Dylan, Bob. Chronicles: Volume One; Simon & Schuster, NY, 2004.
I read this book in only a few days. I am not sure why, but I found it fascinating. I think it has to do with its relevance to American culture, something American Muslims need to concern themselves with more, but Ill get back to that later.
This book should have been called �Ramblings� instead of �Chronicles�. There is no chronology. Fragments abound so much that it is now hard for me to write without the urge to use them myself. If you asked me what the point was, I wouldn�t be able to say. If you were thinking you could write a report on the life of the author you�d be disappointed. I wouldn�t even classify it as a biography. It is more like a long conversation over coffee � the kind a younger person stumbles into with a wise elder where the youth wouldn�t get a word in edgewise. He wouldn�t need to. You can hear the voice of Bob Dylan speaking through this style of writing as if he were sitting right there, rambling on from one subject to another right across the table from you.
And he pulls it off because he is a poet. His fragmented-style of speech on a range of subjects from his own youth, to the music scene when he was getting started, to observations on historical and then-current events, to his discussions of other musicians and so forth � it all has a prosaic resonance that carries the reader through the book without effort. At the same time he comes across fully human rather than as a larger than life megastar. A lull occurs in the book where he dawdles too much on one of his recording sessions, but in emerging from the details of the experience, you have the realization that this is not an untouchable musical genius with mysterious powers, producing his work by way of some divine revelatory exchange with the heavens, but an artist who struggles with his craft and never quite settles on satisfaction with the result.
The artistic personality finds acceptance here. Perhaps that is why I loved reading this book so much. I felt like if Bob Dylan were actually here saying to me what I was reading, the generation gap would not hinder the exchange. I grew up in the 80s. The first time I saw Bob Dylan was on the �We Are the World� video. My friends and I thought it was a riot to imitate his nasal off-key verses. We didn�t know about Bob Dylan. We wondered who let him in the studio with all those �stars�. Years later I was working in a CD store (record stores were being phased out) when Dylan�s 3-CD box set of bootleg recordings came out. By then I knew Dylan was important because he wrote �All Along the Watchtower�, which was one of my favorite Hendrix songs. I got the bootleg discs and couldn�t stop playing them. I didn�t bother with anything else. The bootlegs were perfect to me. Like Robert Johnson, unfinished, unproduced, a man with his guitar and harmonica singing poetry, singing stories � real music. My best friend at the time and I had a �band� � but our initial format was me singing my own lines and him playing acoustic guitar. I liked the simplicity. When we went to the studio our engineer/producer told us we needed to hype things up and add more instruments if we wanted to actually sell anything. I told him � �Bob Dylan gets away with this�. He said, �That�s because he�s Bob Dylan�. We caved and rearranged most of the music so we could sell. The local stations still wouldn�t play us though. They said we were too eclectic. We sold all the copies we made to our friends and relatives.
But I did not really know Bob Dylan. I wasn�t alive when he started out nor did I witness what he went through as a pop icon expected to lead a revolution. But this book introduced to me his world: folk music and whoever the Beat poets were. Whatever it is I know I like it. I feel like I am on the verge of some great cultural discovery � an aspect of authentic America that is lost on my generation, much like jazz or the blues. I fell in love with those years ago and in spite of my attempts to leave them, I could never get away. So what is folk music anyway? I thought it was Tracy Chapman in the 80s. Then I learned about Bob Dylan in 1991. A movie came out a few years back featuring �Man of Constant Sorrow�. The soundtrack was great � from prison songs to Alison Krauss. Folk music makes me think of a strange cross between hillbilly heathenism and southern Christian fundamentalism. Being repulsed by both, I still like it. Reading this book I discovered that Arlo Guthrie is Woody Guthrie�s son. I only knew Woody Guthrie because of the poem on Dylan�s bootleg collection and nothing more. But I salvaged a memory of an Arlo Guthrie record my parents had. The motorcycle and the pickle was the only proper song I paid any attention to, but I memorized the whole Alice�s Restaurant Massacre when I was about 10 years old and walked around my elementary school reciting it to anyone who would listen. I also had a �Brothers Four� record of my grandmothers, which I couldn�t have told you was folk or commercial � just �old folks� music, and a little hokey at that, but something I used to spin from time to time because I liked something about it.
