Superstar's an amazing film, and it can be seen here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=622130510713940545

It's also all over the torrent networks. All hail the free exchange of cultural information!

Haynes: Sometimes brilliant, often extremely self-indulgent. Always worth a look.

Dylan: An acquired taste. "Blowin' in the Wind" has been so overplayed by so many melancholy teenagers that it's original bite can surprise. In Dylan's hands, B.I.T.W. is a protest song, not a dirge.

Dylan has released a lot of crap over the years, but his best is in a league by itself. No point arguing about it, though. Either you get Dylan or you don't. Obviously, a lot of smart people fall into both camps.

Peace, everyone.

"I haven't heard anyone quote. . .

Dylan wrote some good songs. Particularly good (with his delivery) were "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". Others seemed better when performed by others. ("Bob Dylan's Dream" done by Peter, Paul & Mary, for example.)"

but.....

Dylan sold really well throughout the 60s and 70s; in fact his first two albums are about the only 60s ones that did not go gold. So, there was lots of people buying his music, then and now. It must have touched them. Plus, when the Byrds covered him, producers and record companies saw gold and opened up the studios to all kinds of new sounds.

"But the worship of this guy is out of control. Particularly among the critics, but also within the very narrow cultural segment where he appears to resonate. "

I would reply that the "very narrow cultural segment" (narrow relative to what?) you assume included most of the pop and rock musicians working in the mid-late 60s. And they (maybe not Neal Diamond, whose best work I also enjoy, especially while riding in my car on a spring day) passed it on to every young body in this country. You may not like Dylan's "delivery" or his later 60s music, but you can't deny his influence.

Can you?

" . . . . as a member of a younger generation, I'm just sick to death of having to hear about how SIGNIFICANT and IMPORTANT Dylan, the Beatles, Woodstock etc. were."

Why do you bring up Woodstock? Neither The Beatles nor bobby d. played there.

Yes, you're sick to death of hearing about them because there is nothing in your generation which can achieve their level of creative brilliance. You're jealous -- just as those who loved 50s rock 'n roll rejected The Beatles for also sorts of nonsense reasons, when the real reason was that not only did they blow all the crap off the radio, but those folks recognized that the crap they'd fallen for was exactly that.

"Did anyone read David Brooks' column yesterday?"

You mean the pro-Bushit neo-con[artist] right-wing hack?

"My God! I'm a musician myself, and I don't need some weiner from the E Street band telling me I don't know the history of popular music . . . ."

You show no evidence that you do know that history.

". . . any more than I need to see yet another film about how Mr. Zimmerman was actually Jesus Folkie Christ."

No one said he was, except those who confuse the artist for the art.

"One thing I appreciate about my parents (who are boomers) is that they actually follow and enjoy all kinds of contemporary music."

Who says bobby d. fands/"Boomers" other than your parents don't "follow . . . all kinds of contemporary music"? (Do you know the scope of the meaning of "contemporary"? The Beatles and bobby d. are contemporary.) Most of us do -- and explicity reject (as example) Britney Spears. And many of us have rejected those who came after The Beatles who engaged in freak shows because they hadn't the talent to reach the bar as it had been raised by The Beatles.

Ya see, most of us "Boomers" grew up during the latter 1950s, and remember the period between the deaths of Buddy Holly, Big Bopper, and Richie Valens; Elvis being drafted; Chuck Berry being in jail; and Little Richard quitting rock 'n roll and returning to "religion" -- and that the industry filled that gap with manufactured "teen idols". (It was The Beatles who blew away that crap -- and bobby d., and John Lennon, who made possible and acceptable a mature song lyric in popular music. It isn't their, or our, fault, that there hasn't been anyone since, rally, who can meet the high standards they set.)

So we well recognize that we are currently suffering the same imposition of manufactured crap.

"Also, I have to agree with the earlier poster who mentioned the apparently unmentionable (and highly embarrassing) "Christian" phase."

