On Bob Dylan

Living in France, I missed director Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home that aired on PBS like three years ago. But I’ve been raiding my local médiathèque (read: library) for all kinds of free music to pop into my iPod, and I rented it. Expertly done, it hardly needs my seal of approval anyway.

I write sometimes about the rock albums laying around the house when I grew up, but there were zero Dylan records. Reading Rolling Stone off and on ever since the magazine put the cast of Star Wars on the cover, I got tired of them mentioning Dylan over and over again without really knowing his music, so I went and learned about him sometime in college. I went to Morehouse, and so even though they just named their first white valedictorian, I had no white classmates to help me out; I scored the No Direction Home biography by Robert Shelton (no connection to the doc) and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits when I was 20. Before then, the most I really retained was 1) Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” was really Dylan, and 2) Michael Hutchence tossing lyric cards in INXS’s “I Need You Tonight” video was stolen from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and 3) Dylan once said – probably as a joke – that his favorite songwriter was Smokey Robinson.

The voice can be fingers-on-a-chalkboard tough to get past. The poetry of the lyrics is, like, nth-degree amazing. I still only heard my first full-length Dylan record from start to finish, Highway 61 Revisited, on a train from France to England two years ago, downloaded from LimeWire. Great record; I was in London to speak at the British Film Institute about the 10th anniversary of Tupac’s death and I spent the whole time there with the Dylan record on blast. Tried to get through his poetry book Tarantula too, down in Jamaica at the Calabash International Literary Festival three years back. Couldn’t, but some of it was fun to read after a fat joint, and I’m sure Dylan wrote it in the same state I was in when I lay in a hammock reading it.

I ain’t rock dean Robert Christgau; the world doesn’t another Dylan deconstruction. But I’ll say this. Watching No Direction Home and seeing Dylan morph from a snotnose wannabe Woody Guthrie from Minneapolis to the influential mouthpiece of his times, I was drawn to how comparably vapid 2008 is. Barack Obama (a black presidential candidate with progressive politics) is the only great thing going these days. There’s no King, no X, no Kennedy. Hiphop is a shadow of its former self, there’s no March on Washington-type movement… Not that Dylan ever claimed to be, but who’s the voice of today’s generation? And who’s listening? Everybody just wants to get rich and famous, watch reality TV and get numb/dumb.