Daily Ramblings:
Heat Up Some Coffee Grounds ...07/02/2005 09:59:48 am
So the Guardian gave us two reactions to Dylan's Starbuck's deal, neither one of which faced the simple fact that RWB referred to here - namely that the old ways of selling music to the public are decaying, thanks to technological advances, and this can be seen as just an experiment in doing things differently. Anyone who regularly gets music from free online sources can hardly throw stones at an artist and/or record company that looks for new ways of selling it.
Nevertheless, there's a few things to note in what was said in those two columns. John Harris makes this remark about Dylan (which might lead some to believe he's been reading RightWingBob.com):
His brief spell as an alleged leftist firebrand came to a close some time in 1964, and even his most agitationary lyrics tended to ask far more questions than they ever answered. In fact, I tend to cleave to the idea that Dylan has long been more of a political conservative than his more romantically minded admirers might be prepared to admit. For possible evidence, one need only survey the rum statements made during his born-again phase about "homosexual politics", or his gloriously right-on final words at the US leg of Live Aid: "It'd be nice if some of this money went to American farmers." Throw in his lifelong contrarian streak, and you start to understand why he might have chosen to offload some of his tunes to the 'Bucks. Indeed, he probably chortled as he did it.
He goes on to engage in some kind of extrapolative fantasy where people in the not too distant future will believe that Dylan and other iconic artists actually got their start in places like Starbucks, instead of places like The Gaslight. Yeah, well, I guess he was due to submit a new column. The constant fetishizing of Dylan's early years in the Village by writers and documentarians is hardly going to let anyone forget that whole story.
Meanwhile, Mike Marqusee writes as though he's finding his own thesis on Dylan increasingly hollow - the idea that Dylan wrote great songs of social consciousness that speak for the left, but just failed as a human being to live up to them (especially with his avoidance of anti-Vietnam-war protest). He's repackaging his book "Chimes Of Freedom - The Politics Of Bob Dylan's Art" as "Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and The Sixties." It's fair to think he regards Dylan as pretty wicked these days - and that's what he thinks of Starbucks too:
With its corporate regimentation and single-minded dedication to maximising profit, Starbucks is diametrically opposed to the ethos of the Gaslight. In fact its cut-throat policies have pushed independent coffee houses out of business. Yet it likes to present itself as the inheritor of the old coffee-house ambience - informal, hip and socially responsible. It calls its low-paid workers "partners".
Spare me the tears for the poor oppressed Starbucks' employees, please. Someone who can't tear his mindset out of an idealized fantasy of 1964 seems to see every issue as a chance to join hands and sing "We Shall Overcome." It's called capitalism, Mike, and it's the reason why people have jobs and the ability to buy iPods and digital cameras and crummy books about Dylan. Former socialist paradises like Russia, China and even Vietnam are crying out for more of it, while wanna-be socialist paradises like France and Germany wonder why they have such chronically high unemployment. Starbucks has figured out a way to sell a lot of coffee to a lot people who want to buy it. They are neither saints nor villains but simply a collection of people who have succeeded, for the time being, in the marketplace.
And that, of-course, is the ultimate unforgivable sin in the blinkered world view of the knee-jerk leftist, which, as the world-at-large may be beginning to understand, Bob Dylan is assuredly not.
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