He wasn’t a folk singer, he was part of the folk revival movement and later made rock and roll. He covered folk songs & emulated folk music, but he wasn’t a folk singer. It wasn’t his tradition, he was quite far removed from the living tradition those folk songs originally were a part of. As I said, he was like Elvis in that regard. He was like the Iggy Azalea of his time.
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I love Dylan and appreciate this quote. It’s okay to not like something and it sucks being told you should.
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Wonderful.
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?? How is his first album at least not a folk album? Was Peter Paul and Mary not folk singers then? Joan Baez?
Folk music by definition is living tradition. Same thing happened to indie, the term went from a very specific meaning (music released by independent label) to “a sound” or a genre of music. Folk music is not a genre, it’s very specifically folk music, meaning music passed down generations and taught & learned in a community. NYC folk revival movement was very specifically a bunch of hip young people in a big city cannibalizing the folk traditions of different parts of America. There’s nothing inherently wrong about it, other than maybe I’ll rather listen to actual folk music than a covers album by a city slicker on a big label.
So you’re saying that because they were based in NYC they had no right to call themselves folk singers? Dylan was from Minnesota. Is that not country enough?
Ok so then what’s your point? That I just not call Dylan a folk singer?
Examples of actual folk musicians making music very similar to Bob Dylan: Roscoe Holcomb, Dock Boggs & a whole bunch of bluesmen who never got their due. Bob Dylan’s generation stole that music, repackaged it & sold it to the public and made everyone involved rich while the people they ripped off got nothing. That’s boomers for you.
I’m not saying there isn’t gross inequity in the history of music. I would never say that because it’s true.
However, Dylan himself didn’t make his fame covering their songs. His second album were all originals and they were far different things than the folk songs he had been covering before. He took their influence somewhere else.
Look I’m done with Dylan talk. If you don’t want to accept the historical record, that’s of course your prerogative.
Hah, I’m well aware of the historical record. Bob Dylan is not a folk singer, he was (later) a singer-songwriter which is quite different. Honestly if he were a folk singer, he’d have performed jewish folk songs as opposed to covering Bukka White. Makes you wonder how much of the royalties went to Bukka White’s family? None I’d wager, which was alright with Bob Dylan. He was about as authentic as a Polish southern rock band.
You know who else I have a bone to pick? CCR, who were hippies from San Francisco trying to sound like country bumpkins from the Bayou. That’s boomers for you!
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Look I get your point about the historical inequity in music and appropriation of culture. I do and it’s valid and it’s something I wish had never happened and would whole heartedly support some kind of reparations within the music industry.
My point is, Bukka White and Dock Boggs were not writing surrealist histories of America, nor were they calling out corporate arms dealers, nor writing 13 minute love letters to the past. It was different. And to Dylan’s credit, he has been incredibly vocal and complimentary of his influences.
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They were too busy working in a coal mine for Dock Boggs and working odd jobs & being in jail for Bukka White. Altho to be fair Bukka White did write some pretty influential tunes, I wouldn’t hold it against him if he lacked some of the flair Bob Dylan had. He wrote about his reality, using the tradition he’d grown into. Bob Dylan wrote naivistic fantasy, using a tradition that was not his.
They were terrible.
It’s actually funny (and this is a bit off topic, so apologies), I just watched a documentary called Hypernormalisation by one Adam Curtis. He argues that in the 70s, the counterculture & political dissidents lost the will to fight for a better world and retreated to being cynical observers rather than active operators. I say Bob Dylan did that a decade earlier. He was very vocal about what was wrong in the world, yet what did he actually accomplish? His so called politics were just as naive and empty as the hippies, and ultimately he embraced being a super rich & famous rock star rather than an activist and a force of change.
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Great documentary that one.
You should watch the series he did earlier this year, it’s excellent, it’s called can’t get you out of my head.
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Bro you are speaking my language and while I don’t think that assessment of Dylan is totally fair - its more or less fair about his politics, his concerns - it’s very fair about the generation for which he is the spokesperson.
All his fans became corporate lawyers.
Ive never watched Adam Curtis - something about it makes me pause - but I will one day.
But the 60s did a bit but, yeah, they more or less threw in the towel then sold the future out.
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I can’t get Adam Curtis out of my head.
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Literally for me right now, hah. Very good documentary, goes well with my lifelong obsession for J.G. Ballard.
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But if you don’t see any power in voicing concern for the world through art, what has any artist done, to change anything?
Do you have to be an activist on the side, like for example Bono, to be of any use?
I think Dylan changed a lot of minds, in more or less subtle ways.
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Dylan, like many after him did not really do anything about the issues they were supposedly concerned with. He wrote songs about how those things made him feel rather than actually go out and do something about it. It was empty talk, nothing more. Compare him to the young, white activists who traveled to the southern states to work for the abolishment of racial segregation and lost their lives in the process. Would they have accomplished as much, or anything, had they stayed home and sang about how racial segregation made them feel? That was the last generation to actually work for a better world, to actually be willing to lose their lives for what they believed was right.
Bono, even if he is REALLY fucking annoying both as a person and a singer, has actually done a lot for the things he feels strongly about. I don’t know if he’s changed the world, but he has made an effort to try. This was the claim on Hypernormalisation, that the 70s counterculture & political generation lost any alternate vision for the future and started to believe the fake world global capitalism is selling us. They lost touch with reality, what the true issues of our capitalist systems are and were more concerned with fictional issues that are either unsolvable or if solved, really change nothing. He used the Soviet Union as an example, where everyone knew that the officials were lying, that the system wasn’t working and that a lot of people couldn’t even afford eat, yet still they acted like nothing was wrong and that the Soviet system was the best thing ever. We’re in that situation now, and it all started in the 70s. We have been so fully brainwashed into capitalist ideology that we can’t even imagine any alternative. I don’t think Bob Dylan could, either.