BY TOM FLANAGAN
In his review of Clinton Heylin's Bob Dylan biography (GLW #433), Phil Shannon attacks Dylan on the basis that he sold out on his politics. Shannon fails to grasp that Dylan was never a political activist. His music took up political themes when they impacted on his life.
In the early 1960s, when a folk music revival fused with the growing civil rights movement, these influences were reflected in Dylan's music. Despite Dylan's early reputation as a "protest" singer, there was never more than a shallow political perspective in Dylan's songs. They reflected everyday consciousness in the circles he moved in, not the result of deep political analysis on his part.
Artistic merit, not politics, singled him out from his contemporaries. There was no political sell-out, merely a personal evolution.
Dylan has always written from a personal perspective. While his art is "a mirror held up to reality" (albeit held at a very interesting angle), it is not Bertolt Brecht's revolutionary "hammer with which to shape it".
Of Dylan's greatest musical achievement, the 1974 album Blood on the Tracks, Shannon says nothing. That is because he is only judging Dylan's work by its political content, Shannon fits this album somewhere along the line of betrayals that began in 1964. "Protest abandoned for the personal", followed by the betrayals of "folk for rock, rock for country, pretty well everything thrown over for Christian fundamentalism".
Shannon says Dylan's musical well has run dry. I may have been tempted to say that in 1977, when I saw a fairly ordinary concert in Melbourne. But in Adelaide in 1986, I saw a spectacular concert in which Dylan performed 1980s material that compared favourably to his 1960s and 1970s classics.
Being a committed Marxist-Leninist doesn't stop me from getting inspiration from the pent-up passion, poetry and anger in Dylan's music. Inspiration comes in a wide range of forms. If we only listened to music that took the right political line, our music collections would be very limited (one old vinyl Gang of Four album in my case).
Dylan is one of the towering figures of 20th century art, let's not write him off as an artist because we disagree with his politics.