Bob and I are about the same age and early on I was awestruck mostly by his sheer audacity, me feeling just a little unsteady about that time. Like Picasso, it was his fearlessness that actually carried the art, just a guitar and harp, common and accessible. His big hits could sometimes sound sorta snide and condescending, b-sides were always thoughtful and deep, but it wasn’t the words, no matter how brilliant, that won Bob the ‘noble.’
After the cultural desert of the fifties in which popular music was born in theft and exploitation, forced through the corrupting turnstiles of limited commercial outlets, and reduced to the cheap emotion and limited horizon of a beach party movie, Bob brought the rain. Simple as that. He crystalized a questioning search for identity that spread forehead to forehead across a generation. Achingly raw and defiant, still he immediately became very popular. People were especially glad to see him, it had been a long drought.
Bob’s thoughts and observations hadn’t been part of the high school vocabulary, lived experience had never been addressed so directly, and the pebble of honesty he kicked off the cliff of a vast cultural malaise became an avalanche of poetry-driven lyrics and musical innovation. His was the first shot fired in a world-wide revolution, whole populations aspiring to a common humanity beyond the low common denominator of commercialism, well you know. He deserves the prize.
* * *
Music is currently suffering too much of a good thing, transitioning from restricted airways and major label dictatorships to way more freedom than they need, with an influence so small politicians use lyrics they like, even if the song goes against them. Visual art, by contrast, can not be broadcast, and a digital-copy no matter how accurate is just not the same. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the very characteristic that makes visual art impossible to reproduce, limits its range, and has made popularity problematic, turned out to offer the one true test of authenticity our age requires? Instead of one performer singing into a microphone miles away, frozen in time by technology, here’s a movement that happens all over all at once, painters in every town. Even working people sometimes feel compelled to make it, and anyone who engages the machinery they’ve been given can understand it.
After the cultural desert of the fifties in which popular music was born in theft and exploitation, forced through the corrupting turnstiles of limited commercial outlets, and reduced to the cheap emotion and limited horizon of a beach party movie, Bob brought the rain. Simple as that. He crystalized a questioning search for identity that spread forehead to forehead across a generation. Achingly raw and defiant, still he immediately became very popular. People were especially glad to see him, it had been a long drought.
Bob’s thoughts and observations hadn’t been part of the high school vocabulary, lived experience had never been addressed so directly, and the pebble of honesty he kicked off the cliff of a vast cultural malaise became an avalanche of poetry-driven lyrics and musical innovation. His was the first shot fired in a world-wide revolution, whole populations aspiring to a common humanity beyond the low common denominator of commercialism, well you know. He deserves the prize.
* * *
Music is currently suffering too much of a good thing, transitioning from restricted airways and major label dictatorships to way more freedom than they need, with an influence so small politicians use lyrics they like, even if the song goes against them. Visual art, by contrast, can not be broadcast, and a digital-copy no matter how accurate is just not the same. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the very characteristic that makes visual art impossible to reproduce, limits its range, and has made popularity problematic, turned out to offer the one true test of authenticity our age requires? Instead of one performer singing into a microphone miles away, frozen in time by technology, here’s a movement that happens all over all at once, painters in every town. Even working people sometimes feel compelled to make it, and anyone who engages the machinery they’ve been given can understand it.
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