Dowd Blows In Dylan's Wind

In "Dylan's new tune in China," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd gives the ancient folk singer a good swift kick in the pants.

"Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out."

Dowd's pit-bull attack on the icon-legend is obviously an attempt to smear any "good feelings" baby-boomers and aging hippies may have about the troubador.

Here is my simple but solid response to Dowd's doo-doo:"It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains." ~ Thomas H. Huxley

Truth be told, if you were Bob Dylan, wouldn't you rather be on your way home with a pocketful of coins than otherwise detained in a place you would rather not be? Back to Dowd's piece:

"A 22-year-old Dylan did walk off “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

But he’s the first to admit he cashes in.

David Hajdu, the New Republic music critic, says the singer has always shown a tension between “not wanting to be a leader and wanting to be a celebrity.”

In Hajdu’s book, “Positively 4th Street,” Dylan is quoted saying that critics who charged that he’d sold out to rock ’n’ roll had it backward.

“I never saw myself as a folksinger,” he said. “They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw (what) a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.”

“Folk music,” he concluded, “is a bunch of fat people.” "

So I guess Bobby D is fat and happy? More power to him!



Tags: Bob Dylan, Maureen Dowd