2005 was a triumphant year for Bob Dylan. The man famously dubbed as the ‘voice of a generation’ (the sixties for those who weren’t there) has been as omnipresent as the Messiah some believed him to be. As David Smyth wrote earlier this year in the London Evening Standard: ‘You would be forgiven for thinking that Bob Dylan had recently passed on, such is the weight of tributes and retrospectives currently bearing down from all sides.’
As well as the standard fare of rehashed bootlegs, this year saw the much-anticipated release of a new album (Live at the Gaslight 1962) and DVD (No Direction Home), and to cap it off, November saw an auction of verse written by the American Bard.
The critics are unanimous: Dylan’s still got the magic. Looking at the archive footage, hearing the old tunes anew, it’s easy to get caught up in a wave of nostalgia and tut-tutting about how nothing today can compare. Dylan was the real deal you might say. A brilliant musician who also had something to say. He was an advocate for social change, defender of civil liberties, a cultural revolutionary. They certainly don’t make them like that anymore. Or do they?
Aging Dylanites may not think so, but today’s youth reckon messiahs such as 50 Cent, Beyonce, and Andre 3000 are every bit as profound (and ‘hip’) as Dylan was to his disciples in his heyday during the sixties and seventies. And, like Dylan, contemporary ‘prophets’ are equally as incomprehensible, inflammatory, and annoying to the older generation having a hard time ‘getting it.’
A lot has been made of Dylan’s commitment to art before profit. Something that can hardly be said about today’s leading pop artists. But then times have changed. In the sixties the cost of living was unimaginably cheaper than it is today. Dylan lived in Greenwich Village at a time when artists could afford to live there. Today, only artists as successful as Dylan can afford the sky-high rents. And the messages cited by young artists reflect the changes in materialism that occurred. Iconic female singer-songwriters have plenty to say about money and to their mainly youthful audience the message probably has the same revolutionary spark as Dylan’s gravelly nasal drawl did for some youths back in the day.
It would be impossible to take anything away from Dylan even if that was the intention. Even now he manages to enthrall audiences new and old. The point is that for the current generation of youth there are plenty of new performers that they regard as equally enigmatic, revolutionary, and ‘deep’ as Dylan was to youth in the sixties.
When the latest Dylan album was released it was done so through corporate coffee giants Starbucks. Has the Messiah sold out? Perhaps, but only if you believe he had something to sell out of in the first place. Dylan sang songs and got paid for it. The money might not have mattered when he was a freckly-faced teenager but it does now. As much as Dylan’s songs might have been a ‘soul-awakening’ for his ruptured audience, he recorded them to be sold and to make money.
And another thing, one of Dylan’s most significant contributions to music and modern culture was introducing the Beatles to marijuana, back when weed was considered as evil as heroin or crack today. Seeing as this is the year of revisiting Dylan, perhaps someone ought to suggest that this puts him in the same league as, say, Snoop Dogg or NWA?