It was mentioned. And those in the know about bobby d. knew it was both genuine and temporary -- and that an artist has the right to explore whatever s/he wants, regardless whether we "approve". Ya see, bobby d. is the kind of artist who takes risks; he jumps in, goes through, then comes out the other side. A lot of people didn't like and disapproved of Yoko, and criticized Lennon for his relationship with her, even though they weren't married to her and it was none of their business; what mattered, what was relevant, was his work as an artist, not his private life as a human being, except as _he_ chose to make it so.

into righteousness against an imputed righteousness, brightstar65? --

"I like poetry

there are lots of good poets.

"I come from the school of thought that a good artist is knowable by others, or at least there is some gleaning of genius available to almost ANYONE with some basic, cursory knowledge of the medium."

Two points:

There is an at-least-equal school of thought which holds that the artist is irrelevant to the work of art. That it is the insecurity of the voyueristic observer of the art who insists upon knowing what the artist is about, and the specific intention of this or that piece -- that there must be an intention -- in order to bring the work of art down to the size of the voyueristic's impoverished imagination.

How does a non-genius come to have so huge an ego as to be unquestingly certain that s/he is able to recognize genius, let alone fathom it?

Do you actully know anything about poetry -- and the academic argument that songs are not and cannot be poetry?

The stumbling continues:

"A second school of thought is more about 'status', so that even those who know a lot about the art may not be in on the supposed artistry of some specific artist. Indeed it becomes a nested Russian doll collection of initiates inside initiates. Til you reach the inner initiate who is so pure, so perfect that only he or she TRUUUULY understands that this artist is a genius in ways only he or she understands.

It is thus a sophomoric power play and you have to take people's word that the artist they worship is so INCREDIAWESOME!!! !! ! If only YOU, you simp, were skilled enough to understand."

Most bobby d. fans don't confuse their projections for bobby d. Most jealous anti-bobby d. folks aren't able to distinguish between the two phenomena.

Stumbling on --

"Basically, this second school of thought is a JOKE. an IN joke, a joke on the initiates, and a joke on anyone willing to take them seriously.

The kind of joke similar to when a Buddhist stares at a grain of sand until that grain of sand contains ALL the secrets to the universe. BUT ONLY TO THAT BUDDHIST experiencing it at that time. Most people then grow up, once they get out of high school and quit the pot."

Are you questioning the authenticity of that Buddhist's putatively subjective state, and the possibility that that may be a more accurate conception of truth than yours, without the evidence of actually witnessing and experiencing that state? Do you, in short, know better than that Buddhist the experience and insight of that Buddhist?

"In the first school of thought, Springsteen is almost universally acknowledged as a genius, by those who know something about rock music."

Actually he isn't -- except by those who came after the firt generation of bobby d. fans, and who, in jealousy, decided to be angry twits by deliberately choosing a second-rate bobby d. knockoff who was made possible by bobby d.

"But, unlike BD, he is not inaccesible to most people."

Wholly irrelevant: you're like the Newport 1965 folkies who falsely believed they owned bobby d., and that he therefore must obey their dictates. Because a genuine artist -- I wouldn't pretend that I, not being a genius, would nonetheless be able to recognize genius -- he refused to be chained and straightjacketed by that set of bigots.

"You need only hear Born to Run to comprehend that this was a genius at his best."

And how long ago was that? 1975-76? And he did nothing before, and has done nothing since, worthy of mention. Oh, right, there's the tribute to Woodie Guthrie -- as he again copy-cats bobby d. -- in which the multimillionaire Springsteen dresses down to pretend his solidarity with the underdog working poor.

"Who really cares, [PR], all is phony".

"I can, on the other hand, listen to BD songs for months or years (til my face falls off) and still not understand if there is a THERE there."

That is your limitation, as there need not be any "there" there: art is unbounded by the materialists who refuse to -- or worse, cannot -- appreciate art when their demand that they be given access to the artist's private life is treated as the extraneous irrlevancy it is. bobby d. ain't Springsteen; but Springsteen ain't no actual bobby d.

"Sorry, but the "I know better than you, and you are a simp" school of artist worship is crap and always will be."

It isn't about the artist, or "artist worship" -- except in your case, with Springsteen. It's about the art.