Free Bob from the Bobolator cult.
by Ron Rosenbaum, slate.com
May 16th 2011 10:31 AM
Bob Dylan has a big birthday coming up (70), and it occurred to me that one of
the best presents we could give him would be to extricate Bob from the treacly,
reductive, crushing embrace of the Bobolators. (My name for those writers and
cultists who still make Dylan into a plaster saint, incapable of imperfection,
the way Shakespeare's indiscriminate "bardolators"—one of my targets in The
Shakespeare Wars—refuse to believe it possible The Bard ever wrote a flawed
line or a poorly chosen word.)
Similarly, the Bobolators diminish The Bob's genuine achievements by putting
everything he's done on the same transcendentally elevated plane. With their
embarrassing obeisance, their demand for reverence, their indiscriminate
flattery, they obscure the electrifying musical—and cultural—impact he's
actually had.
The book and blog Bobolators, with few exceptions, cumulatively give one the
impression of a cult of scriveners all eager for a few favors from the Dylan
Industrial Complex—a liner-notes commission here, a super-impressive title
("Historian in Residence" at the official Bob Dylan website) there. All you
have to do is suspend your critical faculties and never express anything
negative.
Of course it's not an easy job being a Bobolator. You have be prepared to
praise the purportedly profound inner complexities of Masked and Anonymous—that
botched Dylan movie by that Seinfeld writer—arguably the most turgid and
clichéd production with the Dylan name attached to it ever. You have to chirp
in wonder at "Little Drummer Boy" on the cringe-making Christmas album. You
have to, in other words, make Dylan not only unsurpassable as a musician but
guru-like in the ineffable brilliance of his life choices (give it up for
Jesus, then give up Jesus), and a source of all wisdom whether he's mocking
those who claimed to have "God on their side" or claiming to have God on his
side (and Jesus in his pocket) himself.
To see him perfect in all aspects, as the Bobolators do, is to deny Dylan the
respect he deserves as an artist who takes risks and fearlessly goes out on
limbs that sometimes don't sustain his weight. The Bobolators abandon any
pretense of aesthetic discrimination and in doing so reduce Dylan's often
superb choices ("going electric," writing Chronicles) to the level of his
occasional dismal ones (the Christmas album, serenading the torturers of
Beijing). Let's just say their sycophancy does him no favors.
The odes that are produced by this mindset do more harm to Dylan's stature—make
him seem merely the object of the worship of deluded fanboys, the idol of a not
very discerning cult. Like the cultists who were upset at my Billy Joel
put-down (still get hate mail; and fan mail, too.), the Bobolators put off many
from his music altogether by making it seem some hermetic little boys club
populated by Steve Buscemi Ghost World-types where you have to know which songs
on Blood on the Tracks were recorded in New York and which in Minnesota to get
into the clubhouse.
I say this as someone who has written about Dylan's work in both rhapsodic and
occasionally scathing terms. Someone who, yes, is known among the Bobolators,
for an interview with Dylan in which he uttered his resonant description of the
sound he was seeking ("That thin, that wild mercury sound.") I guess for a time
I was a Bobolator. (Jesus saved me.) But, in writing a book about him now (for
Yale University Press), I'm seeking to peer through the haze of hagiography and
discover what really makes Dylan Dylan—what makes him unique, and not just
another great singer-songwriter. What accounts for his impact on our culture,
on me. Why people continue to respond to his work. Why the cult.
In any case, if you needed any convincing it was a cult, you only had to read
the outpourings of rage from his acolytes, who were on full, groveling display
in the recent fracas over Dylan's tour of that secret-police torture state
otherwise known as the People's Republic of China.
If you're coming late to this controversy, Dylan was invited to play Beijing,
Shanghai, and Hong Kong this year so long, Reuters reported, citing an official
Chinese source, as he performed with "approved content." The widespread
impression was that Dylan allowed the Chinese to vet his set list presumably
for songs that might refer to, if not protest, the vicious crackdown on
dissidents that was going on during the time Dylan played the People's
Republic.
Not true, Dylan protested (see he still is a protest singer) in a rare personal
statement on the official Bob Dylan website issued on May 13, more than a month
after his appearance had provoked controversy.
It was particularly notable since Dylan rarely responds to media attention.
(One had the feeling this statement was meant to pre-empt birthday articles
that made this an issue. Notable as well because that month had been marked by
a profusion of defenses of Dylan from the Bobolators who indignantly denied
there was anything wrong with anything Dylan did in "engaging" with China while
it was jailing dissenters and had "disappeared" the artist Ai Weiwei, the
iconic dissident.
Curiously, none of the Bobolators suggested Dylan follow the courageous example
of Björk, who capped her 2008 Chinese concert by crying out "Tibet! Tibet!"
(What happened to the spirit of "Ain't Gonna Play Sun City"?) Dylan's not a
protest singer, the Bobolators maintained, and he was only faking it when he
sung protest songs in the past.
Dylan's story is that the Chinese didn't vet his set list: "As far as
censorship goes," he wrote on his site, "the Chinese government had asked for
the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to
that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months."
"There's no logical answer to that"? I think what that means in Bobspeak is
that he never knows what he's going to sing on any given night; it's all
dictated by his unpredictable Muse.
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