Chimes of Freedom the Politics of Bob Dylans Art book

Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan'due south Art
Mike Marqusee
New York: The New Press, 2003.
$24.95, 327 pages, ISBN i-56584-825-X.

Claude Chastagner
Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier Three

There used to be a time when Dylan was meaningful, when each of his albums, of his songs, was eagerly awaited by a growing cohort of fans. He disturbed them, challenged them, opened up their minds, and refused to atomic number 82 them. He was their poet, not their leader. With him, rather than through him, they looked at the globe and at themselves. Perhaps they changed the world, certainly they changed themselves. Then, after an uninterrupted series of flawless LPs, Dylan ceased to be infallible. He started to alternate gems and mediocre songs and he lost his grip on his generation. He turned into a neat artist, one of a few, but he was no longer the ultimate musical and poetical genius of his time.

It is this early flow of Dylan's life and music that Marqusee explores, namely half-dozen years and 8 albums, from 1962 to 1968, from Bob Dylan to John Wesley Harding, through Freewheelin', The Times They Are A-Changing, Another Side, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Marqusee is representative of a rather new tendency of writers on music. Whereas until recently monographies tended to concentrate on the biographical and the aesthetical, they increasingly cover a historical perspective. Have for instance, also in this month'south instalment of Cercles reviews, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History, by Devin McKinney, or Neil Nehring's opus on the Sex Pistols. This is precisely the job Marqusee has embarked upon: relocating Dylan'due south golden years' production inside a specific historical, and social context, and tracing its roots in time and place so as to pay a better homage to both the political insights and the artistic achievement of a man Marqsee calls "a navigator." The political culture of the United States in the 1960s was marked by "the weakness of socialist traditions..., the absenteeism of mass parties, the centrality of racial oppression, and the reality that America had become an empire"[p. 3]. The author'south thesis is that Dylan's work succeeded in translating these years' political and cultural dynamic complexities. Far from delivering messages, Dylan provided inspiration, lessons, warnings at most. Just time has elapsed, events accept become forgotten, or misrepresented, their import blurred past conflictual, contradictory interpretations. Hence the need to reassess and examine critically Dylan's songs both every bit a succession of stylistic and political transmutations with which his followers tried to apprehend the world, and as a single, solid torso of work, produced past a versatile but coherent artist. In this respect, how appropriate is the choice of Chimes of Liberty for a title, a track that can be considered equally much as the final protest song and "the first of those comprised of 'chains of flashing images'"[p. 93].

Marqusee's method owes more to cultural history than to cultural studies. The latter'due south accent on theory (preferably French) is rejected in favour of a limpid, unassuming, just powerful reading of Dylan'south most memorable songs, his song and song-writing techniques. At most, he indulges in a discussion of Greil Marcus'south analysis of the Basement Tapes in his recent opus, Invisible Republic, or borrow information from Robert Shelton'southward and Clinton Heylin's bios. Particularly impressive are the pages on "Blowin' in the Current of air," "Masters of War," "With God on Our Side," "Similar a Rolling Stone," "The Times They Are A-Changing," "Mr. Tambourine Human being," "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Haemorrhage)" or "Highway 61 Revisited," (where Marqusee would have been well advised, for his biblical analysis of the song, to refer, along Kierkegaard and Auerbach, to Gil Bailie's analysis of the sacrifice of Abraham; the style Bailie relocates the sacrificial gesture within the context of mimetic violence and blind obedience to religious dictates is i of the most profound and illuminating I have read in contempo years). Marqusee follows a chronological order (the "protestation songs" period, the post-protest days, when Dylan launched into a radical critique of political involvement as such, the in/famous Newport '65 Festival, the years of reclusion) which enables him to bargain with Dylan'due south response to the major events of the 1960s (the emergence of the New Left and the SDS, of CORE and SNCC, of Black Power and the Weathermen, the civil rights movement, the bump-off of Kennedy, the Vietnam State of war, the 1968 Autonomous Party convention, etc.).

Marqusee counterbalances the emphasis on texts (albeit relocated in time and space) by mapping the musical and political background of Dylan'due south formative years, peculiarly the folk and crush context (Allen Ginsberg, the Almanac Singers, the Kingston Trio, Woody Guthrie, The People'southward Song, Harry Smith's anthology for Moe Asch'due south Folkways label, or Phil Ochs, his contemporary). In contempo years, marked by a bluegrass revival and the success of films like the Coens' O Blood brother, much every bit been written virtually the early on days of American state music, in an attempt to recapture an idealized past, and strip the music of its political connotations. As a event, political folk, protest song, "chanson engagée," take been pushed back to the outer borders of musical essays. Writing about musics tainted by a socialist subtext must have seemed passé and utterly not-commercial. Is information technology purely coincidental that Marqusee is an American expat (currently put up by Great britain)? Hence the value of books like Chimes of Liberty, which revive the hopes, dreams, and struggles of a whole generation of artists.

In the course of his essay, Marqusee grapples successfully with such tricky and essential concepts equally "actuality" in its complex human relationship with the folk movement. As he writes, "Folk music promised a healing of the alienation between production and consumption, performer and audience. It promised customs and continuity"[p. 37]. Marqusee explores what Adorno derided as "the jargon of authenticity," an illusory, self-indulgent, and futile attempt to evade the dissatisfactions of backer society. Was the adoption by Dylan of Guthrie'southward persona, the very mask of actuality, the signal that we had entered, equally Baudrillard would put it, "the realm of the fake-authentic?" Wasn't it the beginning of an unending process which characterizes pop music, whereby new artists claiming established ones in the name of authenticity? Focusing on Dylan's cooptation of both white political folk (Guthrie) and roots blues (Robert Johnson, or Leadbelly), Marqusee demonstrates how Dylan accomplished a level of authenticity, which whatever its depth, enabled his fans to relate to the various issues and struggles of the early on 1960s, but also immune the artist to pace out of what was afterwards all simply a mask through irony and distance. For Dylan, the dilemma was indeed to retain street creed in an industry that packaged the true product of the street. As French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa has brilliantly argued in his essays, the irony is that the new mass anti-consumerism was propagated by the instruments of consumerism. "This here ain't a protest song or anything like that, cause I don't write protest song" was the standard introduction to "Blowin' in the Wind," which eerily prefigures how Bono would years afterward introduce "Sunday, Encarmine Sunday."

One should also praise Marqusee'south erudition and free spirit which allows him to trace Dylan's connection to genres as remote from folk every bit soul, reggae, punk, rap, drum-and-bass, or even acid business firm. The book itself is a pleasant, no frills simply well conceived object, with useful select bibliography, website list, and discography, lengthy notes and an index. One could perhaps merely object to Marqusee's pessimistic conclusion on the ascension of an aggressive new American empire. Afterward all, as Emmanuel Tood suggests, aren't the recent manifestation of American ability, merely the ultimate efforts of a state whose hegemony is slowly waning in face of ascension European, Asian, and Russian blocs? Come on, Dylan, "There must be a way out of here." You lot got a clue?

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Source: http://www.cercles.com/review/r17/marqusee.htm

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