The new issue of Granta has a transcript of Studs Terkel interviewing Bob Dylan in 1963.
This quote from Dylan really hit me:
“Maybe it’s just the time, now is the time maybe you have to belong to yourself. I think maybe in 1930, from talking with Woody and Pete Seeger and some other people I know, it seems like everything back then was good and bad and black and white and whatever, you only had one or two. When you stand on one side and you know people are either for you or against you, with you or behind you or whatever you have. Nowadays it’s just, I don’t know how it got that way but it doesn’t seem so simple. There are more than two sides, it’s not black and white anymore.”
It’s just that reading that passage made me feel like we’ve gone back to 1930…I wonder if Dylan feels we’re going backwards in time too, and if he thinks a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall…again.
As far as the times changin, I would personally rather live today rather than in the 30’s. More complicated? Certainly. But also much so many more possibilities.
I suspect this has more to do with the perspective of the indivduals involved. A libertarian in the 1930s might have been much more aware of the complexities of an open society than a hard-luck bum on the soup line. (Not there’s anything better or worse of either one, just that they might have different perspectives.)
Hm - it does say something about the attention span of your average rock and film star!
#1 highest ranking song: “like a rolling stone” (3 1/2 minutes) #5 highest ranking movie: “clockwork orange” (what, 2 hours? 2 1/2?) #10 highest ranking tv show “the prisoner” (half an hour a week) #19 highest ranking book “on the road” (I gave up after a few hours myself)
These changed the world!!??!!??
What about Darwin’s Origin of the Species? Marx’s Communist Manifesto? Or, what about Star Wars? Implanting the Taoist philosophy of Yoda in the minds of a whole generation! Star TREK? Breaking down barriers of racism in Hollywood by giving a speaking part to a black woman!
That’s the last time I pay any attention to a movie and rock star poll.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Karl Marx
Actually, Brad, it looks like we’ve gone all the way back to 1848! Or at least never left it…
