Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  We can draw a useful analogy from high culture. At the point where the nineteenth century was becoming the twentieth, there emerged a number of cultural groupings (such as the Dadaists and the Futurists) who believed that art had a special role in modern society. Thinking that high culture was the only part of social life that had not been colonised by the instrumentalism and avarice of capitalism, these avantgardes engaged in a variety of cultural offensives designed to highlight the contradictions of capitalism in order to awaken the masses and instigate social change. For the first half of the twentieth century, this was the generally understood ‘function’ of the arts – they were supposed to express a critical voice unavailable in other spheres of life. As modernism became canonised, however, a new generation of artists emerged in the fifties and sixties (such as Jack Kerouac and Andy Warhol) that saw how high culture was itself embedded within the very power relations it sought to overthrow. These new artists believed that culture should be used to describe how we experience the world rather than attempting to provide any overarching critique. This new understanding, which became part of postmodernism, did not seek to challenge capitalism but accepted that culture was thoroughly embedded within capitalism and could not therefore offer any kind of resolution to its problems.

  The declining belief that rock could provide a genuine countercultural challenge in some ways mirrors the decline of avant-gardism, while the other changes occurring within popular music at this time – the emphasis on style rather than content; the fragmentation of the mainstream into a variety of different-but-equal genres such as new wave, new romantic and hip hop – all relate to the emergence of postmodernism within Western culture. Postmodernism is complex but can broadly be seen as two distinct but related social processes. The first of these is the merging of ‘culture’ and ‘commerce’.12 Whereas once culture was seen as the antithesis of commerce, as the only possible space for a critical voice (a view that can be seen in the world view of the English Romantics, the modernist avant-gardes and the voices of the sixties counterculture), today culture is an essential part of commodification in, for example, differentiating between the products that we buy to express our individuality (three stripes on your running shoes or two?). Culture sells and is used to sell; there is no cultural production that is outside of the capitalist game. We can see this in Warhol’s reproductions of mass-produced artefacts, in the celebrity status of artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and in how Bob Dylan songs are used to advertise banks and women’s underwear.

  The second aspect of postmodernism is a cynicism, what Lyotard calls an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’.13 Meta- (or ‘grand’) narrative means a belief system that often presents history as following some kind of overarching logic, such as the idea of scientific progress. Marxism is considered a meta-narrative, as are most religions. According to Lyotard and other postmodernists, people have lost faith in meta-narratives: they don’t believe that ‘science’ or ‘technology’ will lead us to a better world; they don’t trust politicians, or religious leaders, or other kinds of authority figure. People in a postmodern world do not seek to rely on expert knowledge and are instead more interested in experiencing the present rather than worrying about the future.

  This growing scepticism towards grand narratives offers a partial explanation for the problems affecting Dylan’s star-image in the early eighties. In turning to evangelical religion – the grandest of grand narratives – at a time when his audience was becoming more self-centred and less socially conscious meant that Dylan was clearly swimming against the tide, as he himself became an authority figure. This is particularly acute given the emphasis on rebelliousness within rock culture and the manner in which Dylan’s conversion contradicted his own star-image as an anti-leader. As Dylan pulled back from his explicitly Christian world view, however, wider social processes were undermining rock’s claim to be the master narrative of popular music. The disintegration of rock’s modernist ideals meant that many stars associated with rock lost the justification for their stardom (many sixties stars, such as The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, The Who and The Kinks were similarly afflicted during this time). Whatever he may have felt about it, Dylan was seen as responsible for popularising many of the key components of the rock ideology, particularly those aspects such as authenticity and social conscience that were most losing their public appeal.* He was an important symbol of ‘rock’ at a time when ‘it was no longer taken for granted that “rock” represented the most powerful expression of the critique of mass society’.14 Commenting on Dylan’s UK appearances in 1981, NME journalist Neil Spencer wrote: ‘The expected media fanfare came, but it was muted in comparison to that afforded the ’78 trip. . . . [Dylan is now] set at the heart of a rock tradition whose myths are, for a growing number of young Europeans, now despoiled, overtaken by everyday reality or the new myths of punk and post-punk.’

  During the first part of the 1980s, therefore, Dylan’s authority as a songwriter and performer – his stardom – was undermined by the social processes that undermined rock’s authority. Dylan’s work at this time, and its reception, illustrates this. The 1983 album Infidels seems to illustrate Dylan struggling to define a new role for himself (such as the decision to include two mediocre protest songs, ‘Union Sundown’ and ‘Neighbourhood Bully’). Significantly, for more interested fans, the story of the album’s preparation quickly became part of Dylan’s star-image. The production process for Infidels was troubled. Dylan’s relationship to recording has always been troublesome and his approach has always been to ‘cut it live’, meaning that the band is recorded together playing the song in the same room. This approach had failed badly with Saved, however; even though he took his touring band into the studio with him, the recorded versions were pale imitations of the performances that occurred on stage. For his albums at the beginning of the eighties, Dylan decided to spend more time in the studio working at getting songs to sound right. In one sense this worked – Infidels is one of Dylan’s best sounding albums. In another sense, however, it went terribly wrong, for it gave Dylan too much time to second-guess himself. The result was that he dropped many of the best songs from the final version of the album and substituted later, poorer, performances of some of the others. Recordings from these sessions soon surfaced among collectors and the whole episode seemed to demonstrate a lack of artistic self-confidence from Dylan at this time.