So now I�ve got some homework. After a few days of listening to modern folk music sage I realized I need to know all about Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac (a writer who I had never heard of before, but is of some apparently great influence on the �Beats� as in beatnik [unconventional/nonconformist] or beatific [exalted joy] � incidentally Dylan makes some remark about Americans who don�t know him � and I never even heard of him), Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and other pioneers of American music. Dylan dropped names throughout this book, often without referencing any background information. So I wouldn�t know if they were musicians, poets, writers, or what kind. �Just leads in a detective story in pursuit of identity.
So in this book I learned it�s all right to be myself. It is OK to be one of those artistic types in an engineer�s world of presumed objectivity and always needing to be on time. When I was younger I wanted to lead the next revolution � the one we thought was going to happen in the 90s and make the 60s look like the 50s, (or some nonsense like that). I became a Muslim and thought Islam was the vehicle for change. Instead, I got caught up in a world community with so much inner unrest that making any positive impact on others was going to be a far-flung proposition. It�s like expecting broke people to teach the world how to get rich. Meanwhile I was so busy being anti-conformist to my own American culture that I didn�t notice how much of a conformist I had become within the Muslim scene. A conformist is a conformist either way � someone who�s lost his unique identity and stopped being true to himself just to fit in. It�s a false superficial kind of fitting in that one day when called upon to fill your emotional or psychological needs caves in. Once it did for me, I realized my error. Instead of a revolution, what I needed was a relationship with God, and God is not found through conforming to the wishes of others. That is what Islam means: There is no god, except THE God. (I.e. no other needing to be pleased except God).
I am not sure Bob Dylan would agree with me on that. Despite all his common-sense wisdom there is a strange pessimism that chases his observations. He speaks of avoiding any search for truth as if trying to pin that down is too imperialistic, while I have always seen that search as part of my purpose. His last line epitomizes what I mean about him: ��not only was it [the world] not run by God, but it wasn�t run by the devil either.�
I kept thinking as I read this book � that very few of the people I know, (mostly Muslims), would have any interest in it. I would go further and say that they wouldn�t even be able to keep up with it. Though I would say it is important in this question of American Muslim culture, because while most of us are busy grappling with the issue of what it means to be Muslim today, who has bothered to focus on what it means to be an American? Once we get past the �I�m not a terrorist� rhetoric, maybe Dylan could help us answer what else it means. Folk music might be important in this � music being so intrinsic to culture. Obviously commercialism is as American as it comes, but not necessarily an aspect we are proud of or want to keep around. What is America underneath its commercial exterior? Doesn�t folk music, including country, blues, rock, jazz, and even rap, (Dylan says he was checking out Ice T, Public Enemy, and NWA), provide pieces to the puzzle? The instruments, their sound, the feelings, and the stories all add up to something inseparably American. Our music is not all just drugs and sex to be shunned due to a sense of obligatory religious puritanism. Rather, the culture of America can be found in its history and its art. We will remain culturally illiterate as long as we shun its art as evil and look at its history as little more than an extension of European imperialism. Certainly, not all art is good and imperialism cannot be denied, but we must not oversimplify America and its people lest we be guilty of the same stereotyping that America perpetrates against Islam and Muslims. The American Muslim must have a well-rounded appreciation for both. Dylan�s book is too advanced for Muslims as a starting place, but maybe it is a kind of litmus test � but even then, only for a certain kind of American.
In closing, I felt like I shared the past few days with Bob Dylan. We didn�t talk about Islam at all. He told me all about folk music and his own experiences as a musician in a by-gone era. Rent was $60. You could hang out at the right places and run into the right people. You could be honest and still get into the music business with some honest people. He digressed often, which was cool, because he shared his thoughtful insights on history and politics and other matters. [I noted an interesting comment he made about Swaggart�s downfall being not out of line with Biblical religious figures who also had slavegirls and/or prostitutes]. He did not talk much about what he thought about things going on right now, though I wished he had. I am not sure why, but it just seems to be worth knowing what Bob Dylan thinks about things. Maybe because in an age of such social disconnection, where families are nuclear and grandparents get shelved away in homes, he is the closest thing we have to a wise elder.
Last update : 02-04-2005 16:19
|
|
|
(0 vote)
