Two of the most discussed human beings on earth have died
since I last wrote an entry into this blog, one in a slightly more unpleasant fashion
than the other. Whilst Steven Jobs’ passing will be lamented for months to come
(candidate for Time Person of the year much?),
he will always be fondly remembered as the coolest and second most inventive
dude to ever be involved in the computer industry. Muammar Gaddafi on the other hand, will be
remembered as the most heinous looking ‒
but not the first ‒
Middle Eastern dictator to ever be found hiding in the hole. New Zealand also became Rugby World Cup champions,
a moment which justifiably sent myself and a pub full of Kiwis into a wild fit
of drunken hysterics. Unlike at home, there was no public holiday on Monday in
Japan, so team-teaching for the the next few days can only be described as
brutal death. This blog post isn’t about any of those things however. In fact,
this is going to be my first non-adventure related post since I’ve been
living in Japan – and what better topic to begin with than my very favourite obsession,
Bob Dylan.
When you spend an entire year writing one ten thousand word
dissertation, you spend a ridiculous amount of time settling on the opening
sentence. Dozens of combinations are tested, cut-up, reorganised and scrapped.
New, ostensibly brilliant phrases are thought up on the familiar journey from
University to the nearest location with half decent coffee, but they are never
written down, and are nothing but a distant memory by the time you’ve finished
your flat white. Finally, at the very last minute, you decide to settle on one
of the original phrases you scribbled down, only with the slightest of tweaks,
which seems to mock an entire year of research and deliberation.
“Mercurial, mutable and always in motion” was the opening phrase
I settled on the night before I handed in my dissertation on Bob Dylan at the
end of 2010. It is a phrase which at least begins to capture the sense of how
he had, throughout his career, constantly resisted being reduced into a single
genre or category – even when the image of him as a singer of protest songs had
become fixed in the public imagination. As paranoid as ever, I checked and
rechecked the spelling and grammar of the opening sentences long into the night
with a near manic intensity, desperate to avoid the nightmare scenario of an
early blemish, which surely would tarnish my work in the eyes of my moderators.
When I finally received my marked copy three months and
several dozen parties later, those opening pages did, thankfully, turn out to
be blemish free. It’s far less difficult
to focus on something if you find it interesting and Dylan is, and will remain above
all else, a figure of intrigue.
In 1959 he was a young, scrawny, and unknown Jew from an obsolete
mining town in Minnesota. By 1963
he was the darling of the American Civil Rights Movement, playing two songs at
the March
for Jobs and Freedom on Washington, the day of Martin Luther King Junior’s
legendary “I Have a Dream” oration. By 1966 he was undisputedly one of
the hippest human beings on earth, gallivanting around London, New York and San
Francisco with the likes of John Lennon and Allen Ginsberg, singing his special
brand of jaunty, cryptic and beatnik-inspired pop. Then, in 1969, when an
entire generation gathered at Woodstock in what was the climax of the 1960’s
countercultural revolution, he was nowhere to be found, tucked away in
Nashville, with his wife that not even his closest of friends knew about.
Even today, many of his songs remain pertinent to
contemporary culture, roughly thirty of which could be called ‘classic’ – that is,
imbedded into the collective consciousness of the general public. He remains
not only an American, but an international cultural icon. His ‘fame’ is made
all the more astonishing by the fact that he is a singer, who had (and has) absolutely no
singing voice whatsoever – which only amplifies the significance of what he was saying, regardless of how he was saying it. His death, which
is now surely not far away, will only cement his position as one of the most
influential people in the 20th century.
These images of
Dylan, set against the poem Suicide in
the Trenches by famous World War One poet Sigfried Sasoon, begin to convey
the dramatic shift that occurred in Dylan’s life (more specifically, changes in his worldview) in that scarcely believable period
of creative intensity in the 1960s. Enjoy.
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life with empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With mice and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer as soldier lads march by,
Go home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Suicide in the Trenches by Siegfried Sassoon (1886 - 1967)
