Probably the most famous tour in popular music since the 1960s is Bob Dylan’s world tour of 1966, where the, till now, acoustic folk-based Dylan went electric, and was booed and heckled relentlessly by the hardcore folk element, previously when he seemed a perfect figurehead for the movement, was now famously being roared at as “Judas”. On the surface the hatred was due to he, the icon of the protest movement, was now embracing rock n roll decadence, and betraying all the longing for idealism. But within socialist ideology, all art must be propaganda for the movement, and all morality is that which serves the movement. The only permitted stance regarding existent forms of society, including its morality, is protest against and subversion of them. The cult of Progress is by definition moving away from the past, “progressing” away from it, a past to which a negative value judgment is intrinsically attached.
So Dylan in going electric and concerning himself and his art with more personal concerns than simply protest against external reality, could certainly no longer be pigeonholed as a figurehead and propagandist for the ideology, and, not that it had to be consciously understood, he now had to be literally shouted down. And so, though I don’t know if it’s been pointed out elsewhere, he was a victim of cancel culture, which is the standad and “correct” position of the totalitarian ideology’s adherents to forces it feels to be opposed to itself.
There is actually a parallel with the early career of Dostoevsky in Russia in the mid19th century. His first work, Poor Folk was hailed as a masterpiece, particularly by the foremost critic Belinsky, who possessed a degree of influence it might be hard to fathom in our time. Besides its wealth as a work of art, much of this adulation spring from the fact that the novel, and Dostoevsky himself, seems to fit perfectly the desire for a “protest literature”, pointing to the sad fate of society’s downtrodden poor folk, helpless beneath cruel society. This may have been partially true in terms of the book, though also something of a crude simplification.
With his next work however, the far more interesting, deep and strange work The Double, influenced much by the work of Nikolai Gogol, Dostoevsky could certainly not simply be reduced to the role of a simple propagandising figurehead for a simplistic ideology, and with this far deeper work, Dostoevsky saw his support from the influential progressive critics vanish. His renown did not resurrect till far later, with the work The House of the Dead, about life in the Siberian prison camp where he had served for, ironically, his subversive activities, because of his hatred of serfdom. Perhaps that he could now be, even if uncomfortably, considered a protest writer/ propagandist again, helped this rehabilitation. Not that this illusion could last long.
Below is Ballad of a Thin Man from that tour. Imagine being so stupid and blinkered as to think this is the work of a sell-out, and that you’re now looking down at him from the height of your truth and integrity. That’s how powerful delusion can be - and all the more so when it’s a collective one. Dylan as you see begins with trying to get these poor self-righteous clowns to shut up and let him play - and this snippet gives a very mild glimpse of what he was receiving at this time from these people. The guy blathering in pompous fury about Dylan crawling through the gutter is of course as usual a well-educated, middle-class guy, though convinced he stands knee-deep and arm-in-arm in the mud with the downtrodden.
This is what happens when this “intelligentsia” in their mental straitjackets encounter a kind of living, elemental force of freedom. They might embrace such a one at first for a while, but when this person ultimately refuses to conform to their parameters, if they don’t step beyond their old selves, their rejection of him is off the scale. Not having to pretend Dylan to be some perfect being, but Jesus and the Pharisees comes to mind - and you can be pretty sure the Pharisees weren’t telling themselves ”We’re the bad guys here.”
To add, I love the wild, “uncivilised” freedom of some of the singing here. Gets I think a lot less mention than merited.
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