Letters to the Editor

• a few points

  [Read the article: Tangled up in Dylan]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Josh, you have to keep in mind just how much false history, concocted mythology, and factoids are out there concerning the American '60s.

  You're still overgeneralizing, to hugely mistaken effect. Bear in mind that the first time 18-year olds were able to vote, in 1972, 52% of the under-30 vote went for Nixon.

  http://tinyurl.com/5qze5c (click my screen name to link)

  Thus, the oft-repeated canard that the baby boomers were all idealistic flower children who somehow did a wholesale flip-flop and sold out in the Reagan years is false.

  The corollary notion, that today's youth is more conservative than their parents generation was at the same age, is also false (if presidential election results are accepted as a general guideline)

  http://tinyurl.com/57l72

  "we're talking about the millions of people who mistook [Dylan] for a savior"

  Didn't happen. The record sales indicate that.

  Sure, there was somewhat of a cult following- although I find the characterization of his 1960s fans holding him up en masse as a "savior" to be dubious. Dylan fans older than myself will have to chip in their comments on that one.

  I can say with some certitude that to the wider world of the 1960s, even as media personality, Bob Dylan had nowhere near the profile of the Beatles. He got a lot of ink from youth/counterculture journalists of the day, and even more name-dropping- maybe as much as the Beatles or the Stones, although he was only fractionally as popular, and relatively unimportant as a singles artist with high-charting pop hits. I think Bob has always been a favorite subject of journalists because he has literary and intellectual appeal, a rare thing in popular music. Makes a musician easier to write about.

  Bob Dylan's real importance to the cultural scene of the 1960s wasn't as a cult of personality- it was his transformative effect on the artists around him, on the craft of lyricism and the revitalization of traditional American folk musical motifs, and the recording of his songs by other musicians. He was more an eminence grise than an icon. In terms of being a touring musician, Bob is more active than he ever was in the 1960s.

  Personally speaking, I didn't even scratch the surface of what Bob Dylan was/is up to until I had been listening to his music for around 8 or 9 years. The first time I heard him do "Like A Rolling Stone", on Casey Kasem's Top 40 syndicated show (my own local Top 40 station never played it) I just thought it was annoying. The 60s were long over before I heard the original versions of "Mr. Tambourine Man", or "All Along The Watchtower"- for me and my immediate peer group of 14 year olds in 1969, the first was a Byrds song, the second was by Jimi Hendrix. Very unlike Mick Jagger or John Lennon, Dylan was a footnote, you might say. And I think my experience was not untypical (not to be confused with "typical", or stereotypical.")

  It was a different world back then, kid...it's hard to explain. Don't accept the pop media shorthand, or the caricatures presented by the various cultural and political reactionaries who have based their careers on grinding their axes against the era, instead of coming up with something forward-looking on their own.

  My personal opinion is that much of the demise of what was best about the late 1960s-early 70s era in terms of culture can be attributed to the takeover of the FM music stations by profit-driven syndicates who treated their audiences as advertising markets rather than communities of listeners. If you think 1960s radio sounded anything like a "classic rock" station does nowadays, you obviously weren't there. Even the most formatted commercial pop music stations had more diverse playlists. The syndicates balkanized the music into formats, dumped the diversity of playlists, maximized advertising airplay, and instituted [i]de facto[/i] cultural apartheid on a level undreamt of in the 1960s.

  That formatting was not the fault of the listening audience- "radio sucks" has been axiomatic among most of the American listening public for at least 25 years. But when it comes to the airwaves, "freedom of speech" belongs to those who own the transmitters. Especially the strong-signal ones.

  I bring all this up because I see the possibility of a situation with a similarly detrimental effect arising nowadays in the on-line world of the blogosphere, as a result of having the Internet turn into the domain of a few large Internet Service Providers. If a way is ever found to choke off the voices of independent bloggers and websites on the Internet- most likely, by pervasive requirements for fee payment- that will be the end of yet another era of blooming free expression.

  Don't think that powerful people aren't working on that very project. Imagine how much more difficult it would have been to speak out against some of the agendas advanced over the last 8 years by the Bush administration, if the only news media available were at the pre-Internet level. Imagine how alienated and alone those of us with dissenting views would have felt. How voiceless and powerless.

  Some people consider the blogosphere irrelevant; others, self-indulgent; others, impolite, rude, and pushy. Depending on the situation, it's all that, and more...it's the "more", the part that isn't, that interests me.

  Don't dwell on the past. We're in an era that's precious and unique in its own right, with its own possibilities, opportunities, and dangers- and we don't want to look back one day and mourn at how that possibility was taken away.

  [end of digression]

  Permalink Sunday, April 27, 2008 07:52 PM