David Kinney's The Dylanologists, which I reviewed in the weekend Wall Street Journal, is a pretty fascinating look at the world of Bob Dylan obsessives. I enjoyed the book quite a bit, though, as a Dylan novice,* I have no idea how it will play with hardcore fans of the gravelly throated singer. I wanted to take a moment this morning to briefly highlight something I didn't have space to address in my review.
As you know, I have little patience for people who judge artists not by their artistry but by the content of their political character. In part, I think this is because I'm a conservative who enjoys and takes seriously pop culture; if I drew up a personal blacklist excising every Obama-supporting actor and writer and singer from my media library, well, I'd be stuck with a pretty small list of entertainers.** I've found that many of my fellow-travelers on the right have had to do the same sort of compartmentalization, keeping the worlds of politics and art separate. And, frankly, I think we're better people for it: Those who allow politics to consume their every moment, taint their every experience, strike me as deeply unhappy individuals.
Which brings us to Kinney's Dylanologists. One thing about Dylan that has always intrigued me is his political inscrutability. Over at Reason, Brian Doherty had some fun when, during the run-up to the 2012 election, Rolling Stone tried to badger the aging troubadour into voicing support for Barack Obama and denouncing those who oppose his beneficent efforts to improve the lives of the masses:
This gives Gilmore his hook: didn't Obama change all that? And isn't it so that people who don't like him don't like him because of race? Gilmore takes five different swings at getting Dylan to agree. Some of Dylan's responses: "They did the same thing to Bush, didn't they? They did the same thing to Clinton, too, and Jimmy Carter before that....Eisenhower was accused of being un-American. And wasn't Nixon a socialist? Look what he did in China. They'll say bad things about the next guy too." On Gilmore's fourth attempt, Dylan just resorts to: "Do you want me to repeat what I just said, word for word? What are you talking about? People loved the guy when he was elected. So what are we talking about? People changing their minds?"
As Kinney notes in his book, the left has long been frustrated by Dylan's inscrutability vis a vis politics. Here's Kinney on the garbologist Alan Jules Weberman:
Weberman seemed to harbor as much hatred for his hero as love. It was the early 1970s, but he was still angry about what had happened years earlier when Dylan stopped writing topical protest songs. To Weberman, the man had frittered away his moral capital. He had never even spoken out against Vietnam! Weberman concluded that the singer was strung out on heroin. He founded an organization called the Dylan Liberation Front and printed up buttons reading FREE BOB DYLAN.
And here's Kinney on Peter Stone Brown, a longtime Dylan fan whose faith was tested after Dylan suggested he wasn't big on San Fran:
What did bother [Brown] in Connecticut was the right-wing political diatribe that Dylan spewed from the stage. Dylan started preaching about the Canaanites, and how God pronounced in the book of Genesis that Judgment Day would come for them someday, but "their iniquity is not yet full." ... Dylan—erstwhile friend of beat poet Allen Ginsberg—linked the Canaanites with gays. "San Francisco is kind of a unique town these days," Dylan said. "I think it's either one third or two thirds of the population there are homosexuals. All right! I guess they're working up to a hundred percent, I don't know. Anyway ... I guess the iniquity's not full yet. And I don't want be around when it is!"
Peter left Hartford appalled. "I was pissed at him for a really long time after that," he says. "I just couldn't believe the man who wrote 'Chimes of Freedom' was saying this total bullshit."
He didn't burn all his records. But when Saved came out, he gave it a bad review.
Stephen Webb, meanwhile, has written that Dylan's liberal fans have been barking up the wrong tree this whole time:
[Webb] argued that left-wing critics had gotten it wrong from the beginning: "The impossibility of locating Dylan along the spectrum of leftist politics has afflicted Dylanologists with a plague of anxiety," Webb wrote. They concluded that Dylan was wearing masks and changing identities because they were uncomfortable with the idea that he might not be the liberal they thought he was. "Even in the sixties," Webb argued, "Dylan was more of a religious than a political artist. He has often been called a philosopher and a poet, but I think he is best understood as a musical theologian."
Needless to say, this drives the politicized crazy. And it provides me some small measure of amusement. Artists who wear their politics on their sleeves are, frankly, a bit boring.
*I own, literally, zero Dylan albums. Feel free to tweet suggestions on where to start to @SonnyBunch!