[Marxism] Why we are still turning to Dylan for the soundtrack to out demonstrations?

["Michael Hoover" <hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Silent protest
Why are we still turning to Dylan for the soundtrack to our demonstrations?
Ian Buruma
Saturday November 12 2005
The Guardian

It already seems so long ago that hundreds of thousands turned out in the 
streets of London, New York, Rome, and many other cities to protest against the 
war in Iraq. I was in Manhattan during that cold winter, two years ago, and 
watched the protests on Washington Square. There were people of all ages, 
including some venerable greybeards from the 1960s. But most were too young to 
remember, or perhaps to have even heard of Martin Luther King's long march to 
Washington or Chicago '68. And yet the curious thing was that the musical 
accompaniment to the protest in 2003 was almost all at least 30 years old.

I heard no rap, or Eminem, or Oasis, but old songs by John Lennon and Bob 
Dylan. It was if there had been no culture of protest since those heady days 
when Vietnam was the focus of popular outrage. Not that politics had stopped, 
or opposition ceased: the turnout in 2003 belied that. But where were the words 
and the music to express contemporary feeling? Why did people have to reach 
back so far?

The absence of a contemporary protest culture explains, perhaps, the cult 
status of Bob Dylan, which has reached a pitch of religious idolatry, where 
every scrap, every scribble, every concert ticket is deemed worthy of 
publication. Many of Dylan's songs are wonderful, of course, but one feels that 
there is an element in our contemporary Dylan worship of faute de mieux. The 
same might be said of the American success of George Clooney's latest film, 
Goodnight and Good Luck, about the radio and television journalist Edward 
Murrow, who took on Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witchhunt in 1954.

Like Walter Cronkite a bit more than 10 years later, Murrow was a legendary 
figure, whose broadcasts from London during the blitz had made him a household 
name. When his famous voice went on air saying that "This is no time for men 
who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent," its impact was felt all 
over America. Where is the Edward Murrow of today? Certainly nowhere on any 
major US television network.

The irony of Dylan's status as an iconic protest singer is that this is not 
what he ever wanted. As we know from Martin Scorsese's brilliant documentary, 
No Direction Home, Dylan was baffled, annoyed, and upset when the media built 
him up as the "voice of his generation", whose protest songs would change the 
world. In live performances, he would pronounce "protest songs" with the 
exaggerated drawl of derision. To him, they were songs. He was an artist, not a 
spokesman or a politician. Protest was one of the idioms he used, because it 
was an outlet for his musical passion.

Or so he claimed. There was perhaps a certain disingenuousness about his 
statements. Unless he was a total cynic, which I don't believe, it wasn't just 
opportunism that made him stand on the same platform as Martin Luther King, in 
front of more than 250,000 people gathered in Washington DC in 1963 to demand 
civil rights for black people. His songs had a profound message for those 
people. Dylan's genius was to match the music with words that expressed the 
hopes and the anger of millions. Of course, Dylan knew this perfectly well. He 
just didn't want to be pegged. He is an artist, and he don't look back.

The protest culture of the early 1960s, like all culture, also reached back 
into the past. Dylan was inspired by the songs and vocal mannerisms of Woody 
Guthrie. As a young singer, he honed his style by poking around old blues, 
country, and folk songs, for the particular vein of popular American feeling he 
was after. He found it in Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Hank Snow, and others more 
obscure. But Dylan made the old songs sound new, transforming them into 
something unique to him. King's speeches, as much part of the protest culture 
of the 1960s as Dylan's songs, also drew from old sources, specifically the 
Bible, as interpreted by black southern Baptists. His rolling waves of 
repetitions, his marvellous verbal crescendos, these were part of the same 
tradition that produced spirituals and rhythm and blues - a tradition that also 
inspired Dylan. Like the great rhetorical artist that he was, King refreshed 
this tradition and gave it a thoroughly modern meaning.

One thing Dylan understood much better than the reporters and earnest folkies 
who pestered him about switching from "protest" to rock'n'roll was the nature 
of popular music. He once said, in a fit of exasperation, that everything he 
did was protest. In a sense this was true. Striking a blow for freedom against 
oppressive authority does not mean you have to sneer about the "masters of war" 
all the time. The words are not always what matters. Jazz or rock or any form 
of dance music can be politically loaded. For a whole generation, Glen Miller's 
In the Mood was the anthem of liberation - and not just from Nazism or fascism.

Dancing to clandestine jazz music, forbidden by Hitler as "nigger music", was 
one way for German youth, the so-called Swing-Jugend, to claw back some sense 
of liberty in the Third Reich. In countries under communist dictatorship, jazz 
and rock music probably meant a great deal more than it did at Woodstock or the 
Isle of Wight. The Swing-Jugend, as it were, of Warsaw and Prague, were 
dissidents just for claiming the freedom to let themselves go, to dance the way 
they wanted. For us in the west, rock was fun; for them it was essential.

Vaclav Havel, for instance, was perhaps more deeply affected by the Velvet 
Underground, Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones, than he was by more overtly 
political expressions from the west. Lou Reed was one the first people to visit 
Havel, after he was elected president of Czechoslovakia. They appeared on stage 
together in a somewhat awkward colloquium about politics and music. Havel could 
talk eloquently about the subject for hours. But intellectual reflection is not 
the strong suit of most rock'n'rollers. Reed muttered something about "becoming 
like Kafka" if he had lived under communism. Kafka never did, of course, but 
one sort of knows what Reed means.

