Left wing? right wing? chicken wing!
In my humble
opinion, Moynihan’s article suffers from bias and spin that are not surprising
considering the author, the media company and its intended audience, all of whom
veer towards right wing conservatism. Moynihan claims that the narrative
portrayed in “A Complete Unknown” deliberately obfuscates Bob’s ideological
shift to the right, as one might expect from a Hollywood leftist propaganda
piece, but based on the generally accepted narrative it seems to be Moynihan
that is the historical revisionist. Did Bob really reject those woke lefty folks
and their politics? If so, what might we reasonably gleam as his reasons for
doing so? Is it possibile that Dylan was simply inspired by a new artistic
vision and was rejecting the huge amount of pressure associated with being anointed
the spokesperson of a generation? To get to the bottom of this we have to look
at Bob’s natural history.
Bob was raised
in a mostly secular/Jewish home in the cultural backwaters of 1940s Minnesota.
All indications are that he grew up, just like many young American boys of that
era, wanting to ride a motorbike, impress his friends and get the girl. Wanting
to be James Dean. This desire for success in any and all of its perceived forms,
encompassed by the American dream, is a great motivator for kids and adults
alike. In rare cases, a combustible desire combined with inherent talent and a
Goldilocks context of nurturing circumstances can manifest in an artist with
unparalleled creative genius, such as Bob. As we know, Bob was spurred on and
inspired after his discovery of the American folk hero, iconoclast and
rebellious wandering troubadour, Woody Guthrie. The James Dean of folk music. Guthrie,
whose mythology and songs have come to represent the experience, the struggle,
and the very spirit of America, was a lifelong socialist, political radical and
social activist. Dylan absorbed Guthrie; his music, his identity, his social
conscience and his humanist impulses. Shortly after becoming Guthrie, Dylan proceeded
to compose some of the most powerful and iconic socially conscious political songs
ever, including “Blowin’ in The Wind”. All evidence indicates that he was steeped
in anti-war, pro-civil rights and other leftist causes, partly through the
influence of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. Did he not stand on the stage behind
Martin Luther King Jr. at the march on Washington in 1963 during the “I have a
dream” speech, and travel across the country with Pete Seeger in support of
civil rights? Certainly he did. Did he also write a-political love songs and
ballads? absolutely. Bob, who is known for messing with his interviewers, once
said that he never intended “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a protest song. Moynihan
seizes upon this one quote as evidence that Bob was trying to distance himself
from the protest movement by 1965, which, while possible, tells us nothing
about his political affiliations. Although he largely disappeared from the
scene, he remained a big inspiration for the social justice and anti-war
movement that lasted right up to the late 60s; while others, such as Neil Young
stepped up to fill the void.
Moynihan’s
argument can be distilled thus: Bob rejected leftism. Bob is great. Leftist
causes and social activism suck! Score one point for conservatives. Only the
second proposition is patently true. Even IF Moynihan has some express
access to the contents of Bob’s mind in 1964, things that have never been
revealed in interviews or in print, so what? Let’s give him the benefit of the
doubt. Let’s say he is right, Bob woke up one day and said “I don’t believe in
all this leftist, communist bullshit”, as the author of the article seems to
believe. We still have to ask, “so what”? If Bob jumped off a bridge would that
be proof that it’s a good thing to do? If Bob accepts Jesus into his heart
(which of course he did), should we all do the same? Should it impact our
enjoyment of his music? Perhaps the world would be a better place if Bob had
stuck with his activism and protest songs in the late 60’s.
The period of
Bob’s career encompassed in the climactic sequences of “A Complete Unknown” was
for sure an inflection point. But evidence that a political ideological change
was behind it is lacking. By rejecting Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and essentially
all his fans, while going electric, he was not necessarily rejecting the social
justice movement, or the value system of the left. The most obvious explanation
is rather that Bob was making a profound and personal protest. That is to say, rather
than stepping away from protest, he was twisting the screw to transform the
nature of his protest. He was now protesting the box. He was asserting that he
was both less and much more than what his followers were making him out to be. His
new songs were protest songs of a whole new sort, which demonstrated an
artistry on a whole different level, to the extent that what was being
protested was not always clear. It wasn’t protest songs that were being
abandoned, but topical songs. His new material was more existential, the lyrics
were surreal and toyed with meaning. Clear literal narratives were replaced
with riddles. If there was anything Bob was rejecting it was the possibility
that words could convey clear and specific meaning, that anything in this world
could be cut and dry.