  The forces of stardom are not something that just happen to Dylan, however. He is not a powerless victim battered by the seas of social forces but an active agent able to reflexively engage with his circumstances. One key way he is able to do this is, of course, through songs and there is one song from this period that not only has as its theme the problems of Dylan’s contemporary star-meaning but, also, through its own ‘biography’, illustrates those very problems. It is one of the songs left off Infidels – ‘Blind Willie McTell’. Dylan begins it by portraying a world reaching its end:

  Seen the arrow on the doorpost

  Saying this land is condemned

  All the way from New Orleans

  To Jerusalem

  The song builds a portrait of this modern wasteland, dredging up ghosts of misery and slavery, building to its final statement on the world:

  Well, God is in His Heaven

  And we all want what’s his

  But power and greed and corruptible seed

  Seem to be all that there is.

  Such an outlook is not particularly unusual within a Dylan song. He has had a vivid sense of living in the End Times throughout his career (in, for example, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’) and it is prevalent in Dylan’s evangelical and post-evangelical work (again emphasising that the ‘prophet’ aspect of Dylan’s character was to the fore at this time). While the recording of the song offers a masterful evocation of such doom, however, it is not actually the subject matter of the song. As John Bauldie highlights, the question it raises is how can this doom, this desolation, be adeq
uately lamented? For, after each of the song’s five verses, the singer, Dylan, states:

  And I know no-one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

  As Bauldie writes, ‘Dylan conjures the ghost of a long-dead blues singer who might have offered appropriate lamentation were he not dead and gone’.15 However, the song is not merely about the fact that there is no one who can offer an adequate expression of grief, it is an acknowledgement that this particular singer – Bob Dylan – knows there is no one. This is a song in which Dylan reflects upon his status as an artist because the singer knows that whatever he can offer will be inadequate: ‘the singer of this song cannot find the words, or the voice, to adequately express what he sees as he gazes’.16 I don’t think that Blind Willie McTell is individually significant here – he chose McTell for its rhyming possibilities rather than to single out that performer specifically (clearly he’s not completely irrelevant, but he signifies a particular type of singer rather than an individual; Dylan could just as happily have chosen Leadbelly, or Robert Johnson, or Charley Patton). What is significant is not what the song says about McTell, but what it says about Bob Dylan: it seeks to question the role this singer should play in the modern world.

  In delivering this song, both the acoustic version eventually released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3, and the electric version currently available only on a proper bootleg, Dylan offers a virtuoso performance. In a last minute decision, however, the song was pulled from the album. The song has taken on legendary status among Dylan fans as an example of what Dylan might have become, how he might have regained his critical and commercial standing in the early 1980s, if only he had released the original Infidels.* I’m not entirely sure that this line of thinking is fruitful, however, given that, to a great extent, Infidels turned out the way it did because of Dylan’s position at the time, because his star-image was so out of step with the times. Short of completely reinventing himself (never really possible for a major star), whatever he had produced in the early eighties would have been treated with suspicion, even if all the great songs left off Shot Of Love and Infidels had been included. For ‘Blind Willie McTell’ to have any meaning (both as a song and as a reflection of Dylan’s stardom at this time), it had to remain unreleased. There is already an irony in the song because, in bewailing the fact that he cannot adequately express the state of the world, Dylan produces a performance that bears comparison to anything produced by the great blues singers. The song is not ironic, however, and Dylan manages to sidestep this irony through his decision to not release the recording. To have released it would have undermined the sincerity of the song and made it necessarily inauthentic. When, in 1997, Dylan (surprisingly) began to play the song in concert, he chose to utilise an arrangement of the song developed by The Band. In this version, the chorus line is changed to:

  I can tell you one thing

  Nobody can sing

  The blues like Blind Willie McTell.

  This changes the entire character of the song. Now, the singer is confident of his abilities (‘I can . . . ’), the phonetic double negative of the original (‘know no’, wailed as if crying ‘Noooooo! Noooooo!) has been lost, and the extra rhyme (thing/sing) adds a swagger to its delivery. This is a man on top of his game and comfortable with his place within this tradition. The song as originally written and recorded, however, deals with uncertainty in the face of tradition. If the bedrock of Dylan’s star meaning was disrupted in the early eighties through postmodernism and the ‘death of rock’, then ‘Blind Willie McTell’, to me, represents the first stage of Dylan finding a way to marry his contemporary celebrity with his traditionality, a process which only comes to fruition in the late nineties. Before he achieved this, however, the cultural industries began to shape Dylan’s star-image in particular ways that cashed in on the significance of his history.