Rock and pop played a central role in the protests on Tiananmen Square. One of 
the leaders of the Beijing demonstrations was a Taiwanese pop singer, Hou 
Dejian, whose hit song, Descendants of the Dragon, was the unofficial anthem of 
the Chinese protest movement. Another figure to appear on the square was Cui 
Jian, who has been compared variously to Bruce Springsteen, Dylan and Lennon. 
None of them quite fit the raucous, rather melodramatic style of this Chinese 
rocker, who plays guitar as well as trumpet. His song, Nothing to My Name, 
belted out in hope as well as frustration, was played over and over, live, on 
loudspeakers, and private cassette players. The lyrics are about unrequited 
love, but to the rebels on the square they meant much more than that:

I want to give you my hope

I want to help make you free

But all you ever do is laugh at me, 'cause

I've got nothing to my name.

Cui, whose performances are routinely banned in China, except when his fame can 
add lustre to an official campaign - for the Beijing Olympics, for example - 
did not suddenly rise in 1989. He was part of a culture that developed soon 
after the death of Mao. Students began to organise debating societies in 
university dorms.

At the same time, urban kids found an outlet for their frustrated energies in 
new, barely tolerated western fads, such as break-dancing. These are the words 
of a shop girl in Tianjin (quoted in Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin's 
New Ghosts, Old Dreams): "When I'm break-dancing I feel passionate and 
uninhibited ... I'm normally very quiet and soft-spoken ... But when I hear 
that entrancing music ... The last drop of adolescent shyness evaporates as hot 
blood surges through my veins. After all, I'm a child of the 80s!"

The Chinese are no different to us. The appeal of Cui and other Chinese rockers 
was not their political message; it was the attitude, expressed in the music, 
of defiance. This was political enough. Discussing liberal democracy was for 
the Beijing University students. Other Chinese were less articulate, perhaps, 
but they knew what it felt like to be oppressed by authority.

As one of them famously said on Tiananmen Square, when he was asked by a 
foreign reporter what he wanted: "All we want is what you have, and we don't."

Attitude is what the Rolling Stones had, even though their overtly political 
songs were usually ham-fisted. Street Fighting Man summed up the nature of 
western youth rebellion brilliantly: "What can a poor boy do, except to sing 
for a rock'n'roll band, 'cause in sleepy London town, there's just no place for 
a street fighting man." Of course, Beijing in 1989, or Prague in 1968, were 
anything but sleepy. But neither was the US at the height of the Vietnam war, 
which is why this Rolling Stones number came blaring from the windows of every 
dorm in Berkeley.

Why, then, didn't I hear contemporary songs on Washington Square in 2003? Am I 
simply missing something, because I'm too old? Am I the Mr Jones of Dylan's 
song, who knows something is happening, but doesn't know what it is. This is 
entirely possible. But I think something has happened to inhibit the kind of 
protest culture that lit up the 1960s. First of all, it has to do with 
attitude. Part of what made Dylan or Reed or Zappa hip was their refusal to act 
like politicians.

The very idea of Dylan going to the White House, or world summit meetings, to 
discuss the fate of the world, was ridiculous. Even accepting an honorary 
doctorate at Princeton was really too much for him. Yet this is precisely what 
the most political rock stars of today are doing: accepting medals, having 
meetings with presidents and prime ministers, receiving knighthoods. What is a 
rock'n'roller like Bono doing when he gives out official statements from the G8 
summit praising George Bush for his generosity to Africa? And what about those 
"signed copies" of Bob Geldof's photographs made during his African journeys? 
This is politics too, of a kind, but it is not exactly fizzing with protest 
against the established order.

This is not to say there is no music out there with attitude. Hip-hop and rap 
have lots of that. The behaviour - and lyrics - of such groups as Public Enemy 
(Fight the Power!) or 2 Live Crew (Me So Horny) have been more subversive and 
violent than anything Sir Mick Jagger ever came up with. They are also closer 
to real experience, in the harsh black areas of New York and Los Angeles, than 
the songs written by middle-class white men. The Stones, as well as the early 
Dylan, really relied on a kind of impersonation. They took the experience of 
poor, mostly black people, and interpreted it for a much wider, mostly white 
audience. This is not to belittle them: they gave the musical expressions of a 
poor minority a universal appeal.

Rap and hip-hop are popular beyond a narrow black audience, to be sure, but are 
still too close to the sources, too "real" perhaps, to gain universal currency. 
Eminem is an exceptional white rapper, and that is one reason for his enormous 
success.

If the world of hip-hop is still a little too exclusive, most popular music 
suffers from the opposite problem of being too corporate. By the early 1970s 
protest culture had been absorbed by capitalist enterprise. Rock became big 
business. Small record labels were bought up. Big labels became part of media 
conglomerates. Rock songs are used to promote anything from Coca-Cola to the 
new German chancellor, Angela Merkel (The Stones' Angie was her campaign song.) 
The Sheraton hotel group, targeting the baby-boomer generation, looked for "a 
1960s rock anthem" that could be remixed to "symbolise the Sheraton chain". The 
final choice was Let's Spend the Night Together by the Stones, a song once 
banned on the radio for being too lewd. So what's a poor boy to do now?

He can start a blog, perhaps. As the mainstream media, especially in the US, 
have become part of the same corporate entertainment empires that own most 
popular music, there is little or no room for a new Edward Murrow to stick his 
knife into the powers that be. But the blogosphere is buzzing with life. 
Subversion of all kinds, much of it mad and malicious, has been privatised, as 
it were. If hip-hop and rap fill large niche markets, internet journalism fills 
millions of niches, some of them no bigger than the author him or herself. 
Quite how this will translate into the words and music of a new culture of 
protest no one really knows. In the meantime we will just have to make do with 
movies of how it was done in the old days.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Please Note: 
Due to Florida's very broad public records law, most written communications to 
or from College employees regarding College business are public records, 
available to the public and media upon request. Therefore, this e-mail 
communication may be subject to public disclosure.

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism