No Direction Home
So I watched that Bob Dylan documentary that Scorsese did for PBS. I've always been fascinated by the people that got pissed off at Dylan when he went electric. Just personal taste, but that whole 60's folk movement is just one of my least favorite musical movements ever. I mean, I like "real" folk music, but these guys trying to imitate it, totally out of context, and taking all the edges off...yech. Dylan's stuff is good, the rest I just don't care for. So when I look at these people, in the days of the Stones, Dick Dale, The Yardbirds, James Brown, rejecting all that stuff to embrace Pete Seegar and Joan Baez, it just makes my head spin. They've always seemed like these weird, neanderthal luddites who were just on the wrong side of history.
The parellels to what would happen with Miles Davis 5 years later are pretty obvious, and this documentary did go some ways towards explaining it for me, in the same way that Ken Burns' Jazz helped me understand the people who were pissed off at Miles. But there are some important differences. For one thing, Miles' jazz fans had been listening to Miles play jazz for something like 20 years. They can be forgiven for being reactionary. Dylan hadn't been on the scene for 5 years at the time. And Miles' electric albums are vastly different from his previous work, especially by the time we get to On The Corner. They don't have most of the elements that a jazz fan finds appealling. I would even go so far as to agree that they are not jazz, closer to "jam rock." When Dylan went electric, he was basically doing the same thing he'd always done, just with an electric guitar and some drums behind him.
As it turns out, though, more or less the same reasons are given. The argument against Electric Miles was that jazz is all about the players interacting, listening to each other play and reacting to what they hear, and they were playing so loud, and playing over each other, that they couldn't hear. On the surface this is absurd, but it is true that there's a hell of a lot going on on On The Corner, and noone seems to be paying any attention to each other, and even on Bitches Brew I can see how an older fan with a jazz-oriented ear would miss the interaction.
Dylan's folkie fans felt that the essence of the folk scene was a communication between performer and listener, as opposed to the one-way loudspeaker of rock-n-roll. This seems a far more nebulous concept to me, but I guess I can understand the idea.
Mostly, in both cases, the central argument was always that they were part of a non-commercial subculture, which the offenders abandoned for a more lucrative, integrity-free field. Nothing surprising there. Sonic Youth fans were ready to lynch them when they started writing structured, coherent songs, and in fact the whole punk scene around 1985 seemed to be based upon villifying anyone who did anything that didn't sound exactly like the first Minor Threat record. REM's fandom represents an especially neurotic juxtaposition: they spent the first half of the 80's crying out about the injustice of mainstream culture's insistence on ignoring them, then spent the second half of the decade disgruntled at the maintsream attention they got. Perhaps the price of investing your identity into an artist is to be betrayed. "Selling out" is a concept that only fans understand, because it involves an artist ceasing to be what a person who never met them assumes they are all about.
The parellels to what would happen with Miles Davis 5 years later are pretty obvious, and this documentary did go some ways towards explaining it for me, in the same way that Ken Burns' Jazz helped me understand the people who were pissed off at Miles. But there are some important differences. For one thing, Miles' jazz fans had been listening to Miles play jazz for something like 20 years. They can be forgiven for being reactionary. Dylan hadn't been on the scene for 5 years at the time. And Miles' electric albums are vastly different from his previous work, especially by the time we get to On The Corner. They don't have most of the elements that a jazz fan finds appealling. I would even go so far as to agree that they are not jazz, closer to "jam rock." When Dylan went electric, he was basically doing the same thing he'd always done, just with an electric guitar and some drums behind him.
As it turns out, though, more or less the same reasons are given. The argument against Electric Miles was that jazz is all about the players interacting, listening to each other play and reacting to what they hear, and they were playing so loud, and playing over each other, that they couldn't hear. On the surface this is absurd, but it is true that there's a hell of a lot going on on On The Corner, and noone seems to be paying any attention to each other, and even on Bitches Brew I can see how an older fan with a jazz-oriented ear would miss the interaction.
Dylan's folkie fans felt that the essence of the folk scene was a communication between performer and listener, as opposed to the one-way loudspeaker of rock-n-roll. This seems a far more nebulous concept to me, but I guess I can understand the idea.
Mostly, in both cases, the central argument was always that they were part of a non-commercial subculture, which the offenders abandoned for a more lucrative, integrity-free field. Nothing surprising there. Sonic Youth fans were ready to lynch them when they started writing structured, coherent songs, and in fact the whole punk scene around 1985 seemed to be based upon villifying anyone who did anything that didn't sound exactly like the first Minor Threat record. REM's fandom represents an especially neurotic juxtaposition: they spent the first half of the 80's crying out about the injustice of mainstream culture's insistence on ignoring them, then spent the second half of the decade disgruntled at the maintsream attention they got. Perhaps the price of investing your identity into an artist is to be betrayed. "Selling out" is a concept that only fans understand, because it involves an artist ceasing to be what a person who never met them assumes they are all about.
posted by Chris Oliver at 1:04 PM
2 Comments:
Like the blog, though I'll admit I check it most often to get to your links. Haven't seen the Dylan-doc. but plan to and I agree with your thoughts. In recent years I have lightened up about the notion of selling out, but it's something I still struggle with in regards to my favorite artists.
I have to say, this blog has proven most useful to me as a homepage for accessing my links.
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