Bob Dylan: a ranting rave
It seems a shame to reduce anything about Bob Dylan to a single post on a mediocre blog, but such is the force of Dylan that he forces mediocre minds to expound deeply on things they really know nothing about. It's his themes, resonating in the empty thoughtless chamber of my head: epic old-testament landscapes, calamitous heartbreak, and the beauty of perfectly smouldered eternal resentment.
Why am I waxing foolishly upon Dylan? Because now, nearly 50 years later: Bob Dylan's official video for Like a Rolling Stone has been released. Go watch it. If you don't come back for hours, I understand. To sum up, it's sixteen different videos broadcast like a cable tv service. You, as the viewer, get to pick what channel is played behind the song. And what's on each channel? People in various cable shows - The Price is Right, Pawn Stars, various infomercials, kid's shows, even Bob Himself. And they're all singing Like a Rolling Stone!
I don't know whose idea this was, or how it was executed, but it seems a perfect union of a seminal 60's song with the internet age. Dylan's anti-hubris and -privilege diatribe playing against a backdrop of everything he's railing against. A juxtaposition so outrageous you wonder why people went along with it. Doesn't Drew Carey, or the Pawn Star guys - don't they know they're the butt of the joke?
I'd subscribe to this entire set of channels and flip through it for hours. Seriously. It's more proof, if we needed it, that Dylan's ideas are timeless. It even makes the idea of reducing what Dylan is to the world of ideas you can put in words seem trivial. Dylan expands beyond the concepts of ideas - he grows and envelops and conquers.
I bought my first Dylan album my freshman year of college. It was Blonde on Blonde, the double CD set, and it was1987. He squinted up at me from the rack, his face blurry, that knit scarf loose about his neck. I bought it on a whim, and didn't take it out of my stereo for months. It was as mind-shattering to me as Einsteinian equations were to the blinkered minds of the early 20th century Newtonians, as if a rift in the cosmos had opened and this was what was on the other side. I feel this way about all of Dylan now, that he's not really a man writing songs but a conduit to another realm where perfect ideas exist, and he is just the medium by which that ethereal plane reaches this world.
I'm not kidding when I say that. Other songwriters do the same from time to time - Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Leonard Cohen - but Dylan, every five years for the past half century has been teasing masterpieces from otherwhere on a basis so consistent you become numb to it. Even when he fails - and he only fails on Dylan's terms, that is, brilliantly - his failures are interesting, worth listening to over and over. I've learned as much about writing and life from Sylvio, or I and I, as I did from his canonical hits Like a Rolling Stone or Visions of Johanna. As the Bible is to Christian philosophers, Dylan is inexhaustible.
And so why not back Like a Rolling Stone with kid's cartoons, with The Property Brothers, or the Girl Channel? The banal was never Dylan's enemy, it was his source material. And we will never be rid of the banal and shallow, the vain and petty. So I can envision Like a Rolling Stone being sung by Greek balladeers in 2000 BC as easily as by whatever roving space bards will occupy the sci-fi landscape to come. Like a Rolling Stone is a critique of vanity and aspiration, an ode to the corrupting influence of impossible ideals of wealth and aspiration, an anthem that mocks whatever embraces it as its anthem. Like a Rolling Stone, like Dylan, cannot be tamed or contained. If anything, it needs more than 16 channels. It needs all the world behind it.
All images taken from the video.
