Bob Dylan (16 page)

Obviously, I think the subliminal message of “We Are the World” is destructive. The message is, ye have the poor always with you; that there is a We, you and I, who should help Them, who are not like us; that as we help them we gain points for admission to heaven (“We’re saving our own lives”); that hunger, whether in the U.S.A. or in Africa, is a natural disaster, in God’s hands, His testing—His testing, perhaps, of those Americans who are homeless and starving “by choice,” and if they aren’t, how in God’s name did they reach such a fate? And if they are, aren’t the Ethiopians? For that matter, small print and small USA for Africa contributions to American hunger relief (ten percent) aside, doesn’t the spectacularization of Ethiopian suffering trivialize American suffering and hide its political causes in a blaze of good will? Bad politics, which can be based in real desires, can produce good art; bad art, which can only be based in faked or compromised desires, can only produce bad politics. Such carping is as
vague as “We Are the World”—but there is a message hidden in the song that is more specific than anyone could have intended.

As with Michael Jackson in 1984, the highlight of the 1985 Grammy telecast was the unveiling of the new Pepsi commercial. Lionel Richie, earning $8.5 million as a Pepsi spokesman, strolled through a three-minute spot, advertised as the longest network TV advertisement in the history of the medium. The theme was pressed hard.

“You know, we’re all a new generation,” Richie said, “and we’ve made our choice”—most notably, he was saying without saying it, the choice of Pepsi over Coke.

Pepsi first tried this theme in the sixties, when it pushed “The Pepsi Generation” as a slogan. In the time of the generation gap, of seemingly autonomous youth, the line didn’t work. As based in abundance as the sixties were, the ideology of the era was antimaterialist; the corporate cooptation rubbed raw. But the new generation of Richie’s commercial really was new—the post-sixties generation, which is all-inclusive, which indeed has room for anyone from that passed time; a generation whose members, according to media wisdom, have traded utopianism for self-realization, but nevertheless look hard for quality time to spend on family, friends, and areas they personally would like very much to be interested in, so long as those areas are sufficiently distant, say, eight thousand miles distant.

Actually, the 1985 Pepsi commercial was a lousy commercial: a stiff combination of a Lionel Richie video and an insurance-company ad. Compared to the 1984 Mountain Dew breakdancing commercial it was merely long. But “We Are the World” is a great commercial. It sounds like a Pepsi jingle—and the constant repetition of “There’s a choice we’re making” conflates with Pepsi’s trademarked “The Choice of a New Generation” in a way that, on the part of Pepsi-contracted songwriters Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, is certainly not intentional, and even more certainly beyond serendipity. As pop music, “We Are the World” says less about Ethiopia than it does about Pepsi—and the true result will
likely be less that certain Ethiopian individuals will live, or anyway live a bit longer than they otherwise would have, than that Pepsi will get the catchphrase of its advertising campaign sung for free by Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, and all the rest. But that is only the short-term, subliminal way of looking at it. In the long-view, real-life way of looking at it, in terms of pop geopolitical economics, those Ethiopians who survive may end up not merely alive, but drinking Pepsi instead of Coke.

As American singers came together for the USA for Africa sessions, Canadian performers gathered to make their own Ethiopia record. Among the contributors was Neil Young. “You can’t always support the weak,” he had said in October 1984. “You have to make the weak stand up on one leg, or half a leg, whatever they’ve got.” But the Ethiopia benefit session? Hey, it was something he personally very much wanted to be interested in.

 

USA for Africa, “We Are the World” (Columbia, 1985, #1) In 2010, Lionel Richie and Quincy Jones, the producer RedOne, and
Will.i.am
of the Black Eyed Peas staged a twenty-fifth anniversary remake: “We Are the World 25 for Haiti,” credited to Artists for Haiti (Columbia, #2). Especially in the video for the song, the performance was simpering beyond belief, with the singers—including Justin Bieber, Tony Bennett, Jennifer Hudson, Jeff Bridges, Barbra Streisand, Usher, Fergie, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson (in a film clip, not from the beyond), Jamie Foxx (Ray Charles in
Ray
), Enrique Iglesias, Celine Dion, Pink, Lil Wayne, Mary J. Blige, Josh Groban, T-Pain, and dozens of others, including Brian Wilson and Al Jardine of the Beach Boys in the huge chorus—consumed by their own expressions of compassion and pain. It made the original seem like “Ready Teddy.”

