The UK Times Online has a response today to the excerpts from Bob Dylan’s interview with Bill Flanagan that were published yesterday and analyzed so astutely in this space. The new article is titled: After the summer of love, Bob Dylan backtracks on Barack Obama.
Up until now it had been a mutual love affair.
As the campaign for the American presidency gathered pace last June, Bob Dylan lent his support to Barack Obama, telling The Times that his candidacy was “redefining the nature of politics”.
In return Mr Obama described the singer as an icon, and boasted of having “probably 30 Dylan songs on my iPod”, including “the entire Blood on the Tracks album”.
But in an interview to be published on Dylan’s website today, the hero of 1960s counterculture seems to have cooled on the prospects of the recently elected American leader.
Asked if he thought that Mr Obama would make a good president, the singer said that he had no idea.
What’s that old saying or warning about the press? “They’ll build you up and then they’ll tear you down.” This is a particularly perverse twist on that concept. The media created the story of the “mutual love affair” between Bob Dylan and Barack Obama, and now somehow Dylan is to blame for not playing along.
All of this originated with an article by Alan Jackson in the Times last June. The article as a whole was just fine — Bob was giving the interview in order to talk about his artwork, an exhibition of which was about to open up in London. And it’s an interesting interview on the subject of his paintings and drawings, worth rereading.
But it was not the substance of this interview on his artwork that got picked up and spread around the world. It was the completely off-topic ambush at the end. As I remarked at the time (and still wonder about), it’s quite possible that Dylan didn’t even know his words at this point were going to be in the published interview. Read it again:
My time with Dylan is up and we stand in preparation for my leaving the room. As a last aside, I ask for his take on the US political situation in the run-up to November’s presidential election.
“Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval,” he says. “Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up … Barack Obama. He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.” He offers a parting handshake. “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future,” he notes as the door closes between us.
Note that we don’t hear what the actual question was that Dylan was asked. Note the “…” at one point, telling us that something was redacted. Note, above all, that what Dylan is quoted as saying doesn’t appear to make any clear sense. Sure, he appears to be saying something quite positive about Obama, although we can’t tell if he’s smiling while saying it, or being at all ironic when he credits a politician with “redefining the nature of politics from the ground up.” But what is that stuff about poverty and purity? How does that fit with anything else he’s saying? I don’t care how smart you think you are: it is incomprehensible in any normal way, as published. It’s crying out for more context or a follow-up question. But there is none. As they stand up to go their separate ways, the journalist threw some unknown question at Bob about politics and then later printed this rather mixed-up response from him. The editor should have struck it out, frankly. But instead, I’m sure the editor was wetting his pants, knowing what a big story it would be, if it could be spun as “Bob Dylan endorses Barack Obama!” And the Times duly did that in a separate article, and the rest of the world enthusiastically followed suit.
It became gospel. Well, some might say, “Dylan didn’t fight it.” But then, he never does, does he? If he tried to fight every distortion and misconstrual that appears in the press with regard to himself, he would go crazy in about twelve hours flat (believe me, I know). Later, Jann Wenner interviewed The One on the campaign trail, and did his best to erect the entire myth in stone.
WENNER:
You were endorsed by Bob Dylan a few days ago. What’s that mean to you?OBAMA:
I’ve got to say, having both Dylan and Bruce Springsteen say kind words about you is pretty remarkable. Those guys are icons.
It’s kind of funny, isn’t it, to endorse someone for president and then, not even 90 days into his presidency, say that you “have no idea” if he’ll even be a good president. But the endorsement never happened. It was fog, mirrors and wishful thinking, pushed hard by Jann Wenner and a host of other committed leftists pursuing their undeclared agenda in the pages of newspapers and magazines everywhere. Nothing much new there. Then, we had Dylan’s remarks from the stage in Minnesota on election night, and more distortion by the media, completely leaving out the context and the irony inherent in Dylan’s words.
It’s a lesson, if needed, on the extraordinarily strict standard to which you have to subject everything that you read. And that goes double when politics is involved, and quadruple when the name Bob Dylan is involved.
…
On a personal note, I well remember the day that Dylan’s alleged endorsement of Barack Obama hit the wires. I was out of state on vacation and not planning on blogging or anything like that. Not having seen the news, I casually checked my e-mail. Expecting at most one or two messages, I was greeted by a couple of dozen. Quite a few were from people who apparently don’t like RWB very much (a thing which is very painful to contemplate), saying things like, “See this?!” “What do you say to that!!” and “Look’s like your site’s reason for being just ended!!” There was also a reporter from ABC News trying to get my reaction to it. Altogether, I was suddenly pretty busy, coming up with an instant response and then writing about it in this space. In truth, rather than trying to figure out Dylan’s remarks, I should have just said: This is nonsense, and incomprehensible as printed. Not Dylan’s fault, just bad journalism. Of-course, that wouldn’t have been enough for anyone — it would have seemed like a cop-out. But the passing of time has proven, in my belief, that this is really the only way to look at it.
Of-course yesterday, when the Times found itself printing what is effectively the antidote to their previous shoddy story, in the form of a plain Q & A between Bob Dylan and Bill Flanagan, I didn’t get any calls from news organizations asking for my reaction to Bob Dylan not being an Obama endorser after all. And there were no e-mails from enemies saying, “Hey, guess we were wrong about this – sorry!”
About this, I am not at all surprised, but never let it be thought that I am so noble as to resist pointing it out.