Apart from
this simple explanation, Moynihan seems to miss or gloss over the fact that Bob
was formatively influenced by the Blues, Country, Rockabilly and R&B, in
addition to folk music, with evidence of this going back to his very first
studio sessions (“Mixed Up Confusion”). Considering this, and Bob’s revolutionary
nature, his alchemical shift in musical styles, which lead to the creation of a
whole new genre, folk-rock, is not quite so surprising. Moynihan’s knowledge lapses
make me wonder, does he know enough about Bob to be able to make just
pronouncements about what motivated his change of tack? I get the sense that Moynihan
is a bit green on the topic, and may not have any real insight into what makes Bob
tick. Although I don’t doubt that he’s a big fan, he may not be “Aspergerian”
enough. Critically, he doesn’t bring the receipts to back up his argument. His
villainization of Pete Seeger, and by association all members of the folk
revival, based on his undying support for Stalin, also seems to go too far.
According to his Wikipedia page Seeger’s support for Soviet-style Socialism began
to wane with increasing evidence of atrocities associated with the Hungarian
Revolution in 1956. Should Seeger have publicly renounced support for Stalin sooner?
Probably. But his faith in communism can be separated from this lapse in
judgement, and his belief in a fairer and better world is certainly his defining
characteristic. In 1995 he said: "I still call myself a communist,
because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what
the churches make of it". Will we ever tire of flogging the communist
straw-man?
In formulating
his understanding of Bob Dylan, Moynihan seems to be erroneously projecting
some of the characteristics of the lead character in the 1992 political satire
“Bob Roberts” Trailer. The movie is about a right-wing conservative folk singing
senator running for President. This character is figuratively and literally a
mirror inverse of Bob Dylan. He sings “The Times They Are Changing, Back”, and
“This Land is My Land”. The movie demonstrates the extreme (although not by
modern standards) of what could happen with the assent to the presidency of the
United States by a vapid and corrupt showman that is utterly devoid of any
social or moral standard. The character just happens to be conservative, and
not one of those woke lefties. And that’s pretty much how it ended up happening
in real life, 24 years after the movie was released.
Did Bob reject
leftism and social justice in the mid 60s? highly debateable. Did Bob become
more conservative later in life? Likely. It is in fact a common trajectory that
I will discuss below. Winston Churchill was falsely attributed as saying “If
you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a
conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain”. While I disagree with
the qualification of the phenomenon, there is truth to the trajectory as a
general trend, and there are also exceptions. The British historian Paul
Addison pointed out that Churchill himself had been a conservative at 15, and a
Liberal at 35. However, in the flush of youth we generally start off filled with
hope and naivety that the world can change, with total imaginative and creative
plasticity. As we age, we become more set in our ways, more jaded. We ossify.
The hard knocks of life and the biological/neurological damage that accrues
naturally with age (and faster with the rockstar lifestyle of drug and alcohol abuse),
makes us less dynamic. We become less able to dream in the metaphorical sense,
and our literal ability to dream diminishes relative to the young. Our old curmudgeonly
selves become more “conservative”. We decide that certain things that we precociously
believed were possible are not possible. We clutch for the pearls in moral
panic and fear. We become less tolerant of immigrants (instead of pitying
them), homeless people (including hobo’s), and marginalized groups in society
as our faculties wane, and we lose sight of the very thin line between good and
evil. Young people have the advantage of a kind of beginners mind: free of all
the meta-garbage, false-assumptions and propaganda that gets deposited in our
brains through the banality of culture; Free of all the brain worms, and the
thoughts not-our-own that have been implanted by parents, teachers and society
at large, and left to suppurate. As Dylan sings counter-intuitively “Ah, but I
was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”. To be wise, we must get
younger. To stay free, to continue to care we must stay forever young.