  INDUSTRY RESTRUCTURING AND THE ‘LIVING LEGEND’

  The period that I have characterised as dominated by an ambiguity in Dylan’s star-image coincided with a sustained downturn in the recording industry. The period from 1979–82 witnessed a decline in record sales for the first time since the 1930s. This decline can be partly explained by the changing demographics of the music audience as well as the growth of alternative leisure consumer goods. For our present discussion, the reasons for the decline are less significant than the effects it had on the industry. After a decade of remarkable growth, the labels may have assumed that their business model could continue successfully into the foreseeable future but the downturn resulted in some serious belt-tightening and rosters of recording artists were trimmed. This almost certainly would have impacted upon CBS’s relationship with Dylan. While it seems unlikely that CBS would have considered dropping Dylan, the new climate meant that there was less money available to pander to superstars’ crazy ideas like preaching the word of God. In that sense, Saved represented a grave blow to Dylan’s relationship with his record label.17 More significant in the long term, however, were the structural reorganisations made by the industry and the changing nature of celebrity and stardom during the 1980s. These changes altered the nature of popular music stardom, transforming it into something we would today more readily recognise as celebrity.*

  The recording industry fundamentally changed its over-arching strategy during the 1980s. Before this time, a record label’s general approach was to nurture a stable of artists, spend moderately on each one and look for a modest return on each investment. It was thus possible to talk of an ‘average sales-run’ for albums. Dylan’s sales would fit into this approach – he has never been a major seller, but his albums sell consistently. The success of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, however, which sold 47 million copies worldwide, resulted in a shift in record industry strategy. This new approach concentrated on the blockbuster album. Labels realised that they made more money selling 5 million copies of one album than selling half a million copies of ten albums: label staff were thus told to treat every album they worked on as a potential 10 million seller. This significantly increased the importance of celebrity status for pop musicians, because labels began to rely on star names to guarantee major returns, resulting in a number of multi-million dollar contracts (which actually functioned as a form of pre-sales promotion: talking up the size of the contract in the press created an interest in the star’s releases). The celebrity status of the performer also became significant because of its potential to break into new markets – both new territories that were opening up in an increasingly globalised world, and markets for new products and entertainment industries as the record labels became swallowed up by multi-media conglomerates.18 Popular music stardom, like all celebrity, was a significant feature of media ‘synergy’ – using one form of media to help sell others (for, example, films using a distinctive signature song became much more common around this time). Again, this trend can be related to the broader cultural currents of postmodernism.

  These trends are most clear in the emergence of a television channel dedicated to popular music. MTV materialised as a result of the deregulation of television, which gave rise to multichannel cable TV and multinational channels, as well as the growth of the VCR which made young people more likely to watch TV.19 Friedlander argues that MTV initially had a democratic effect on the music industry as it introduced less mainstream artists to audiences,20 but this is difficult to see as by prioritising the expensive video clip as a form of promotion, it gave a further advantage to the major record labels.21 Certainly by the mid-eighties, MTV was merely replicating existing biases within the industry. MTV has often been criticised for focusing on surface over substance, appearance over artistry (again, another postmodern trait). For example, Jon Pareles wrote: ‘in a visual culture like ours, MTV has amplified the importance of image over sound, which has repercussions in everything from stage shows to who gets a chance to record . . . MTV favors pretty people . . . ageing performers, or those whose only talents are musical rather than visual, tend to hide in their own video c
lips.’22 There is a danger of romanticising the past in such claims, but it is certainly the case that MTV was another example of the changing nature of popular music stardom in a multi-media world. It was not possible to be just a singer. MTV made an obvious contribution to the changing nature of pop stardom. Although pop videos are often dismissed merely as TV advertisements for a particular record, they are significantly more than that because they help construct a star-image. Pop videos are assumed to be authored in a way that advertisements are not and, though we may acknowledge that many factors are at work in pop videos, we still see the presentation of the star in the video as in some way linked to the ‘truth’ of the star’s personality.23 As pop videos became more ubiquitous they became an increasingly important vehicle for interpreting what a particular star represented. They provided another example of how Dylan was a man out of time during this period. Almost without exception, his performances in promotional videos show him uncomfortable and shifty. If pop videos are understood to offer a self-portrait of the singer, then Dylan’s showed a singer so out of synch that he couldn’t even mime his own words.

  Two of the strategies deployed by the recording industry in response to its crisis at the start of the eighties, therefore, did not serve Dylan’s stardom well. The industry came to depend on blockbuster sales but, even at the height of his stardom, Dylan has never been a major seller. Despite having released over fifty albums, Dylan ranks only forty-third in terms of US sales, with 36 million sales, some way behind The Beatles’ 169 million, and also behind artists such as Bob Seeger, Kenny G. and Backstreet Boys.24 Secondly, the industry came to depend on new types of crossover celebrity, synergistic stardom to conform to the new multi-media landscape. Always uncomfortable in front of cameras, Dylan cut an outmoded figure who did not belong in the new world of surface and style.