Daily Ramblings:
They're Planting Stories In The Press ...02/24/2005 10:26:12 am
The Drudge Report has linked to a story in Brit music mag NME,
"breaking the news" that Dylan made some
disparaging remarks about current popular music. It
was also picked up in a lot of other outlets. In
fact, he made those remarks in 2001 to Robert Hilburn
in the LA Times. They have apparently been a part of
his tour program for several years. The quote that
excited them was this:
I know there are groups at the
top of the charts that
are hailed as the saviours of rock'n'roll and all
that,
but they are amateurs, They don't know where the
music
comes from . . . I was lucky. I came up in a
different
era. There were these great blues and country
folk artists
around, and the impulse to play 'those sounds'
came to me
at a very early age. I wouldn't even think about
playing
music if I was born in these times.
A lefty website called Arts &
Opinion is currently posting what I'm assuming is the
full tour program interview here (I don't personally possess an original
copy of this program - though I figure I'll acquire
one in April when I next plan to see Dylan live). I
believe this "interview" is actually an
amalgam of various interviews, selectively edited to
appear in Dylan's tour program. I think I can
identify both LA Times and USA Today interview
segments in there, and maybe Rolling Stone too.
(Anyone have more precise knowledge to share?)
The NME doesn't quote it, but in
the tour program Dylan goes on to make this astute
observation also:
I don't think what we call pop
music today is any
worse than it was. We never liked pop music. It
never
occurred to me in the 50s that Bing Crosby was on
the
cutting edge 20 years before I was listening to
him. I
never heard that Bing Crosby. The Louis Armstrong
I heard
was the guy who sang Hello, Dolly! -- I never
heard him do
West End Blues.
What's interesting to me is what
has been selected, presumably with Dylan's input, out
of the big piles of possible interview fodder, to
appear in the tour program that gets sold at each of
his concerts. The full text is not long, so it
doesn't seem valid to assume that any particular part
is carelessly included. Rather, they probably started
with something much longer, and edited it down to
just the parts that they (or Dylan) wanted to keep.
In that context, I would think it's
significant that this relatively large segment is
included:
BOB: I'm not sure
people understood a lot of what I was
writing about. I don't even know if I would
understand
them if I believed everything that has been
written about
them by imbeciles who wouldn't know the first
thing about
writing songs. I've always said the organized
media
propagated me as something I never pretended to
be . . .
all this spokesman of conscience thing. A lot of
my songs
were definitely misinterpreted by people who
didn't know
any better, and it goes on today.
Q: Give me an example of a song that has
been widely
misinterpreted.
BOB: Take Masters Of War. Every
time I sing it, someone
writes that it's an antiwar song. But there's no
antiwar
sentiment in that song. I'm not a pacifist. I
don't think
I've ever been one. If you look closely at the
song, it's
about what Eisenhower was saying about the
dangers of the
military-industrial complex in this country. I
believe
strongly in everyone's right to defend themselves
by
every means necessary . . .
That's just about the only song
where Dylan has felt compelled to explain its meaning
and take on those who misinterpret it. He's done it
repeatedly, in fact. Despite this, it continues to be
taken as a straightforward anti-war song, just as
Dylan says - including by many fans cheering lustily
each time he plays it in concert, thinking of their
favorite Republican as he sings the line "I hope that you die." You could make a strong argument that
the song is therefore a failure on some level. But I
find it interesting that this gets addressed - out of
so many other possible issues - in Dylan's tour
program.
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