I’ll end this
with a finer point on Moynihan’s folly. Early on in his piece he sets a trap that
he proceeds to fall into himself. After noting that “with minimal quote-mining,
one can create endless iterations of Dylan: left-wing or right-wing,
evangelical Christian or messianic Jew, civil rights activist or subterranean
racist”, he then proceeds to use quote-mining (badly) to create a version of
Bob that suits his personal viewpoint or ideals (likely those of a subterranean
racist, lol). It’s true that Bob wears many hats, and he has many faces, many
personas, and many voices. He also likes to wear masks, some of which are
indistinguishable from his actual face. He wants to be, as the movie title
suggests, a complete unknown. All of this creates a kind of mystique that is
part of his enduring allure. He is of course an artist and a performer, all of whom
are engaged in building a public facing persona. He is an iconoclast, but he
takes it even further; he plays with his public image and messes with people’s expectations,
and what they “want him to be”, as if to say “I am all of these things, and
more, but also none of this”. Therefore, Bob can be what you want him to
be. If you want him to be a lefty, listen to his protest songs. If you want him
to be God-fearing, listen to his gospel (which ironically is some of his best
protest music), if you want him to be anti-Science listen to the last line in
“Do Right To Me Baby”.
Just like any
Bob fan, I find in him what I want to find. When I was an idealistic teenager I
gravitated towards his early political content. “Where have you been my blue
eyed son”, spoke directly to me. It painted a picture of an unjust and chaotic
world, where human suffering was a consequence of natural disasters and
man-made disasters (“I saw a white man that walked a black dog”). “God on our
side” was pretty clear to me in its atheistic thrust. A clear condemnation of
the twisted logic that allowed us to forgive ourselves for slaughtering the
indigenous peoples of the Americas, and then to forgive the Germans for
slaughtering the Jews. To my mind, the message was clear: how can there be a
God at all if he is on the side of all of these evil actions throughout
history? In what universe can a good and just God allow and condone genocide? Others
have interpreted this song differently, and different spins are possible. This
is a prime example of how the listener can develop a relationship to a song,
which acts as a kind of touch stone or scaffold for a developing philosophical
concept. That’s really what Bob’s music did for me. It helped me to learn, and
to develop my personal philosophy about the world and place it in a historical context.
In my particular case, coming from a left leaning upbringing, Bob’s songs
served as a catalyst to help me grow my particular flavour of philosophy or ideology.
This continues regardless of whatever his own political view points are currently.
Bob fans that had a conservative upbringing, no doubt accentuated and amplified
those messages that supported, based on their own set of biases and
assumptions, a very different philosophical outlook. They probably spent more
time listening to John Wesley Harding. Our minds look for points of congruence,
that support our pre-existing psychological momentum. Although there may be
moments where a song challenges us and our assumptions, it is unlikely that our
goal in listening to music is to produce feelings of cognitive dissonance.
Bob is a
mysterious human. Trying to understand him using his art is a difficult, but
worthy exercise. His art is really a reflection of his inner world of dreams,
nightmares and other subconscious stuff, and therefore represents a tussle with
his inner demons and symbolic fragments of his personality; and since most of
us struggle with universal ills and demons, Bob’s art is like a Rosetta stone
for our own intellectual and philosophical journeys. We may never know the real
Bob, and just like any of us his political views and rational perspectives on
culture and politics must be shifting and evolving over time, and in response
to changes in the world itself. Certainly he did return to protest songs in a
more complex form in the 70’s (Hurricane, George Jackson) and 80’s (Infidels,
the Gospel albums). Also, Bob was very friendly with Barak Obama, Bill Clinton
and Jimmy Carter, and not at all with any republican president (that I know of),
which might be a subtle hint of his political leanings. On the 2018 album
“Universal Love”, Bob contributes the first song, “He’s Funny That Way”. The
album features various artists singing gender-specific love songs with pronouns
adjusted to refer to same gender. He’s hardly an LGBTQ activist, however his
endorsement of this project suggests that he is sympathetic to the cause. Ultimately,
he cannot be categorized, and any effort to do so must be taken with a grain of
salt. It’s like trying to ascertain the political ideology of Mount Everest. He
transcends identity politics and always has. As his mentor Woody Guthrie said,
“Left wing? Right wing? Chicken wing.”