December 17, 2020 at 2:17 p.m.
Say it ain't so, Bob
Say it ain't so, Bob
It appears to be the largest acquisition in history of an artist's publishing rights.
For Universal, it's a coup. The corporation now has complete control over more than 600 songs written and released by Dylan since the early 1960s, and that means that whenever those songs generate revenue - used in a commercial or movies or TV, played on the radio, or covered by another artist - the money all goes to Universal.
Company officials are universally happy.
For the 79-year-old Dylan, the move caps an iconic career in which the singer-songwriter reinvented himself on multiple occasions, produced legendary protest songs, and for decades wallowed in a murky pool of commercial hypocrisy that somehow never dimmed the popularity of all those social justice lyrics.
The truth is, with his Universal deal with the devil, Dylan has completed the ultimate sell-out of his generation, leveraging his soul along with his songs to an international corporation that cares not one whit about social justice or struggling artists, unless, of course, they can make a buck from it.
Not that any of us should be surprised, for, while Dylan's songs represent the foundational conscience of a New Left born in the upheavals of the 60s and that went on to capture the Democratic Party and give birth to the far left woke politics of today, Dylan the person represents the narcissistic antithesis of that message - and a working prototype of today's leftist generation.
Simply put, he is a hypocrite who in his early career happily spewed out songs condemning corporations and "right-wing" groups and anti-environmentalists, while using the profits from those songs to pursue an elite life of privilege and entitlement.
In his early song "North Country Blues," for instance, Dylan railed against the closing of iron mines in the Midwest. He took on company executives from the "East" who complained that wages were too high and "it's much cheaper down in the South American town where the miners work almost for nothing."
In that song, Bob Dylan was taking on a pro-corporate globalism that was emerging even then. By 2014, though, he was crusading for that globalization in a Chrysler commercial: "Let Germany brew your beer, let Switzerland make your watch, let Asia assemble your phone... we will build your car."
Really?
And now his deal with Universal puts an exclamation point on his politics, as he beds down with an international corporation that has gobbled up the music publishing world and that turns independent artists into indentured servants through its contracts with streaming music services. Those contracts reap Universal billions, but its penny pinching royalties for most artists turn the music stage into a veritable sweatshop.
Bob Dylan obviously has no problem with that.
Not to mention, but those who revered the political messages of his songs will now see them proliferate in TV commercials and other profit-driven venues, watered down to mere sop for unbridled consumerism. And Bob Dylan will have no control over who gets to use them. He obviously has no problem with that, either, since, frankly, he's done it before himself.
All this - the sell out, the advent of leftist messaging as part and parcel of popular consumer branding, the hypocrisy - should be a familiar scene. That's because it's a replay of the general script of a modern leftism that has in general embraced multinational corporatism in its marriage with globalism. Suddenly, these corporations and the bureaucratic cartels they partner with are the vanguard of progressivism.
Like Dylan, the left continues to publicly condemn millionaires and billionaires and corporate oppression, but it's all rhetoric. In reality they are the shills for the millionaires and billionaires and the corporations. That's what the left is, that's what Bob Dylan represents, and that's the way it has been all along.
In reality, the left wants its privilege, it wants its power, it wants its entitled lifestyle, but it wants you to toe the line. You know, just let Asia assemble your phone, just let other countries do all the manufacturing, just let the favored few publish and sing (as long as we approve of the lyrics). You don't need to eat. You don't need a good job. Just do as we tell you to do, not as we do.
The social critic Michael Harrington once remarked of the New Left and counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s that they wanted a revolution without the inconvenience of changing any basic institutions.
How true. Those New Left protesters grew older and cut their hair, and now occupy corner suites of international corporations - those pesky basic institutions again - where they continue to worship sell-outs like Bob Dylan and pursue their social agendas from on high. They are still narcissistic, and their politics of change is all about you changing your life to benefit their existence.
The environmental movement is particularly popular with this crowd and is a perfect example of this politics of fake change. They fly around on private jets but lecture you for filling your gas tank. They preach about capping carbon emissions in America and decree that we should roll back our standard of living by a century to make America green again. All the while they shift their jobs and factories to India and China and continue on their polluting and profit-mongering way.
The thing is, it's not anything new. For while Bob Dylan, and especially his deal with Universal, shows just how ethically corrupt and sold-out the Left is, it was also Bob Dylan who, if anyone had been watching, showed us all along just how self-centered and privileged the New Left was in its earliest incarnations - a portent of what was to come.
In one comment in the early 1970s, Harrington, who came from the Old Left, where, the politics notwithstanding, there was at least real solidarity and camaraderie, described first hearing Dylan sing in Greenwich Village. It wasn't warm and uplifting as old protest songs were, he wrote, but cold and chilling and bathed in totalitarian tones.
Isn't that the same thing we think today when we hear the left wing of the Democratic Party support violence and censorship and all-knowing government control of life? Isn't that the chilling feeling we get when we hear lock-down happy governments talk of a new normal that will include fewer and fewer civil liberties?
That the New Left was always in it for its own hypocritical prestige and power was also evident in Bob Dylan's words and conduct from the early 1960s.
In a 2011 piece in Dissent, Peter Dreier reported that, by 1964, Dylan was already telling reporters he had lost interest in politics. He told another protest songwriter and singer, Phil Ochs, that what Ochs was writing was "bull...t" because politics was 'bull...t."
All this as Dylan was writing and releasing protest songs.
Dylan even told a civil liberties gathering shortly after John F. Kennedy's assassination that he saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald, Drier reported, and, in a compelled apology, he wrote that he no longer wanted to sing about "we" but about "I."
And that's today's left in a nutshell. The history of Bob Dylan's career is a succinct history of the modern left in America.
The "woke" movement is not about "we," but "I." They sing of social justice from snowflake bubbles disconnected from real life, and they either believe not a word of it or know no better. To them it is all "bulls...t," except for their own narcissism and thirst for power. Not least, the left is about that hypocrisy, as they engage in globalist partnerships and deals with anti-capitalist enterprises and anti-American bureaucracies, sapping wealth and creativity from our society while cranking up their low-wage pollution machines in the developing world.
And there probably is something of Lee Harvey Oswald in the rank and file of the far left. They might not ever actually pull the trigger to kill capitalism and democracy, but, if not, they are most certainly patsies for those who will.
Bob Dylan once wrote that "the times they are a-changing," but he forgot to add that the more the times change, the more they stay the same. Nothing has changed for the left, or for Bob Dylan, since those early days in Greenwich Village.
Not the hypocrisy. Not the sell outs. Not the marketing of social justice as a hollow brand.
It just may be that Dylan's signature deal with Universal marks his most powerful lyric yet - an ironic song in and of itself, in which he unintentionally exposes the utter bankruptcy and dishonesty of an entire political movement, and with an exclamation point at that.
That man sure is a truth teller.
Comments:
You must login to comment.