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Of Bob Dylan
Apr. 10th, 2011 08:35 am“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”
“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”
He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. In his memoir, “Chronicles,” he stressed that he had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the “cultural mumbo jumbo” imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.
“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.
He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.
“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he wrote. He complained of being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent.”
Performing his message songs came to feel “like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat,” he wrote.
-- Maureen Down for The New York Times
Wow, so Bob Dylan is an other to join the ranks of the Ayn Randians! I cannot say that I feel especially betrayed. I never got into Dylan or folk music. I'm kind of a lefty in my politics, but when I listen to music, I'm more into that old time rock and roll, the kind of music that just soothes the soul, the music that sounds like clocks fucking - more entertainment than art or philosophy. I could hardly make out what Dylan was even singing anyway, and I guess it didn't matter.
“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.”
He can’t really betray the spirit of the ’60s because he never had it. In his memoir, “Chronicles,” he stressed that he had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the “cultural mumbo jumbo” imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.
“I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he said.
He wrote that he wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and pink roses in back, live in East Hampton with his wife and pack of kids, eat Cheerios and go to the Rainbow Room and see Frank Sinatra Jr. perform.
“Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it,” he wrote. He complained of being “anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent.”
Performing his message songs came to feel “like carrying a package of heavy rotting meat,” he wrote.
-- Maureen Down for The New York Times
Wow, so Bob Dylan is an other to join the ranks of the Ayn Randians! I cannot say that I feel especially betrayed. I never got into Dylan or folk music. I'm kind of a lefty in my politics, but when I listen to music, I'm more into that old time rock and roll, the kind of music that just soothes the soul, the music that sounds like clocks fucking - more entertainment than art or philosophy. I could hardly make out what Dylan was even singing anyway, and I guess it didn't matter.
