September 08, 2006
exile from bob-land
O.K., here’s my idea: Maybe it’s time for Bob Dylan to shift from writing more songs to writing more books. Chronicles, the first volume of his memoirs, was brilliant; Modern Times, the new album, a wildly overhyped disappointment. I don’t want him to stop singing and playing, just spend more time writing Chronicles-level prose rather than giving us more of the doggerel verse of Modern Times—songs that only hard-core Bobolators could praise. “Bobolators,” you might recall, is the phrase I coined for the sycophants who lavished praise on his leadenly pretentious film Masked and Anonymous (The Observer, July 28, 2003). It marked the moment of my exile from Bob-land, the Dylan-industrial complex restricted to those who never say an unkind word.
more from Ron Rosenbaum at the NY Observer here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 06:47 AM | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c562c53ef00d834e6121169e2
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference exile from bob-land:
Comments
Very interesting piece, I agree with the author that Dylan's chronicles were amazing but Bobolators have a point too.Bob has said and done pretty much everything. Purists who want him to put the same album out over and over again are clearly delusional. But that seems to be the problem with most rock critics in general. A few other examples that come to my mind are REM and Radiohead. If REM only kept making "murmur" over and over again we wouldn't have other good ones like "Fables" , "Document" etc and if Radiohead only kept putting out "The Bends" , "OK computer" then we wouldn't have "KId A".Any how I'm sure there are plenty of other examples to support the other side too. But I think it is fun to watch artists evolve on their own just like other humans....
Posted by: krusty | Sep 8, 2006 8:53:52 AM
I'm a Bobolator from way back & I tend to agree with Rosenbaum. Modern Times just isn't that great a record, much weaker than Love & Theft. And Chronicles is a very good book. My exile from Bobland came more recently, when I just couldn't manage to convince myself to spend 400 bucks for a pair of tickets to the current tour.
Posted by: joseph duemer | Sep 8, 2006 3:54:34 PM
"Rollin and Tumblin" off the new album is saturated in authenticity.
Authenticity and rootsiness in the mind of someone as culturally shallow as Rosenbaum can easily be conflated into "that stuff".
Sleepy John Estes and Bukka White and Blind Lemon Jefferson all sound "rootsy", but they're vastly different artists with vastly different lives. Until you can hear their lives coming through the music they made you'll probably dismiss what they're doing with those cheap guitars and unglamorous voices, because it challenges and demands before it pays off.
There's a scene in "Masked and Anonymous" where Dylan's Jack Fate, newly sprung from the dungeon of wherever-that-is, finishes some real laconic bigtime small talk with Cheech Marin's Prospero and stiffly walks down toward an arriving bus.
In the upper right of the frame as he heads toward the bus's open door there's a Ford Falcon parked across the street.
Rosenbaum most likely didn't notice that, and if he did it probably didn't signify.
Which is why he isn't qualified to levy any kind of attribution, or pick up any kind of scale and weigh it out - because he doesn't know what he's looking at.
Posted by: Roy Belmont | Sep 10, 2006 5:34:15 AM
Post a comment