Just finished Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, by the cultural critic David Yaffe. Very stimulating! Yaffe is a close, attentive, erudite listener and student, and a wise interpreter of the great Dylan. The book makes me wish I had paid closer attention to Dylan as an artist over the years, instead of just “liking” or “disliking” the current album or the the current song on the radio as it appeared. I feel as though I dropped the ball on one of the great artists of my generation that I might have actually been able to appreciate on some deeper level.
Here’s a particularly smart and well-written passage from Yaffe’s book: “Dylan used to be pitted against new Dylans like Bruce Springsteen. Now the new Dylan is the old one. No one expects the voice of Highway 61 or Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks any more. That voice is long gone. It is preserved on stacks of vinyl, reams of digital detrius, lost forgotten years, buried feelings, abandoned love. And as long as time will permit, and old man, past threescore years and ten yet still called Bob Dylan, will continue to song, recasting those anthems in the voice he has at that moment. He will not be the old him. He will be the new old him. One day, and we shudder to think of it, he will be gone, too, filed alongside a voice at times more youthful and dangerous, at others more ecstatic with belief or ravaged by doubt: a cawing, derisive voice, forever taunting, forever seducing, forever finger-pointing, forever bitter, forever elegiac, forever panting, and forever young.”
From David Yaffe: Thanks so much for your kind words re my Dylan book. I grew up reading Spy and
it was my dream to write for them when I was in high school. Instead, I wrote
for ex-Spy editors: George Kalogerakis when he was at NY Magazine, and Susan
Morrison at the NYer.