jane dark's sugarhigh!

bob dylan didn't have this to sing about (chapter five excerpt)

sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months

Pax Americana proved no more pacific than any other Pax. It was a picture of the world, but one with the power of fact; the picture was hard to shake. The Gulf War (not yet “the First”) arrived in the Summer of 1990; already, it seemed part of a different reality. In the ease with which American force brought the belligerents to heel, so distinct from Vietnam, the Gulf War seemed to confirm the new situation.

As a social matter, however, this conflict was not without its mnemonic character. At the Grammy Awards on February 21, 1991 — while the military mop-up slouched toward conclusion — Bob Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Award. It was bound to be an odd occasion, not the least because of Dylan’s well-known recalcitrance in the face of such institutions. Moreover, despite the soft-focus generalities of “Lifetime Achievement,” it was a specific occasion designed for polemic; at the same time, there was a sense of Dylan as a revenant from a different historical milieu altogether (fostered in part by his ongoing turn toward music from earlier eras, previous centuries) — as being out of time.

He sang a song from 1963, “Masters of War,” tamping the melody into the tempo and collapsing the words into a glossolalic yelp. In the description of Greil Marcus, “It was an instantly infamous performance, and one of the greatest of Dylan's career. He sang the song in disguise; at first, you couldn't tell what it was. He slurred the words as if their narrative was irrelevant and the performance had to communicate as a symbol or not at all.” An artifact of the Cold War’s avatar as ascending disaster in Southeast Asia, it’s a song of absolute antagonism directed at its titular villains: “I hope that you die, and your death will come soon.” Twenty-eight years later, the song was surely his most timely and his most out of time; it was hard to say if he was trying to make it mean again through the performance’s distortions, or burying it for good. He followed this with a gnomic acceptance speech, as uncomfortable as it was brief.

Well, my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said — he said so many things, you know? — he say, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you and if that happens, God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways. Thank you.

The odd peroration (borrowed from Psalms 27:10) is as telling as the performance and Marcus’s account of it, telling about what might and might not be possible at this belated moment. It is a study in not taking the bait: scarcely a new trick for the old dog. But there is something peculiarly of the moment within it — an adaptation to new conditions, to a changed world-picture. The song cannot suddenly lack antagonism; it is nothing else. But the Real of History, the new Real in its glory, can only be approached by symbol, by affect. It’s buried deep in the performance, sublimed out of the lyrics — as if their narrative was irrelevant — and unmentioned in the speech. Like the unmentioned occasion of the Gulf War, and the larger occasion of the end of the Cold War, the antagonism is still somehow present: as context and feeling, as a ghost and an absence. It cannot be represented directly. This should by now be familiar.

Posted by jane at August 9, 2009 07:16 AM | TrackBack