Obama may have cheapened it by turning it into a Golden Turkey Award.
Bob Dylan proves the theory right that not everybody who can write songs should actually try to SING them but should leave the job to the professional warblers. Dylan had and has NO talent whatsoever as a performer, and his songs were sometimes bullshit. Even John Lennon, who was no slouch as a songwriter, saw through Bob Dylan's act. He believed Dylan got away with murder with some of his lyrics and thought he could write crap, too. His much-beloved song, "I Am the Walrus," was said to be at least in part poking fun at Bob Dylan. It was a better song than just about everything Dylan wrote, by the way.
In his early years, Dylan for the most part recited or half-sang his lyrics accompanied by a guitar and bad harmonica playing, but then sometime around the release of the album Nashville Skyline, he actually tried to sing outright. As I can fully remember, "Lay Lady Lay," from around 1969, was a big hit for him but was like nails on a chalkboard to hear. Listening to Bob talk was bad enough, but hearing him "sing" was excruciating.
Time hasn't been kind to Dylan or to his golden voice. Some eighteen years ago, I think it was, Dylan was on PBS for some special. I hadn't listened to him in years and thought I'd give the poor guy a listen. I thought maybe after all that time his voice would have improved with age. He strummed on a guitar and did very, very well at it, but then he opened his mouth. That killed it. He was literally unlistenable and could not be understood at all. Subtitles were necessary to understand what he was "singing." I had to shut the television off.
The WSWS's David Walsh isn't kind to Obama here, but he skewers Dylan for his "artistic decay." Considering there wasn't much artistry to begin with, it isn't such a huge loss:
Much of Dylan’s music does not stand up. It is too careless, self-indulgent and often not interesting musically. The “poetic” qualities of his language, so highly praised in the 1960s, generally seem strained and unfocused, on occasion simply foolish, today.
In any event, the singer jumped ship politically decades ago, even before the mass anti-Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s, in which he played no role. Dylan responded to the narrowness of the Stalinist-influenced folk music world, and its disapproval of his particular musical-artistic evolution, by throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the manner of a rather conventional American anti-communist. He disavowed any interest in “protest” or politics, past or present, declaring a plague on everyone’s house, and increasingly cast his lot in with the mainstream music scene. Of course some will disagree, but I find it difficult to point to an urgent or compelling album in the past 45 years.
Dylan’s gravitation toward Christian fundamentalism, Judaism, Zionism and no doubt a good many more –isms over the past decades has been well recorded. His appearance at the White House on Tuesday came as absolutely no surprise, even if one cannot help but register disappointment in regard to someone who once genuinely stood out. The May 29 ceremony simply put the finishing and very public touch to a protracted process of moral and artistic decay.
Dylan was mostly a lucky guy who was in the right place at the right time. He tried to be an imitation Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger although he would never be in that league artisticially. He succeeded wildly because his folk act coincided with interest in folk music in general. His pretentious lyrics appealed to kids who were bored with songs about teen love affairs gone bad and forced them to think about what they were hearing. No longer could a rock or pop song have a good melody and catchy lyrics that you could hum or dance to; they had to have a message. "Message music" was one of the worst things that ever happened to popular music, and Bob Dylan was largely responsible for it.
Here's the Medal of Freedom ceremony. Dylan doesn't say a word:
