Topic: thoughts on Bob Dylan

[LadyVirginia]

An interesting review from http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2010/08/willson-bob-dylan.html

Those of us who were mugged by the sixties now have a better chance to understand who the mugger was. The Baby Boomers haven’t worried about this very much; they just laid back and enjoyed it from the beginning. But there was a generation that has never sought a name. It took on the burdens passed along by the Greatest Generation and rarely complained, although complaints became necessary once the spoiled kids born after 1945 started messing up the house.

Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, was one of the no-name generation. Among other things, this meant that he could read and write. He wasn’t shaped by the Depression (born 1941) or by World War II, and he was too young for Korea and, strangely enough, just a bit too old for Vietnam—unless he had wanted to volunteer, which no sane person did. He grew up in the Heartland, dropped out of college, and migrated to New York to meet Woody Guthrie. Hibbing, Minnesota to Greenwich Village. He made it Big, as we know. Now, in his sixties, he tells us more about the sixties than he probably means to reveal.

Chronicles is an astonishing book. It’s about a man of the people who wants nothing to do with the people; it’s about a search for art by a man who really doesn’t believe in art; it’s about the interior life of a man who doesn’t want you to think he has an interior life. One page will be ungrammatical, and the next will explode with images and tropes that none of our Baby Boomer novelists have in their arsenal. “Arsenal” is the right word: Dylan shoots the hell out of almost everyone who has tried to capture him.

The author's observations are drawn from

Chronicles: Volume One
 Bob Dylan, New York: Simon and Shuster, 2004

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
 Martin Scorsese, American Masters, 2005

Interesting read.

[Libertas]

What the heck is Generation Jones?  And it doesn't make sense to ccompare that term with the no-namer generation (to which Bob belonged and he was born in 1941) to the dates given Generation Jones (1954-1965) unless they mean the latter to be their formative years...?!

I hate it when people mix up stuff!   

Anyway...never cared to much for his music...never cared much for a lot of the hippie music, especially the folks songs or protest songs...

But Bob has talent...it just isn't in his voice!

[Pandora]

But Bob has talent...it just isn't in his voice!

Indeed, but the voice isn't so bad (or wasn't) if he'd actually bother to sing.  "Lay, Lady, Lay" is done very well.