Roy Blount Jr. recently wrote a piece confessing that he doesn’t like Bob Dylan. It’s a confession, as he explains, because:

When a person has an opinion that doesn’t accord with his overall profile of progressiveness, he should probably keep it to himself, when he’s not at home.

I don’t think I’m being unfair by calling the article “rambling,” since Blount admits to as much while writing it — and you can read it yourself to see all of the reasons that Blount finds no particular pleasure in Dylan’s music. Some of them include his perception that “most of his lyrics sound like he is flinging together anything that pops into his head between the rhymes,” and the lack of “authority” in a singing voice that goes through so many changes.

He ends in an interesting way (to me), following on from Dylan’s consideration in Chronicles of the difference in how Northerners like him think and create versus how people who live in perpetually hot climates do those same things:

Most of the singers Dylan has cited as inspirations, from Blind Willie McTell to Hank Williams (he does have excellent taste, as he has been evincing lately as a disc jockey on radio), were warm-place stick-in-the-muds. But whose blues make the ground shake, Dylan’s or Bessie Smith’s? And whose politics have come to a distinctive progressive edge, Dylan’s or Willie Nelson’s?

Oh, I know it must have felt good to Dylan, and to his audiences — getting away with all that crabbiness in the Age of Aquarius, the age of glorified resentful youth. But you don’t need a weatherman to tell you who is glibly changeable, who has a cold, cold heart.

What’s particularly interesting to me here is that we have another example of how Dylan’s body of work is ultimately unsatisfactory to those who expect and demand a certain political message from it — what Blount here calls a “progressive edge,” or what others might just call leftism.

Admittedly, Blount has other reasons for not liking Dylan’s music, but I think it’s telling that he comes back to that one, and ends by labeling Dylan as having “a cold, cold heart.”

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