Camille Paglia on Dylan

Bob Dylan was a hard sell in 1985, when
I first began teaching HU 417, "The Art
of Song Lyrics," at Philadelphia's
University of the Arts. The Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Mamas
and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel,
Led Zeppelin - all these groups were
respectfully listened to in class by the
student musicians for whom I created the
course.

But Dylan was another matter. To my
shock, young people who had never
heard Dylan before found his voice
irritating, his lyrics confusing and his
worldview incomprehensible. It was
horrifying to realize that so titanic an artist
of my own college years in the 1960s
could have fallen so completely off the
cultural map.

This story has a happy ending. Step by
step through the 1990s, students taking
that course began to be intrigued, then
mesmerized, by Dylan's classic songs.
Why the change? First, the grunge
movement, whose tragic falling star was
Kurt Cobain, revived the image of the
suffering, alienated artist and
refamiliarized audiences with an abrasive,
nasal (and probably white proletarian)
vocal style that is half a strangled howl.

Second, the commercial triumph of
hip-hop among white teens sparked new
interest in socially conscious lyrics after a
period in which lyric substance had
diminished, thanks to production-heavy
recreational disco and operatic heavy
metal. Dylan's compassion for the poor
and dispossessed (as in the epic
"Desolation Row") was back in fashion,
and alongside rap, his packed,
speed-freak lyrics suddenly made sense.
Listening for the first time to
"Subterranean Homesick Blues," Dylan's
first hit single, students would laugh in
amazement as they recognized rap's
rhythmic ranting.

But if Dylan's homage to the agrarian
"talking blues" helps reveal the artistic
ancestry of hip-hop, exposure to his
work can partly undermine rap lyrics,
which are sometimes formulaic and
limited in scope. After twenty flourishing
years of that urban genre, surprisingly
few rap tag lines have passed into
general consciousness or can stand as
exempla of their era in the way that
dozens of Dylan's axiomatic one-liners
have (e.g., "But even the president of the
United States/Sometimes must have/To
stand naked").

Despite his pose as a Woody
Guthrie-type country drifter, Dylan was a
total product of Jewish culture, where the
word is sacred. In his three surrealistic
electric albums of 1965-66 (which
remain massive influences on my thinking
and writing), Dylan betrayed his wide
reading, sensitivity to language, mastery
of irony and satire, and acute observation
of society. Next to his dazzling
achievement, with its witty riffs on
mythology and its vast perspective on
history (as in "All Along the
Watchtower"), the lyrics of too much
current popular music look adolescent
and parochial.

Dylan is a perfect role model to present
to aspiring artists. As a young man, he
had blazing vision and tenacity. He
rejected creature comforts and lived on
pure will and instinct. He catered to no
one but preserved his testy eccentricity
and defiance. And his best work shows
how the creative imagination operates -
in a hallucinatory stream of sensations
and emotions that perhaps even the
embattled artist does not fully
understand.