Bob Dylan
As times change, so does a master's influence
By Nick Marino
Times-Union staff writer
times-union.com
The tendency is to find Bob Dylan's influence immeasurable. His influence is too sweeping, his shadow too long to accurately assess how much he matters. To consider music in a world without Dylan, the thinking goes, is to wonder how the newspaper you're holding might be different if Gutenberg had never lived.
At various points since 1963, a Dylanless musical landscape really was inconceivable. His music not only penetrated the psyches of music fans, it also influenced his musical contemporaries from folk to punk.
concert
Bob Dylan
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Where: Jacksonville Coliseum, 1145 E. Adams St.
Tickets: $29.50 and $38.50.
Information: (904) 353-3309.
His modern fan appeal seems resilient, as his endlessly successful touring indicates. But Dylan has had no discernible influence on today's top-selling artists: Creed, Linkin Park, Ludacris, Nickelback, Enya, Ja Rule, Pink, Nas and No Doubt.
To look at the charts, we might as well be living in a Dylanless world right now.
As everybody knows, pop music moves in cycles. When rootsy, narrative-based songwriting matters on a large scale, Dylan matters on a large scale. When punk matters, Dylan matters, because Dylan's shabby voice and spotty musicianship helped inspire punk's anyone-can-play aesthetic.
But the sales potential of today's music depends primarily on the music's beats and the band's visual appeal, a priority shift suggesting perhaps the biggest swing away from Dylanesque music traits since he started making music.
As a result, today's Dylan resides in a weird, quasi-Americana ghetto, just down the block from such cane-toting geniuses as Tom Waits and John Prine. It's an odd place to be, considering that the grizzled, 60-year-old Bob Dylan is producing some of his most vital and acclaimed work in years.
Since 1997, he has won a pile of Grammys, an Oscar, three more Grammy nominations and countless year-end critical accolades for his breathtaking albums Time Out of Mind and Love And Theft and his acerbic single Things Have Changed.
But since 1997, Dylan's work has seemed further and further afield from the beat- and image-driven music that has come to dominate the charts and the radio. Dylan's fans are still listening, but today's upstart artists are not.
That's because teenagers drive the music market. They control the radio and they buy the CDs. So Pink and No Doubt try to appeal to the same girls who loved Titanic, just as Nickelback and Ja Rule target the boys who worshipped The Matrix and Rush Hour.
Dylan has been out-sold before, of course. He's never been known as a hitmaker. What's different now is that no major commercial artist is out there in the spotlight carrying on his legacy.
Used to be, for every Monkees there was a Byrds. For every Abba there was a Bruce Springsteen. For every lightweight band ruling the pop charts, there was an equally popular artist experimenting with Dylan's wordplay, his rough-edged vocals, his ragged guitar and harmonica.
Today we have Nas and Linkin Park and Enya, all of whom are fine for what they are. Rap, metal and new age all deserve seats at the musical table. But the chair once occupied by the young Byrds and Springsteen is getting cold.
For years, every rock songwriter with blue jeans and a guitar was called "the next Bob Dylan." When was the last time you heard somebody say that about anybody?
If you're really into music, you might've heard someone say it about Ryan Adams, the alternative country it-boy whose shaky vocals, prolific songwriting and guitar-based melodies have Highway 61 written all over them. But Adams, for all his merits, is not a star.
He still plays indie rock clubs, not arenas; he was on the cover of CMJ, not Rolling Stone; and for the last time it's Ryan Adams, not Bryan Adams.
To be sure, nobody's saying young Ryan needs to be The Next Bob Dylan. Adams has his own formidable gifts to share, and those who recognize Dylan's unique genius realize that there will never be another Bob Dylan.
But it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect Adams, or someone else, to embellish Dylan's general model and take it to the masses.
Even in the early '90s -- before teen-pop, bling-bling rap and heavy metal bum-rushed the charts -- prominent signs of Dylan's influence were everywhere: Nirvana, for example, drew from punk forebears who drew from Dylan. Public Enemy's leftist, race-conscious hip-hop added a new wing to the house of protest-oriented folk music.
Today Cobain is dead, Chuck D is a figurehead and Adams is our longshot best bet. After Adams, our horses start to pull up lame: David Gray is soulful but safe; Rufus Wainwright is talented but chilly; Lucinda Williams is smart but restrained; Dave Matthews is tuneful but vacant; Ron Sexsmith is pretty but too pretty.
Everyone's saying that the band is back, but it's hard to find any fresh Dylanesque bands capable of taking over the world. Wilco may be the best young band around, but they're two masterpieces into their career and hardly anyone has noticed.
The Strokes are brilliant, but brilliant for their defiance of the Dylan formula -- they're street where he's country, they're direct where he's vague, they're lightning where he's thunder.
U2 -- whose political activism traces back to Dylan -- would fit the bill if they weren't so advanced in their career.
For once, we're out of torch-bearers, which makes it all the more miraculous that Dylan himself continues to keep the flame alive.
His newest record, Love And Theft, is a savage affair. Many critics have noted that the album plays like a trip down the road of music history, but music history isn't a smooth path -- it's more like a thicket, and Love And Theft hacks its way through.
Dylan introduces us to such characters as Mr. Goldsmith, "a nasty, dirty, double-crossin', back-stabbin' phony I didn't wanna have to be dealin' with." Dylan's ready to take him on though. He says he "feel[s] like a fighting rooster -- feel[s] better than I ever felt," and adds, "I'll die before I turn senile."
That's all in one song, the greasy blues track Cry A While. Elsewhere Dylan sings kindly of love and apologies, then turns into a devil chef with "brains in the pot, they're beginning to boil/they're dripping with garlic and olive oil."
Love And Theft has a knock-knock joke, a hard Western swing, a track dedicated to Charley Patton, a reference to politicians in jogging shorts, a reference to naked hunting, remembrances of lost parents and a few classic Dylan kiss-offs.
The record's best line may come at the point in Summer Days where Dylan's narrator meets a young woman who takes him by the hand. "She says, 'You can't repeat the past.' I say, 'You can't? What do you mean, you can't? Of course you can.' "
Of course you can. Or, more accurately, you can reinvent the past, which is (until now) what a parade of great artists have always done with Dylan's music -- and what he's always done with his own music, too.
If Dylan hangs on long enough, he'll live to see another ugly young troubadour with a worn-out copy of Blonde On Blonde -- or better yet, Love And Theft -- burst onto the charts. The new guy will sing off-key and play guitar just to keep time, or maybe he won't play guitar at all, or maybe he will be a she.
Whoever it is will simultaneously restore Dylan's aesthetic and expand upon it. Today's pop charts may prove that Dylan's influence has diminished, but it'll take more than Pink to make Dylan to fade to black.
Nick Marino can be reached at (904) 359-4367 or at nmarino@jacksonville.com. |