on
Wilfred Mellers’s
A Darker Shade of Pale:
A Backdrop to Bob Dylan
1985
⁹

 

This is a confused and confusing book about a confused and confusing figure: Bob Dylan, born 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, as Robert Alan Zimmerman. He first made himself known in the early sixties as self-proclaimed heir to Dust Bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie, singing songs of social change that got him named conscience of the nation’s youth; in the mid-sixties, halcyon times, he emerged at once as throwback to the dandyist bohemians of Baudelaire’s Paris and would-be king of rock ’n’ roll, offering metaphors no one could figure out and everyone could understand, all powered by a sound so fierce and grand neither he nor anyone else in popular music has ever matched it; as the decade turned and shattered he stepped back as sly and quiet private investigator of the ethics of place. In the seventies he performed as walking legend and stumbling troubadour; in 1979 he became a born-again Christian (“His mother’s probably sitting shiva for him right now,” his producer told me as news of the conversion hit), damning the weak of spirit and the corrupt of soul with all he had, which wasn’t much; as I write he has supposedly come back to the world. On the surface, a trail so dizzying not even a hired Indian could track it; beneath the surface, a peculiarly American search, reaching a peculiarly American verge. Bruce Springsteen used to tell a story about a house he once saw in the Arizona desert: a sculpture, really, built by a solitary Navajo out of highway junk. The dirt road leading to the place was headed by a handmade sign: “This is the land of peace, love, justice—and no mercy.” Or perhaps that metaphor is far too perfect, the search merely personal, its rhythm Dylan’s, not common or shared. “What’s it like,” a friend asked me about Dylan’s
first Christian album. “It’s sneering,” I said, “it’s sanctimonious, there’s not a hint of compassion—” “Oh, well,” she cut me off. “You wouldn’t expect him to
change,
would you?”

Wilfred Mellers was an editor of
Scrutiny
when Bob Dylan was in kneepants. For many years he was a distinguished professor of music at the University of York; in a nation where the notion of American culture still brings forth jokes about Australian wine, he has stood almost alone in taking American music seriously. For that matter, few if any American musicologists can approach Mellers’s knowledge of American music—the oldest white ballad traditions, minstrelsy, the 19th century genteel tradition, 20th century art music, jazz, Broadway, blues, country and western, rock ’n’ roll—and few display his patent love for it. In Mellers’s writing knowledge is a form of love: it seeks unities. His unmatched
Music in a New Found Land
(1964) allowed Charles Ives, thirties Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson, Marc Blitzstein, Charlie Parker, John Cage, and hundreds of others to speak the same deep-structural language, and without ever compromising their own voices; Mellers caught meaning in every shading of tone. Taking his cue from D. H. Lawrence’s
Studies in Classic American Literature
(and perhaps Leslie Fiedler’s
Love and Death in the American Novel
), Mellers let Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman map the territory American musicians would have to inhabit to say anything worth saying about their particular version of the human condition; then he translated. It is scandalous that Americans have not followed his lead.

A Darker Shade of Pale
frames Bob Dylan in these Americanist terms, but the presentation is off from the first note. “For more than twenty years,” Mellers writes in his introduction, “Dylan has been a spokesman for the young . . . he has become the mythic representative of a generation and a culture.” The second claim is the case Mellers means to make, but the cracked cliché of the first begs all kinds of questions. Is Mellers buying the sixties fantasy of permanent adolescence? The young for whom Dylan has long since ceased to be a spokesman are superannuated. (“Mr. Masterson has
been known as a distinguished American ‘angry young man’ for the past twenty years,” Frederick Crews wrote in his
Pooh Perplex
parody of Leslie Fiedler—in 1963.) After clumsy curtain-raising, Mellers warms up his New-Found-Land roadster—and drives straight out of his own book. “The Backdrop,” which takes up the first half of Mellers’s study, traces white folk music traditions from ancient Scottish waulking songs to Elvis Presley, but despite the bizarre pronouncement that “when history comes to be written it may seem that [the] significance” of such towering modern representatives of this tradition as Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Hank Williams, and Presley himself “is as precursors of Bob Dylan,” Mellers’s account of the white vernacular does not lead to Dylan. Mellers doesn’t follow it into his section on Dylan proper, he doesn’t build on it; a reader forgets the first half of the book a few pages into the second.

