Is Bob Dylan Still Freewheelin'?
Is Robert Zimmerman Still Relevent to the mp3 Generation?
Aug 19, 2009
Some fine and great art can be crippled by the passing of years and events. Works which once seemed to sum up so much of life decades ago may have little or no comprehending meaning to modern audiences.
Has this wearing of age befallen the first works of Bob Dylan?
As he tours once again around the world. Slurring and mumbling through his own passages, like a drunk reciting the songs of his forefathers, it is an interesting proposition to wonder if he is still relevant? If he is still necessary? If he still fills an echoing gap in the young heart?
Times Are Still A-Changin'?
Listening now, as a 21year old British University Graduate, those first few folk/country-tinged albums seem foreign, distant and almost alienated in the present. But somehow, behind the sheen of dusty age, beyond the grainy black and white pictured references, it still stuck some form of recognition.
Still Relevant as Protest Music?
Although this generation may not be able to spit and scorn at the tale of William Zantzinger, may not have any idea who Medgar Evers was, let alone the single bullet which tore his legacy apart, the tales still shake at something inside. Even today, each time a Black President stands in front of a fast waving, beaming crowd, one wonders… one thinks back and has to blink away the foul picture of a single shot tearing our heady hopes away in a second.
The civil rights movement, the nuclear protest may seem like ideals lost as the years drifted the determination dry, but the fears, the twinge of paranoia still clutches thorn-like at the back of the mind.
Still Relevant as Poetic Lyricism?
But anyone who knows anything of Dylan will know how he scorned at his label of ‘Protest Singer’, how he despaired and clenched his fingers tight under that title, how he fought with razor wit in order to carve it to pieces.
Dylan was ultimately a poet, a poet who chose to balance his wide, wonder-some lyrics on top of wavering melodies and simple chord structures.
Dylan cut the emotions of man with ease:
“I once loved a woman, a child I was told, I give her my heart, but she wanted my soul”
This sums up the first crack of heartache, as sublimely as if it had been written in tears from the authors tender cheek.
Dylan was a guise, a shaken-head acquaintance, an unknown, growing more and more distant as the world tried to close in around him. In this sense his work does not just still stand, it morphs, it clenches around new times like fine artistic canvass, settling to absorb the new colours of a new century.
It is a simple matter of slight rephrase, gentle toying with those rich lyrics to fit modern life. The perfect example picked from ‘Talking World War III Blues”, as the singer strides around the war-emptied streets and meets a modern man, the lyrics switch to
“I said ‘Howdy friend I guess its just us two’,
he screamed a bit and away he flew,
thought I was a terrorist”,
It almost mocks in its pre-emptive perfection.
The quality and depth of ideas expressed in the early music of Bob Dylan must surely still seem relevant to modern audiences. Deep-rooted emotions of the masses do not alter or change over the decades; they stay as firm as the everlasting morals they are built upon. In this sense Dylan's work still touches something seemingly immovable inside. Those answers are still whispering, even as the breeze grows stronger.
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