To Be or Not To Be, What is a Bob Dylan? is a Question

I guess I don’t find nice men interesting.

That sounds worse than I mean it.

And I don’t mean men who enjoy humiliating people, collecting power, or leaving damage behind them and calling it charisma.

I mean something else.

I mean I have never been particularly interested in the easy man who knows how to behave, how to get along, what to say, how to remain acceptable.

The agreeable man.

I don’t trust agreeable men.

The man who can be counted on not to disturb the air in a room.

Give me someone difficult to categorize.

Someone who contradicts himself.

Someone who changes his mind badly.

Someone who walks away from the version of himself everybody else has decided to love.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Bob Dylan.

I have watched the films.

I have read the biographies.

I have read the stories people around him told.

I have what is considered a “diary” but we know not to trust that.

And I have listened to the music. Repeatedly

And yes, by many accounts, Bob Dylan could be an asshole.

Difficult.

Remote.

Unreliable.

Self-protective.

Contradictory.

Capable of treating people badly.

I am not especially interested in defending any of that.

What interests me is the refusal.

People wanted something from Dylan almost immediately.

They wanted a folk singer.

Then they wanted a protest singer.

They wanted someone full of finger-pointing songs.

Then they wanted a spokesman.

Then a conscience.

Then a symbol.

They wanted him to mean something reassuringly fixed.

And he kept slipping out of their hands.

He ran from it.

That fascinates me.

By the middle of the 1960s, audiences had helped build a version of Dylan they believed belonged to them. He was supposed to carry something for them.

The message.

The movement.

The moral authority.

Then he picked up an electric guitar.

Some people heard expansion.

Many others heard betrayal.

And somewhere in England, someone shouted:

“Judas!”

Dylan answered:

“I don’t believe you.”

Then:

“You’re a liar.”

And the band tore into “Like a Rolling Stone.”

God, I love that.

Not because electricity is inherently rebellious.

Not because folk music was somehow lesser.

Not because changing genres is automatically brave.

I love the moment because of what it represents.

You thought you owned me.

Fuck you.

You thought my usefulness to you created an obligation in me.

Fuck you.

You thought because I had once stood in a particular place, I was required to remain there so you could continue believing whatever you needed to believe about me.

No.

Fuck you.

I don’t believe you.

Play it loud.

Play it rough.

That interests me far more than niceness.

Because niceness can become compliance.

Compliance can become performance.

And performance can become a shield.

Niceness can be complicity.

Sometimes I think whole movements — protest movements included — can slide into that.

Isn’t that the new marketing strategy for the last, what, fifty years? Longer?

Performance.

Narrative.

Role.

Not necessarily truth.

Not necessarily life.

Sometimes just very convincing bullshit.

Performance itself isn’t the problem.

We all perform.

On a stage.

On a basketball court.

At work.

At dinner.

Online.

In bed.

The dishonesty begins when the person performing no longer lives anywhere inside the thing everyone is applauding.

Judas!

It’s not political!

I don’t believe you!

It’s simply about enjoyment!

You’re a liar!

Maybe we are all liars sometimes.

Performers.

Faking parts of ourselves for paychecks, belonging, approval, attention.

But when we start pretending we are somehow above all that?

That our performance isn’t a performance?

That our tribe is pure?

That our motives are clean?

You’re a liar.

I don’t think Dylan wanted to be the human shield people held up in front of their own politics, morality, idealism, disappointment, or hope.

I think, he didn’t want people buying his music to also buy the fantasy that they had somehow separated themselves from the ugliness of the human world.

That is uncomfortable.

But if you aren’t part of the human race, then what are you?

Above it all?

He wrote songs.

People made him into a prophet.

He wrote something else.

People became angry with the prophet for refusing prophecy.

Good.

There is something deeply wrong with turning an artist into evidence that your worldview is correct.

And Dylan seemed, again and again, unwilling to cooperate.

That is probably part of why I like the lyrics too.

Not because I believe Bob Dylan was sending down tablets from the mountain.

I don’t.

I like the lyrics because they are puzzles.

Loose ones.

Sometimes beautiful.

Sometimes ridiculous.

Sometimes piercing.

Sometimes obscure enough that I can wander around inside them for years.

I like suggestive language.

I like language that does not resolve obediently.

I like a sentence that can hold several meanings at once.

Shakespeare does that for me.

Marlowe does that for me.

Dylan does that for me.

