Tuesday, January 04, 2022
This review of Knocked Out Loaded is so good I want to be able to come back to it again and again. I think about Bob Dylan kind of a lot, and what I think is that his great subject is how to live authentically. On his early recordings that means looking at post-WWII America and trying to come to grips with why it was like that when its promise was something completely different. This is probably projection on my part: if the other thing I think a lot about is law, the American legal system, and particularly Constitutional Law then what that means is that I am struggling with some of the same questions in a narrower context.
Of course there was always more than just the social justice stuff going on. Young Bob Dylan, like all versions of Bob Dylan, was a great romantic, which means that he is always in a sort of quantum state, a particle and a wave, in love and heartbroken, angry, sad, elated, rueful. This is, I think, why his work is so different than anyone else working in his chosen form. It must be strange for him: his subject is himself,. his own greatest invention, but somehow the world keeps shouting at him, "You are writing about us." Sometimes, though, the world shouts, "This is not about us." When that happens we get Greil Marcus' great remark, "What is this shit?" (Does Greil regret that remark? Probably not.) Knocked Out Loaded is one of those moments when the world wanted something else from Dylan, which doesn't make it good or bad, or accessible or anything other than what it is: an artifact, a message sent but perhaps not received.
Post a Comment