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THE ALLEYNIAN 709
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
Neil Croally investigates the strange relationship between Bob Dylan’s auto-iconoclasm, the recent sale of his back catalogue, and the financial crash of 2008 This
retreat from this image and these expectations: ‘Legend, Icon, Enigma … These titles were placid and harmless …. Prophet, Messiah, Savior – those are tough ones’ (Ibid.: 124). But the attempts to self-demystify are both various and extreme. While the more earnest, overtly political Dylan had always shown a talent for comedy, we see him playing with nonsense in some of the songs on The Basement Tapes , recorded in 1967 but not released until 1975, as in ‘Odds and Ends’, ‘Apple Suckling Tree’, and (quoted) ‘Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread’:
But what has all this got to do with the sale of the back catalogue? And with the financial crisis?
Anyone who has seen The Big Short (2015), or perhaps Margin Call and Too Big To Fail (both 2011), will know that there were many things that contributed to the almost total collapse of the global financial system in 2008. We don’t need to understand derivatives, the famous Black–Scholes article, securitisation, or even collaterised debt obligations or credit default swaps, to know that a significant cause of the crash was the bundling up of bad debt with good debt. Such spreading of risk, together with banks’ excessively high assets–equity ratios, meant that when loans stopped being repaid, everything was affected by the risky debt. The financial system was, to borrow John Lanchester’s image, an elephant balancing on the back of a mouse. When the mouse disappeared, and the elephant fell, we saw governments having to intervene at enormous cost (for example, Northern Rock and RBS in the UK), as well as allowing Lehman Brothers to fail – again at enormous cost. By analogy, Dylan has packaged up his great songs, his good songs, his laugh-out loud songs and his laughably bad ones (his ‘toxic assets’) into one money-making item. The banks got rich before the crash; Dylan, already rich, has got richer after his sale. So, does the analogy break down? I don’t think so. It can be argued that Dylan’s sale is his final act of self-sabotage, even though, just as the banks have risen from the chaos of 2008, so Dylan’s artistic self-destruction goes hand in hand with his persistent need for self-reinvention. But the desire to trash his own reputation has lasted almost as long as his career and, in the sale, he has brought that final iconoclasm of self to fruition. Returning to the elephant and the mouse, perhaps we can see in this image Dylan’s understanding of his own reputation as similarly flimsy and fragile – comically, of course:
Well, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus The poor little chauffeur, though, she was back in bed On the very next day with a nose full of pus Yea, heavy and a bottle of bread
Critics note the change of direction post-1966 into the quasi- country of John Wesley Harding (1968) and the more overtly country-and-western Nashville Skyline (1969). But the record that really upset fans and critics alike was Self-Portrait (1970). On hearing it, Greil Marcus, the doyen of Rolling Stone writers, champion of Dylan and author of a whole book about the one song, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, asked: ‘What is this ***t?’ And New Morning (also 1970, and a ‘comeback’ record) contains the delightfully awful ‘If Dogs Run Free’, where, backed by ersatz cocktail-jazz piano and pointless scat singing, Dylan intones:
deal’s on
If dogs run free, why not me Across the swamp of time? My mind weaves a symphony And tapestry of rhyme
Of course, if you are an icon, even your bad music will incite interpretation. Dylan seems to have decided that more direct action was needed to puncture his own bubble, such as ‘pouring a bottle of whiskey over my head and walking into a department store and act pie-eyed, knowing that everyone would be talking amongst themselves when I left’ ( Chronicles Volume 1: 120). So, much of what Dylan has done in his career, especially after 1966, has seemed to be shouting ‘please do not take me seriously’. But it is not as simple as that, because Dylan himself is not as simple as that. Even as he decries his own status, he does so in an autobiography which will add to the mystique. Even as he aims, apparently, to put the record straight, he parades his autodidacticism by claiming to have read the non-existent classics ‘Tacitus lectures and letter to Brutus; Pericles’ Ideal State of Democracy ; Thucydides’ The Athenian General ’ (Ibid.: 36). Dylan is surely playing with the reader here (note that his remarks about Thucydides are acute). He allows or commissions Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest American film directors, to make not one but two documentaries about him. And in the second of those films, about the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975–76, Dylan is at his most ludic: important figures in the events recorded by the documentary are invented; Dylan himself, interviewed, claims that he cannot remember anything about the revue, because it was so long ago, and that it amounted to nothing. (In homage, I have not checked whether this memory is true.)
fire
That hat balances on your head like a mattress on a bottle of wine
‘Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat’, 1966
Late last year, it was reported that Bob Dylan had sold the publishing rights to his entire catalogue for £225m ($300m). Dylan, who turned 80 in May 2021, has for some time now allowed his music to be used commercially by, among others, Victoria’s Secret, Apple, and Pepsi. But that the voice of a generation, counter-cultural icon par excellence , should succumb to the lure of commerce is still something of a shock.
(from ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964) – but they also helped to foster an image of the singer as poet-hero: note the universalising tendency in such lines as ‘there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all’ (‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’, 1965) and ‘to live outside the law, you must be honest’ (‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, 1966). Even songs whose bile appears to be directed at one person (‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’) seem blessed with everyman gravitas: how does it feel, indeed, to be on your own? Because something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Jones? Dylan received not only the conventional rewards of money and fame; he was also accorded the status of the voice of a generation or, as he records in his own inimitable way, ‘the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese’ ( Chronicles Volume 1: 120). Dylan himself says that he tried to
Author’s note
It is easy to find lists of Bob Dylan’s records; there are many critical responses as well. In addition to consulting Dylan’s own autobiography ( Chronicles Volume 1. Simon & Schuster 2004), I have made use of OA Patrick Humphries’ small book, The Complete Guide to the Music of Bob Dylan (Omnibus Press 1995). For the financial crash, John Lanchester’s Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay (Penguin 2010) is an excellent introduction. For a more general history of financial crashes, see Nouriel Roubini, Crisis Economics (Penguin 2011).
Or is it?
Dylan changed the lyrical potential of popular music. One contribution was the political nature of the early songs. The poeticising of the mid-60s albums – surreal, picaresque, intensely lyrical and polemical – was another. Without Dylan, the Beatles may have continued as pedlars of formulaic romance, and the Rolling Stones of occasionally articulate adolescent rebellion. Not only did Dylan’s lyrics take the young on a trip never conceived of by their parents – ‘don’t criticize what you can’t understand’
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