Bob Dylan performing. | Photo courtesy Alberto Cabello

OPINION: Why Bob Dylan is still relevant today

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Recently I attended a Bob Dylan concert at the Beacon Theater in New York, his adopted hometown. It was my third and by far the best. Five shows in a row and every one of them sold out. No Frank Sinatra covers during these shows only a raw energetic performance that ranged from old favorite anthems to gritty forlorn melodies of his later years. I will be the first to tell you the mysterious troubadour did not disappoint.

Dylan, who has been on a never ending tour since July 7 1988, is believe it or not 77 years old and doesn’t look like he’s letting up anytime soon.

More than ever with where our fascist leaning country is at politically, economically and socially we need Dylan. We need a figure that can speak of marginalized voices, that can articulate death and life in the same sentence, someone that can tell the government “you ain’t worth the blood that runs in your veins” and “I’ll stand over your grave ‘til I’m sure that you’re dead”. Most importantly we need something that Dylan symbolizes but appears to have faded away completely: The American Dream.

Dylan, a middle class Jewish kid from the middle of nowhere Minnesota, became the world’s most popular figure in not only music and popular culture but beyond any category that can be conceptualized. He is the first singer-songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, (he defines himself as a song and dance man), and first American to win the prize in over two decades. If you have any doubts of the Nobel Prize Committee’s decision to choose Dylan just listen to his speech (bob-dylan-nobel-lecture).

Dylan continues to break the barriers of what it means to write a song that digs deep in the listeners psyche and examine the state of the world around them. Instead of his contemporaries at the time, Dylan was singing about racial tension and divide in America with songs like The Death Of Emmett Till, When The Ship Comes In, Oxford Town, and Hurricane, a song about the famous boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was falsely accused and imprisoned for murder and eventually set free. Together with Joan Baez he sang during the opening act of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream Speech” during 1963’s March on Washington. Need I even say more?

We have Dylan to thank for bridging a gap between young white suburban college kids and the civil rights movement. We have him to thank for spreading along messages of hope above despair, of listening for answers that blow in areas where we don’t normally pay attention to, to defy the establishment and question all those with authority.

I am well aware that there was a whole generation before Dylan that influenced him and those around him, but Dylan took what Kerouac wrote and Pollock painted and Guthrie experienced and reached an audience well beyond what anyone thought possible in the decades before him and influenced the generation of his time to fight alongside justice, compassion and empathy.

As a writer he puts himself in other people’s shoes widening his perspective on the world. Jeremy Sherman, writer for Psychology Today and professor of rhetoric and language at the university of San Francisco said a first rate capacity for empathy is the ability to hold two opposed positions in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to think for yourself. He calls this “shoe-shifting”, a fundamental skill of extraordinary power caused by the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Dylan explores the idea of timelessness and changing viewpoints to get feelings across that allow the listener to transport their own consciousness. By doing this it opens up their world and allows for a fluid movement of looking at people in a more similar fashion, in short “I” am “you” and “you” are “me”.

With his rhetoric devices and stream of poetic magniloquence he fought against conforming what is arguably as relevant today than when Dylan began; the military industrial complex. America’s war in Afghanistan is now at its 16th year and the longest foreign war in American History. Dylan’s Master of War still echoes through the movements of today, whether it be Occupy or Black Lives Matter, and everything in between. Dylan said of the song ‘a sort of striking out…a feeling of what can you do?”

It’s time we all ask ourselves the same question.

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3 Comments

  1. Murray Lathem Murray Lathem Tuesday, February 5, 2019

    Hello Tony,
    This is a perceptive and accurate look at Dylan the genius. From a Canadian who wonders what the next move will be there has always been that voice, those words, that look. That is Dylan.

  2. Wheeler Wheeler Tuesday, February 5, 2019

    i think dylan would find this opinion piece at least somewhat inaccurate and without a doubt misinterpreting who he is as an artist. for one, i don’t think we need dylan right now, and I think he’d agree – dylan’s words opened the gates to free expression, but with the amount of free expression we have today, they would (and do) get washed out, tossed around in the whirlpool of noise that preoccupies our country and many parts of the world today. he’s the first to say that he’s not a political person, that he is not a protest singer, and is definitely not the voice of his generation. many of his earliest original folk songs were written because that’s what was “in” in the folk scene – topical songs, songs of life and death and the cruelness in between. He wanted to show them all up and happened to be incredibly talented in doing so – his words ring true (and glow like burning coals), but many of these songs were simply stepping stones for him – the press and the people are the ones who twisted and reinterpreted them for themselves. you even mention his song and dance man quote from one of his earlier interviews in San Francisco – that’s precisely why he sang these songs – not to speak for the country or the generation, but to give people what they wanted, whether they knew it or not – in the movies they call it acting, but for some reason in music they don’t. this isn’t to say that i think dylan is or was being ignoble in any way. But, he doesn’t want this and America today doesn’t want it either. i could go on and on, but i’ll stop there. i love dylan, but he’s so much more than those songs.

  3. James James Tuesday, February 5, 2019

    Well written and truly inspired points made . Just I wouldn’t be so confident that Dylan totally has your political viewpoints 100% . IMO I don’t think he would say we are heading toward fascism , I don’t think he is against the 2nd amendment
    (quotes and words he has said lead to that understanding ).. he would not be caught dead at an Occupy … anything ! Anyway I love Bob Dylan and yes the 3 nights I saw him at the Beacon were among the very best I ever saw since I seen him as 22 year old in 1986 w T Petty!
    For Dylan it’s not about politics it’s about music as religion …

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