Dowd Blows In Dylan's Wind
In "Dylan's new tune in China," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd gives the ancient folk singer a good swift kick in the pants.
"Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out."Dowd's pit-bull attack on the icon-legend is obviously an attempt to smear any "good feelings" baby-boomers and aging hippies may have about the troubador.
Here is my simple but solid response to Dowd's doo-doo:
Truth be told, if you were Bob Dylan, wouldn't you rather be on your way home with a pocketful of coins than otherwise detained in a place you would rather not be? Back to Dowd's piece:
"A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”So I guess Bobby D is fat and happy? More power to him!
But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.
David Hajdu, the New Republic music critic, says the singer has always shown a tension between “not wanting to be a leader and wanting to be a celebrity.”
In Hajdu’s book, “Positively 4th Street,” Dylan is quoted saying that critics who charged that he’d sold out to rock ’n’ roll had it backward.
“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”
“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.” "
Tags: Bob Dylan, Maureen Dowd
