Light On Dark Water

Andrew Ferguson slams Bob in The Weekly Standard.

I don’t really mind him bashing the excessive and uncritical adulation that some people give Dylan. And I don’t at all mind him calling Dylan’s junk what it is. A friend of mine, very much a Dylan fan, once said “Every Dylan album has at least one bad song. Every song has at least one bad verse. Every verse has at least one bad line.” He wasn’t entirely serious, because he wouldn’t have said that of literally every album, song, and verse. But he had a point.

Still, the basic view of Dylan that Ferguson propounds—that he’s a cynical and dishonest misanthrope having a joke at the expense of credulous fans, especially among intellectuals, and that the widely held view of him as a lover and explorer of the entire American tradition of popular music is fraudulent—is wrongheaded.

I don’t have much time at the moment to say more, but my review of Modern Times from a few years ago pretty well sums up my view.

Over at All Manner of Thing there’s an interesting post about Dylan, including a video which discusses Dylan as a spiritual poet. I think (as I say in the comments over there) that Fr. Barron makes a bit more of Dylan than he deserves, but his fundamental point is sound. And, oddly enough, similar to my own.

And by the way, Ferguson is factually wrong about Dylan’s recent concerts when he says they are “…notable most for the uneasy sense among the audience that no one has the slightest idea what song they're listening to.“ That’s simply false; I’ve been to two of them, and they were excellent, in large part because Dylan assembles killer bands.

(Hat tip to First Things. Perhaps a slightly grudging hat tip, since the post is approving of Ferguson and the author, responding to comments, is equally mistaken about certain factual matters, e.g. “The Beatles are still popular with kids while Dylan is—as he always has been—an acquired taste for nostalgic Boomers.“ I expected this to be the case, actually, and have been surprised to find that it is not.)

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