how does the Bob Dylan present the generation war what happened in the America of the 1960s in the context of counter culture
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Nearly half a century after he released his first album, Bob Dylan continues to release new albums (including, last year, a compilation of Christmas songs) and tour the country playing concerts. Sean Wilentz, an American history professor at Princeton University and “historian-in-residence” at BobDylan.com, traces Dylan's influence on American culture in his new book, Bob Dylan in America. Here, he discusses how Dylan shaped his generation—and whether there's a similar artist in today's music scene.
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Answer:
Nearly half a century after he released his first album, Bob Dylan continues to release new albums (including, last year, a compilation of Christmas songs) and tour the country playing concerts. Sean Wilentz, an American history professor at Princeton University and “historian-in-residence” at BobDylan.com, traces Dylan's influence on American culture in his new book, Bob Dylan in America. Here, he discusses how Dylan shaped his generation—and whether there's a similar artist in today's music scene.
He's the most important songwriter of the last 50 years, in a culture in which songwriting has always been a major force, a major component.
Then there's the '60s. Dylan's work is indelibly linked to that time, in part because so much of his greatest work came out of '64, '65, '66. But the '60s became kind of a burden or a weight on the entire culture, certainly to people my age. It became transformed into something bigger than it was.
It was thought of as the revolution. Well, a lot of very important things happened. Jim Crow was smashed, the beginnings of the movements that would end communism in Eastern Europe—all sorts of things were happening all around the world in the late 1960s, throughout the 1960s. And Dylan was very much a part of that. And his music was very much a part of that. It expressed what he wanted to express, but people caught onto it as an expression of what they were feeling, what they were thinking.
That said, though, it's dangerous to limit any artist to a particular period. You might think of Yeats in terms of the Easter rebellion in Ireland, or Wordsworth around the French Revolution, right? But in fact their lives and their art expand far beyond that.
He's influenced by things—by music, by poetry, by writing—that came long before the 1960s. He wasn't born just full blown out of that moment. And he has continued to work and to write and to reflect and to produce great art, long, long after 1969. So it's important to see Dylan's work in that longer view. And that's sort of what I try to do in the book.
The world wouldn't be the same without Tom Stoppard. The world wouldn't be the same without a whole bunch of other people. There's no one person who defines a culture. But Dylan's had an incredibly important role—not just for my generation, I think—in changing the tone of the culture in all kinds of ways.
For example, one of the things Bob Dylan did was almost single-handedly kill Tin Pan Alley—the whole traditional form of publishing and producing and recording music. Now, his doing that changed music for everybody. That doesn't mean people are going to be writing and singing and performing the way he does, but they're not going to be performing anything like the world of Tin Pan Alley before Bob Dylan.
My own connection wasn't so much the very recent stuff, but it was this moment in the early, mid-90s, when my dad was dying—that was a story there that was very powerful. And then a concert I went to in 1997 when I reconnected with the music live. It was an incremental thing, a process of reconnecting with a body of work that developed gradually. It wasn't any one thing—it wasn't simply my response to Love and Theft or any of the later albums, although Love and Theft was important.
There are a lot of my students who are basically my children's age—people who came of age with parents who were at the younger end of the baby boom. And some of them are very much into Dylan's work—his earlier work, but also some of his recent stuff. So they're curious, and they ask me about it some
I don't know that my coolness factor goes up or down particularly. I guess you'd have to ask them. I can't say I walk around campus thinking that the students admire me for that particularly. The student you'd probably heard of is Elena Kagan—she was one of my very first students, and I advised her senior thesis. Elena Kagan did not come to study with me because of Bob Dylan.
Another Side of Bob Dylan—particularly a song off of that album, "The Chimes of Freedom"—I think is a good way to start.
And then the three that follow really have to be heard as a whole, though there are particular songs on each of those albums.
Bringing It All Back Home: I mean, "Mr. Tambourine Man" is obviously an important one on that one. And another one I choose is "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" off of that one.
And then on Highway 61 Revisited, the "Highway 61" song and then "Desolation Row."
And on Blonde on Blonde, "Visions of Johanna" most of all, which I think may be his greatest song, as a work of art.
Understand, too, that one ought to take all that work in context. There's early Yeats and a later Yeats. There's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and there's Finnegan's Wake—both of those are James Joyce, but obviously from different periods in his development. And I think you have to do the same with Dylan.