A reader forgets because if “The Backdrop” doesn’t lead to “Bob Dylan,” it doesn’t particularly lead anywhere else. While wondering where the black music version of “The Backdrop” is (not in this book, even though Mellers ends the section insisting that a mature American pop music, i.e., Dylan’s, must synthesize “white euphoria with black reality”), the reader is continually battered by such Mellersisms as the categorization of all performances as “positive” or “negative,” not to mention the categorizations of white euphoria and black reality—and without the fully developed themes of
Music in a New Found Land
the result is a collection of musical facts not endowed with social meaning but stripped of it. The echoes of Mellers’s once-lucid sense of wholeness are here—such part titles as “The Monody of Deprivation” and “The Liquidation of Tragedy and Guilt”—but they are only echoes. Mellers’s brief but intense tributes to, say, the underappreciated Holcomb, or the far more obscure, wonderfully named Nimrod Workman, are interesting, just as his multiple attacks on Scott Weisman as a country music meliorist are misplaced (though the one-time folk singer Wiseman presumably drove Mellers nuts in the thirties and forties with his duets and comedy routines with
his partner Lula Belle, he defines trivial), but neither Workman nor Wiseman are made to speak to each other, let alone to Dylan.
¹⁰
The basic impression one takes away from “The Backdrop” is that as white American musical culture oscillated between positives and negatives lots of stuff happened over a long period and now it’s 1962 and time to talk about the first Bob Dylan album. Why not? Got anything else you’d like to talk about?

Mellers’s language collapses along with his conceptual apparatus. Throughout,
A Darker Shade of Pale
lacks the clarity and quirky eloquence of Mellers’s earlier books; down-to-earth forthrightness is replaced by what seems to be an attempt to sound hip, which only ends up sounding condescending—and I don’t think Mellers could intentionally condescend to American music at the point of a gun. Still, the horrible example, one of many, screams out of the book: you can no more call Elvis, who as a boy attended Pentecostal churches, “initially a Jesus freak” than you can communicate anything by calling Jonathan Edwards a cult leader. The links between Edwards, Pentecostalism, and contemporary fundamentalism are real (it’s Dylan who is, or was, the Jesus freak), but this sort of thing disposes of them. It’s the literary equivalent of eating with your hands.

Tracing Dylan’s career, Mellers listens closely, but little connects. There’s no drama, no sense of risk or vision—until Mellers reaches the mid- to late seventies, when he takes up Dylan’s soundtrack music for Sam Peckinpah’s film
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
(Dylan had a small and spooky role as one “Alias”),
Desire,
the band-of-hangers-on Rolling Thunder tour and Dylan’s resultant film
Renaldo and Clara,
the awful
Street Legal,
and finally crests with an analysis of the Christian albums, from
Slow Train Coming
in 1979 to
Shot of Love
in 1981. Here, examining Dylan’s least expressive singing, his most stolid and mute accompaniments, and
his most literalistic lyrics—examining work in which Dylan’s links to American musical traditions, secular or sanctified, are almost completely absent, where the poverty of the work justifies itself as wealth by the grace of having God on its side—Mellers does not exactly orchestrate his story, but he does press down harder on his material. That done, he reaches his last chapter—and insists on Dylan not merely as representative of a generation, or a culture, but as ur-representative of the American mythos: “Jewish Amerindian and White Negro,” Pagan Christian and Insider/Outsider, plus, for good measure, Male Female. Mellers stops short only of claiming Dylan as part buffalo. Nothing has prepared the reader for this; it’s all done by fiat. What’s going on?

In the mid-sixties, when Bob Dylan made the music on which his legend is still based, when he produced the capital the interest on which he has been living off since, it was common to hear ordinary, everyday conversations invaded by his lyrics: “Let me eat when I’m hungry / Let me drink when I’m dry / A dollar when I’m hard up / Religion when I die,” Dylan sang in an early unreleased recording, changing the second person of the old “Moonshiner” folk song to the first person. One can suspect that the Americanisms of
A Darker Shade of Pale,
which make little sense when they are clean-cut and are sometimes tortured into the realm of the weird (Mellers wants at least a poetic acceptance of the 16th-17th century theory that as survivors of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, Amerindians
were
Jews), are mainly a pretext for what Mellers really wants to talk about.