The Dylan Diaries

Now that I'm in full-out dissertation mode, and I'm writing about Bob Dylan, which should be of some interest to people who like folk music or singer-songwriters in general, I thought I'd share some of my musings here on the blog.

Dylan Diaries, part one: The Image Industry

He's smiling in this picture because he knows he's just making stuff up that will puzzle future academics like me.

I spent this summer listening to all of Dylan's studio albums, and the biggest thing I took away from the experience is that Dylan has more in common with himself than difference.

Now, that probably doesn't sound like it makes any sense, so let me explain.

Bob Dylan is known for being one of the most elusive, changeable figures in pop music history. All sorts of crazy stories abound about his big switch from folk to rock n' roll, and some fans are still fuming about his "born-again" days, saying he betrayed them by turning to Christianity. In the early 70s, he actually changed his singing voice to this sort of crooning, country sound instead of his usual gravelly-nasally-speech-singing. Go listen to "John Wesley Harding," then compare it with "Nashville Skyline" if you don't believe me.  Dylan is so well-known for his changes that it's common to talk about him in terms of his phases: his folk phase, his rock phase, his Americana/country phase, his gospel phase, etc. As I went into this summer project of listening to Dylan's albums, I was prepared to hear change.

But listening to all of his studio albums in so short a period of time alerted me to the things that don't change about his albums. Specifically, he always, always, always returns to folk or blues roots. Even when he's trying new things musically, he keeps one foot in folk and blues. Folk sources color everything he does -- the way he plays, the way he writes, the way he sounds. And, in the last couple of decades, he's returned even more overtly to a folk sound. As I listened to Dylan's albums, I was struck, most of all, by the way folk unifies his work from start to finish.

What all this leads me to conclude is that when people talk about Dylan's changes in music, they're really talking about changes in his image. This shouldn't surprise me. The music industry has been and continues to be more about image than music -- and Dylan is a master at manipulating, selling, and protecting his image. I wonder how many fans of certain types of music are really more interested in the image associated with that artist or band than the music itself. As an artist, myself, I wonder what I should be doing about my own image, or if it even matters to the true music fans. How much of my own musical tastes have been formed by image? And does it matter? With Dylan, it seems like his image is part of his artistry, as inseparable from his overall artistic work as music is from lyrics in a song.

[end of Dylan diaries, part one]