Bob Dylan: The Great Curator
Dylan’s first original music in 8 years asks us to reflect on America’s cultural and political past
Bob Dylan has released some original material. Hallelujah! What’s more, it’s not bad.
Once you get over the expectation of hearing 60s Dylan resurrected and start to appreciate what he’s doing now, it isn’t a bad song. Clocking in at just under 17 minutes, Murder Most Foul is an epic in a modern style. Like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, it is not necessarily coherent, but, like a Renoir painting, the emotional colour and motion of the time is conveyed in just a few brushstrokes. Dylan’s epic can be read as the prelude for our age. I think Dylan recognises that his time has passed as the soundtrack to youth and has now styled himself as the curator, the guardian of America’s cultural legacy rather than its progenitor.
He’s there so we don’t forget how we got here — something which America has a real problem with.
That day in Dallas changed everything.
What we think of as new, with some exceptions, was started by an artist who does not get the recognition that they deserve. Very little mainstream music during the mid-2010s pushed the envelope. Instead, it became a marketing tool. Presently, the genre is heading in an interesting and experimental direction, however problems still remain. It is important to remember that this problem is not unique. The real problem is industry-wide and has been for decades. Only a few things are truly new and original even though the industry markets it as such.
As curator, Dylan takes the JFK assassination as his focal point. This was a cataclysmic event that is hard to be understood with the distance we have from it. In short, that day in Dallas changed everything. Politics, film and TV, music, they all underwent revolutions in one way or another. Nothing would — or could — be the same again. American culture, at least in the mainstream, stopped. The nation was in shock from the top to the bottom. The underground still carried on. That’s where Dylan stepped in, the spit of Woody Guthrie and angry as Tom Joad. The rise of Dylan was emblematic of a change in the American consciousness: Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had shattered the white-picket-fence dream. America was forced to wake up to its own ugly reality. Women’s liberation found its footing, the Civil Rights movement started to gain more traction than ever before, and war had finally lost its painted glory.
Murder Most Foul seems to be trapped in this shellshocked time. “The Beatles are coming, they’re gonna hold your hand,” sings Dylan. The British Invasion is still in the future. The arrival of the Beatles was the shot of adrenaline which snapped America out of the daze. Equally, their music, steeped in American Rock n Roll, Country, and Blues, forced Americans to look back at their very recent past.
The Beatles debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Less than nine years earlier, Little Richard released Tutti Fruitti. Rock n Roll died in 1959, replaced by a watered-down, insipid corporate version which retained its style, but not its substance. Music made by people of colour had been appropriated so successfully by the big labels and white singers that the original artists were forgotten or pushed under the rug like a dirty secret. It took the four working-class white boys from England to show white Americans what they had been missing. Later came the Rolling Stones who championed African-American Blues artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf as much as they did Rock n Roll.
The Beatles opened the floodgates. Once opened, nothing could stop the tide. When they met Dylan and embraced his poetic lyricism, music ceased to be simple entertainment. Music became an artistic and political expression. The Folk world to which Dylan belonged was always politically charged, however it was given mainstream appeal by the Fab Four. By the end of the 60s, the Who had released what can quite comfortably be called the first ‘rock opera’, Tommy. The album is referenced by Dylan in the track, but he aligns it very closely with the events of November 22nd 1963.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had shattered the white-picket-fence dream.
Later in Murder Most Foul, Dylan begins to list artists, pre and post the Kennedy assassination, and their songs. These songs range in genre from jazz standards, folk blues, electric blues, and gospel. They’re the stories told by Etta James, Patsy Cline, and Stevie Nicks. The innovations of Thelonious Monk, Jelly Roll Morton, and Charlie Parker. They’re the voices of American communities singing In God We Trust and The Old Rugged Cross. These are the building blocks of modern American music and arguably modern American culture.
Music has, historically, had a unique capacity to take the voices of those who ordinarily did not and push them into the limelight, literally and figuratively. These songs and these artists have helped pave the way for the society we live in today. There is still a very long fight ahead, but it’s important to never forget where and how the fight started. If we do, we might get complacent; complacency has never won a battle.
