We Need Another “Bob Dylan Goes Electric” Moment
He who is not busy being born is busy dying – “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”
The story is now one of the most well-known and legendary moments in rock music history. Like Elvis singing to the dog on the Ed Sullivan Show, or the Beatles’ first appearance on the same show a few years later. And, like those stories, every time it gets re-told, it gets a new spin. There are now people claiming Bob Dylan wasn’t who the audience was booing… I call bullshit.
Dylan is one of a kind. He’s an icon, and as such, everyone wants to make him their own and he keeps refusing to belong to anyone but himself. In 2008, when asked about Barack Obama, Dylan said electing Obama would be “interesting”. Everyone who liked Obama took that as an endorsement, I took it to mean, simply, he’d find it interesting. Maybe he voted for Obama, maybe he didn’t, but as a guy who lived through the 1960’s and the Civil Rights Movement, I can imagine he might have thought a few things about America electing her first black president.
This is the thing about Dylan that I have always loved: he doesn’t care. He takes risks. He stands up for what he believes in. He sometimes just does something to see how people will react.
Dylan knows he was booed. He knows he was called “Judas”. In 2012, answering a question from Rolling Stone about not giving credit for lyrical “borrowing”, he spoke about the folk tradition and referenced the 1965 controversy.
Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It's an old thing — it's part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.
Wussies and pussies. Folkies and beatniks in the 1960s who were upper-middle class, college educated, white kids pretending to rebel by fitting in the smallest of boxes and hating anything outside of that box. Most of these kids grew up, started calling it their “beatnik phase”, joined corporate America and voted for Nixon.
Faux Rebellion is all the rage with every generation. Real rebels never change their stripes. Real rebels are not a part of the majority. Real rebels pay a heavy cost for their rebellion.
You could extrapolate this out however you want, but let’s keep focused on the music here. Which one of the biggest pop stars on the planet is going to come out and go against the grain? Is Taylor Swift going to make a record on tape? No snapping tracks to a grid? Live band? Go out on a world tour with just her old Taylor guitar? Would it matter? Are people so in the cult of Taylor Swift that they’d gladly follow her to Guyana and drink grape Flavor-Aid? Maybe.
The closest thing we’ve seen to this is Adele telling Spotify that she only wanted her music listened to by listening from track one until the end. She was heavily criticized for being out of touch and not caring about her fans. While I always say that once an artist releases a song, that song no longer belongs to them, it belongs to the world, I will forever support an artist’s vision to give the world whatever they want, however they want. The fans should not get to decide what kind of guitar Dylan plays or what kind of music he writes. That’s what Tin Pan Alley and Music Row is for. The rebel artist follows only his or her own muse, unapologetically.
Art becomes commerce, but it’s still art. Artists are people who sit on the outside and look in. Those on the inside claim the artist for themselves because there’s something they relate to, but they would never accept the artist, if not for the art they created. The same football players who loved Green Day and The Offspring in 1994 were the same guys stuffing my punk ass into trash cans and calling me a “faggot”.
There are real artists out there, but sadly, I don’t think we have people like Dylan or the Beatles or Queen anymore. Taylor Swift could do whatever she wants, but she won’t. She’s a part of the system just like a politician claiming to change things in Washington and yet, fifty years later, a half-lifetime in the Senate, and everything is still the same except their bank account… which is much bigger now.
But damn it, I think we need another Dylan.