Dylan’s Relevance Today

In a time when “music” to our generation has more to do with the ins and outs of Nick and Jessica’s marriage than the soulful, original and momentous music of our parents’ generation, where does a geriatric harmonica player with a black lung voice fit in? Is Dylan, decades beyond the pinnacle of his career and currently caught up in controversy over charges of plagiarism, mired in an inescapable career trough or will his later work stand the test of time?

When asked last month in his first public broadcast in 19 years why he was still actively touring, Dylan said it was because he did not think other people are doing what he does. He addresses the same question in his recently published memoirs, Chronicles: Volume One, saying that he has hopes to be discovered by a new audience.

Between Dylan’s seemingly ubiquitous presence and what Prof. Thomas calls the “never ending tour,” his appearance in a Victoria Secret commercial and one of his song’s close lyrical resemblance to passages from a Japanese Yakuza novel, the Troubadour has sparked some heated controversy.

In regards to the commercial, Sullivan postulates that it’s Dylan just being consummately self-referential and trying to stay one step ahead of his own image. Sullivan refers to a 1965 interview wherein Dylan said the only commercial he would ever do is for “ladies’ undergarments.”

Not only has Dylan’s image been questioned in recent years, but his musical integrity and lyrical honesty have also come under scrutiny. Songs off of his new album such as “Floater” and “Po’ Boy” seem to take lines almost verbatim from the English translation of Junachi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza.

With a particularly suggestive album title such as Love and Theft, Sullivan argues that Dylan is very consciously tapping into other traditions while at the same time using them to vary his own persona.

“The fact that he took these lyrics from a Japanese gangster novel and made them into something quintessentially American, that’s Love and Theft,” he argues. “He takes it, he transforms it, he makes it his own. This happens in great art everywhere.”

This borrowing of traditions and allusion even goes back to ancient Roman poetry. Prof. Thomas points out the striking similarities between a verse in Dylan’s “Lonesome Bay Blues” and a passage in the English translation of Virgil’s Aenied.

Thomas offers his own explanation for Dylan’s sometimes incomprehensible motives and notes that society doesn’t always understand the means to his ends.

“He’s always known where he’s going, and it’s taken us a while to catch up to where he’s going,” Thomas says. “In hindsight we can see that, but in the moment it can seem like betrayal; it can seem incomprehensible because it’s not familiar. But that’s why he’s an artist, poet or whatever title you want to give him.”

Coming to Harvard

The Undergraduate Council’s booking of Dylan, a significantly more prominent figure than Guster or Busta Rhymes, came as a surprise to most students.

President of Undergraduate Council, Matthew W. Mahan ’05, said in an e-mail that the Concert Commission got the idea of inviting Dylan after measuring the artist’s popularity by the number of times he appeared in Thefacebook.com profiles.

Chair of the Concert Commission Justin H. Haan ’05, who is also a former Crimson executive, said in an e-mail that the logistics worked out well.