The cliché-ridden story is from al-Reuters:

The times they are a-changin’, and Bob Dylan’s surprise decision to release his first Christmas album next month now comes with a banking tie-in that would have been unimaginable during the singer’s 1960s protest years.

Citibank said on Tuesday that “Christmas In The Heart” will be available for Internet download to 13 million customers enrolled in the company’s rewards program, during the week before it hits stores on October 13.

Alright: smart move to have some kind of corporate deal to generate more royalties to go to the relevant charities. The more, the merrier the Christmas. I don’t regret for a minute not being a Citibank customer, since I obviously want to buy the actual CD rather than downloading some mp3s. But to each his own.

What gets me about this story is that lazy attempt at cleverness: “now comes with a banking tie-in that would have been unimaginable during the singer’s 1960s protest years.”

How many of those 1960s’ years even were “protest years”? How many “protest songs” did Bob Dylan even ever record and release, when you get right down to it? The ones that people such as the writer of this piece would probably name — like Blowin’ In The Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin’ — are not protest songs at all when listened to with an even half-attentive ear.

I know; this is old, well-trodden territory, but it never ceases to amaze me how Bob Dylan continues to be offhandedly defined in the mainstream media by largely illusory perceptions of his early work.

Of-course, he wrote a few songs on his second and third albums that dealt with contemporary events, like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and Oxford Town. But even these were already reaching beyond mere finger-pointing songs, and into something more timeless. And that only brings us to 1964! Then we got Another Side Of Bob Dylan, and we really didn’t see that previous side of Bob Dylan — to the extent that there was a previous side — for the rest of the ’sixties. You could even make an argument that Hurricane, in 1975, was the the first truly targeted protest song that Dylan ever recorded and released. And even in that case, there were some other things going on, as I’ve mused on previously.

You could also argue that Ballad In Plain D is the truest protest song that Dylan ever wrote (not truest as in most honest; just truly the protestiest). And as he’s acknowledged himself, it’s likely the one song above all that he shouldn’t have written.

Well, I’m not really going anywhere with all this. It’s just another opportunity to note how inaccurate, and yet how persistent, is the image of Bob Dylan that the mainstream media continues to present and to attempt to perpetuate.

A normal day.

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