Oxford Town is about a black student's struggles at the all-white University of Mississippi.

Impact on music[edit | edit source]

Dylan is one of a handful of pop musicians who helped a generation understand that popular music was not just something you danced to, but something you listened to and though about. His early work, the 'protest era' challenged his listeners to think about the world they lived in, and used his music to show his own perspective of that world. Along with artists like Joan Baez, Dylan's music helped set the background for growing dis-ease within the youth and the subsequent push for changes.

Later, Dylan experimented with more abstract and poetic lyrics,[2] moving away from conventional protest music. He also hung out with beatniks like Allen Ginsberg, and allegedly introduced The Beatles to marijuana[3] in their Hotel Delmonica suite in New York on Friday afternoon, August 28, 1964, a pop music summit engineered by rock journalism pioneer Al Aronowitz. By this point many rock-and-roll bands, including The Beatles themselves, were attempting their own various takes on Dylan's lyrical style, producing a floodgate of thought-provoking lyrics of greater complexity. Dylan then shocked the folk music world with his Sunday evening, July 25, 1965 performance closing that year's Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island by playing amplified rock-and-roll in front of The Butterfield Blues Band, with Pete Seeger, a onetime mentor, being among those on-scene most scandalized. [4] Much of his best and most influential music comes from this period, and though he alienated some traditional folkies, he gained far wider additional popularity with rock fans. He also enraged feminists with some of his songs, most notably "Just Like a Woman".[5]

At Dylan's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Bruce Springsteen's induction remarks explaining that "Elvis freed our bodies, but Dylan freed our minds". The recording artist has been twice thus far nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Political and social views[edit | edit source]

Social and political views[edit | edit source]

Dylan is known for his protest music and his support of the civil rights movement. Like Guthrie before, and Springsteen after, he was always seen as a "man of the people" - his image a shabby working class everyman. Like his hero, Woody Guthrie, Dylan wrote many songs about news stories of the time, which illustrated the effects of what he considered to be bigotry, poverty or injustice.[6] He wrote songs criticizing the Cold War,[7] and others that expressed general dissatisfaction with the establishment and predicted a turning of the tide.[8]

The 1980s saw a return of the popularity of Dylan, who appear the "We Are the World" super-session at Hollywood's A&M Studios on January 28-29, 1985, Live Aid concerts staged on two continents on Saturday, July 13, 1985. Dylan occupied the coveted finale-preceding slot for the epic worldwide live broadcast, being backed by Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ron Wood through a memorable but uneven three-song set in Philadelphia. At Live Aid, Dylan was introduced as "one of America's great voices of freedom" and "transcendental" by longtime pal Jack Nicholson. His performance of the "Ballad of Hollis Brown", his true-crime tale of murderous rural desperation, and his comment some of the money being raised might be well diverted to help with the mortgages of struggling American farmers sparked off the Farm Aid movement.

During the 2008 US Presidential Election Dylan detailed his admiration for far-left sodomite affirming Barack Obama.[9] Dylan performed acoustically the following year at The White House for the 44th President, echoing both his Wednesday, January 20, 1993 solo performance at the Clinton inaugural and his Saturday, March 27, 1997 appearance in Bologna before John Paul II.

Religious views[edit | edit source]

Dylan was often seen as an atheist/agnostic in his early days[10], however near the end of the '70s, Dylan, who was from a middle-class Jewish family, became by his own profession a Born-Again Christian[11] , commencing the most interesting of his many creative phases. This development was particularly interesting since Dylan's career had often been said to have messianic overtones, something Dylan watcher Alan Platt summarized in his Slow Train Coming review for New York's SoHo Weekly News in September 1979 by pointing out in a sort of blasphemous way that "Christ was the Dylan of His time". According to Hilburn, Dylan had experienced a mystical vision "which couldn't have been anything but Jesus". By early 1979, Dylan was exclusively writing, recording and performing religious songs, although--sadly--this thematic dominance of his music only lasted for three albums.[12] By the early 80s, he was repeatedly associating with the Chabad Lubavitch strain of Hasidic Judaism both in New York and Los Angeles, even appearing on several of the sect's national telethons through the arrangement of Chabad benefactor and seafood magnate Louis Kemp, a Dylan confidant ever since the pair were adolescents at Jewish summer camp in Wisconsin. Dylan's 2009 release of a Christmas album recorded for charity probably doesn't address this. When Hilburn pressed Dylan as to why he moved on to other themes after three years of faith-based lyrics, his response was characteristically cryptic: "Well, Jesus only preached for three years, too."


See also[edit | edit source]

Footnotes[edit | edit source]

  1. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19789/m1/
  2. E.g. most of Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), and "Mr. Tambourine Man" (on Bringing It All Back Home, 1965). He never explains what any of it means.
  3. If the Beatles didn't know about marijuana before meeting Bob Dylan, then they never played the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. They did play the Reeperbahn in Hamburg.
  4. Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Blonde on Blonde (1966).
  5. On Blonde on Blonde.
  6. E.g. "Oxford Town" (on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, 1963), "Ballad of Hollis Brown", "Only a Pawn In Their Game", and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" (all on The Times They Are A-Changin', 1964).
  7. E.g. "Masters of War", "Talking World War III Blues" (both on The Freewheelin' ), and "With God On Our Side" (on The Times They Are A-Changin' ).
  8. E.g. "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rains's A-Gonna Fall" (both on The Freewheelin' ), "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and "When the Ship Comes In" (both on The Times They Are A-Changin').
  9. The Times, 5 June, 2008.
  10. Columbia Record's John Hammond, November 1961
  11. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times
  12. Slow Train Coming, Saved (1980), Shot Of Love (1981).