There’s an exceptional article on Dylan — in particular latter day Dylan — written by Robert Roper, in an online magazine called Obit today. Thanks a lot to Karen for the link. It’s called Bob Dylan: Together Through Life.
While the Baby Boomers were busy building their ordinary lives, buying vacation homes and packing their IRA’s with ready dough, then getting foreclosed on a lot of those houses and seeing a third of the value of their pensions disappear overnight, Dylan was off somewhere shaking his head, sucking an eye-tooth, pulling at that mean little moustache he wears these days. He’s not surprised. Bad news is to be expected. Life is about harm, the collapse of hope; and then, at the very end, that unavoidable date with the Reaper. Whoopee! Thanks a lot, Bob! We needed to hear that.
Actually, many of us did, and do. When Dylan says it, it stays said. The credibility he enjoys is enormous among a certain demographic; he is the most honored American songwriter of our time, and by virtue of the prominence of American cultural product in the world, the most honored and influential songwriter on earth. Among Americans and Europeans and South Americans and Russians and South Africans and Israelis and Norwegians he enjoys the status that two centuries ago was accorded the preeminent poets – he is the Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth of our time, our Emerson, Dickinson, and Whitman, and our Auden and Neruda and Mandelstam to boot. He has fulfilled for nearly 50 years the classic functions of the seminal poet, that is, to register his times in vivid and memorable words, and to prophesy.
It’s appropriate that an unusually perceptive article about Bob would appear in a publication that is devoted (I take it) to death, from various angles. The way in which Dylan’s work has always faced up to “death’s honesty” is arguably the single most distinguishing characteristic of it, in the context of the last fifty years of pop culture. That alone has qualified it to be called prophetic.
Of-course, one can in a certain sense “face” death’s honesty and come up with nihilism — and many have done just that and still do — but another distinguishing characteristic of Dylan’s work is that this is not his conclusion. It’s not the taste left on one’s lips after consuming his songs. He once joked back in some 1960s interview that all his songs end with: “Good luck, hope you make it.” In actuality, they do. “Everything’s collapsing, the world is depraved, you can’t trust anyone, you’re gonna die … hope you make it!” The question is what making it really means.