I don’t particularly care whether somebody can tell me what the line definitively means.

That can almost ruin it.

I want the sentence to move.

I want to bring something to it.

I want to leave and come back twenty years later and discover it has become another sentence entirely because I have become another person entirely.

Fixed meaning feels dead to me.

Loose meaning breathes.

Maybe that is part of what Dylan himself became.

Loose meaning.

Opaque.

Unstable.

Misbehaving.

Impossible to turn into a clean little moral.

Even his religious period interests me for that reason, though I do not particularly understand it.

The man who had resisted being made into a secular prophet suddenly began singing explicitly Christian songs.

Maybe he believed with his whole heart.

Maybe he was exhausted.

Maybe he needed something solid.

Maybe he encountered something he experienced as real.

I don’t know.

I don’t need to know.

What interests me is that he did it even though it confused and alienated yet another portion of his audience.

Again:

You do not get to decide what I must believe in order to remain acceptable to you.

That kind of refusal can be obnoxious.

It can be lonely.

It can make someone impossible.

And no, it does not excuse cruelty.

But it is alive.

I think that may be what I mean when I say nice men do not interest me.

I am interested in people with friction.

People who cannot quite be absorbed into the story other people have written for them.

People who are capable of saying no even when yes would be easier, more profitable, more flattering, more comfortable.

People who occasionally blow up their own mythology.

People who refuse to remain useful.

That last one matters.

Because being useful can become another form of captivity.

The good daughter.

The good wife.

The good employee.

The good artist.

The good progressive.

The good conservative.

The good whatever.

Behave correctly.

MAKE GOOD CHOICES!!!

Say the expected thing.

Remain recognizable.

Do not embarrass the people who have invested in the version of you they prefer.

And maybe somewhere inside me, every time Dylan plugs in that electric guitar, I hear something larger than music.

I hear:

No.

Not yours.

I won’t dissociate myself from the world.

But I also won’t become the thing you need me to be in order to make the world simpler.

I like that.

I like the mess.

I like the nerve.

I like the unresolved quality of it.

I like that the meaning keeps moving.

So yes.

I named my son Dylan.

And maybe, all these years later, I understand the choice a little better.

It wasn’t because Bob Dylan was nice.

Or easy.

It wasn’t because he was a prophet or an activist.

It was because somewhere along the way he became, for me, the sound of someone refusing to be claimed.

And then playing louder.

Fuck purity culture.

Be rude. Be independent. Be contrary.

And fuck parading out cultural shields to appear good while the world is burning.

Fuck being owned.

Favorite songs? For better or for worse right now:

“Like a Rolling Stone.”

“Ballad of a Thin Man.”

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”

“It Ain’t Me, Babe.”

“Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

“Hurricane.”

“Tangled Up in Blue.”

Favorite lyrics?

The ones that refuse to sit still.

The ones that sound accusatory one year and wounded the next.

The ones that can be political without becoming slogans.

The ones that can be cruel, funny, absurd, prophetic, petty, tender, theatrical, and completely opaque within the span of a few lines.

I love the famous fragments too.

“You don’t need a weatherman…”

“Something is happening here…”

“I was so much older then…”

But mostly I love the way Dylan lets a line remain unfinished inside your head.

I don’t want every lyric explained to me.

I don’t want to know what I am supposed to think.

I want an image I can carry around for twenty years and find pleasure in misunderstanding.

That is the pleasure.

Not certainty.

Possibilities.

Do I think he was a prophet?

No.

A genius?

Nope.

Talented?

Well, yes.

Skilled?

Interested in his craft?

Committed to it?

Absolutely.

Willing to piss people off so he doesn’t get owned?

Completely horizontal on that one.

He won’t be the first asshole I’ve loved.

He won’t be the last.

It’s my theory that most people, if they are honest, are bastards in one way or another.

It’s the easy-to-like ones I tend to watch more carefully.

The ones who never seem to disturb the air.

The ones people are afraid to argue with or disagree with directly.

The ones everyone agrees on.

Those are the ones that make me suspicious, not curious.

I prefer complicated.

Flawed.

Sometimes difficult.

Be a little mercurial.

But not a performative asshole counting on everyone else’s outrage for attention.

Those are the worst kind.

That isn’t what I mean by difficult.

And that isn’t the Dylan I love.

That wasn’t him, babe.

He wasn’t the one we were looking for.

Maybe that was the point.