This past weekend, Maureen Dowd branded Bob Dylan a sellout in her Times column for allowing Chinese officials to pre-approve the set list for his first ever concert there, and found the final list to be lacking in political content:
Dowd suggests that Dylan should have put some new lyrics to “Hurricane,” (his 1975 song about Rubin Carter) in honor of the detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. That might have been nice, but by expecting such a thing—and labelling the contemporary Bob Dylan a sellout—Dowd thoroughly misreads Dylan’s career, as Sean Wilentz argues in a vigorous rebuttal here at newyorker.com. Wilentz, whom Dowd quotes in her column, rightly points out that various critics have labelled Dylan a “sellout” at every point in his nearly fifty-year career. As to his song choices—which included “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Ballad of a Thin Man”—Wilentz notes that Dylan may have pulled a fast one on would-be Chinese censors:
So, what to make of the scuffle? I’m tempted to put it simply that Dowd is wrong, and Wilentz (and others who have criticized Dowd’s column this week) is right—and be done with it. Dylan’s public persona has always mystified observers; he’s a matter of degree off for everyone—seemingly too smart or too dumb, too political or not political enough to suit people’s agendas. In that light, Dowd is not the first to get Dylan terribly wrong (and he’s devoted parts of his career, it seems, to steering people off course). Yet her central argument—that Dylan was once an admired protest singer who has now, in a grasping late-career incarnation, sold out for money, or prestige, or something (Dowd never specifies)—contradicts itself. Dowd correctly observes from reading Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” that the singer never joined in the most fervent of late-sixties anti-war protests, preferring instead to be a family man: “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.” Dowd then devotes a good chunk of the column laying out the ways in which Dylan distanced himself from the culturally assigned role of social activist, before again calling him a sellout for no longer being a social activist.
It’s worth taking a closer look at Dylan’s memoir, and to give his own words a more significant place in the argument.
In 1968, Dylan was living upstate in New York, with a life already at odds with what the wider culture seemed to want:
Celebrities often drag out the “I’m Not a Role Model” line before telling their fans how to vote or where to donate money. (Dylan has made his share of appearances at fund-raising concerts, but they’ve often been awkward, surreal scenes—with Dylan projecting a kind of confusion—see the “We Are the World” recording sessions—that suggests that someone had put him up to making an appearance).
Beyond the sellout charge, there are other flaws in Dowd’s argument. First, Dowd makes the common mistake of reducing Dylan’s music to being merely a venue for lyrics. (All of the Dylan-as-poetry close-reading projects reveal that most everything is lost when his lyrics are presented on the page. Rock music mostly looks silly when compared to poetry.) Dylan writes: “Musicians have always known that my songs were about more than just words, but most people are not musicians.”
Second, Dowd’s charge rests on the idea that Dylan takes himself especially seriously, or once did. But Dylan’s “protest period” might be better considered the first act in a lifetime of querulous and often goofy rebellion—against his supporters and detractors alike. Dylan is a man nearing seventy who in the last few years has donned a fake beard while performing in Newport. He puts his Oscar and Pulitzer (maybe replicas) at the foot of the stage in concert. He just performed at the Grammys wearing a silly grin and cowboy duds (it’s unclear if his mic was even properly on). For his whole career he’s been a fibber, a master dissembler, and a raffish raconteur: “I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper,” he writes, and here at least, we might take him at his word. He’s maddened critics by following odd musical and political whims. As the sixties turned to the seventies he goofed while others marched on the government:
“Nashville Skyline,” that housebroken album, is actually quite wonderful, but that’s beside the point, which is: why would anyone think that Bob Dylan was or is an important political figure by his own doing? He is a man open about his inconstancy and indifference:
Who would look to such a man for political, spiritual, or ethical guidance? This is not criticism. Dylan is a pop musician. He writes that he must have been naïve to think he could remove himself from this particular cultural equation—but really, it’s the rest of us who are naïve. His memoir puts the issue to bed:
