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.
Camille Paglia is the author of "Sexual Personae" and "Vamps and Tramps."
