REVIEW - Barry J. Faulk

Dear friends, "Bob Dylan, Bard of the Sixties": this is a traditional full-length biography of Dylan from his growing up years to his rise to stardom in the 1960's. The piece posted on Academia.edu is but one chapter from the book. It is the author's intention to let Dylan speak for himself as much as possible. The work delves deeply into his lyrics as the best way to understand this brilliant and complex folk poet. A small confession: this work started out as a rebuttal to Anthony Scaduto's book and then took on a life of its own. The author's interpretations are his own but the Dylan lyrics should speak for themselves, as they were always intended to do--the same lyrics that helped move a generation of young people to believe they could remake the world! Yours for guitars that stay in tune and people likewise, -Prof. Rosenberg

Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music, 2010

Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime despising the nineteen-sixties - all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar. This comic tale of mistaken identity is the the story of his life. No matter what he says - let alone what he sings - it seems to make no difference. When he wrote a percussive-pulsating one chord rant-chant against living in a 'Political World' in 1989, it was dismissed by critics - sub-standard Dylan, they said. What they were really saying was: no, we don't believe you. You are a protest singer at heart. You don't really loath politics, whatever you might say or do. So books continue to be written about him as if he was a nineteen sixties political radical playing loquacious-hipster king to Joan Baez's platitudinous-remonstrating queen. No matter how much he might excoriate this notion of his marvelous biography, Chronicles, Volume One - one of the great pieces of American literature, on a par with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Angie March - it changes nothing. Left-liberal writers still compulsively lionize him in their own image - and their feckless children, who populate the modern media machines, regurgitate the same risible clichés about him.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2006

impetus to mass atrocity lies in a hubristic and ultimately totalitarian faith in human omnipotence. Jerome Kohn also focuses on Arendt, taking Bernstein's (1996) Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question as his starting point, but with the goal of explicating the faculty of 'judgement' and, in particular, how this human faculty can be said to contribute to the generation of a 'common world.' As with nearly all Festschriften, the essays and pieces that make up Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment are very diverse, offering analyses of disparate subjects from a variety of perspectives. There is a failing often observed in books of this sort: that the multiplicity of their contributions leads to a shallow, superficial effect. Yet this is not the case here. Rather, the diversity of this volume's contributions happily mirror the diversity of the man they were collected to honour, a man, as Benhabib and Fraser rightly note, defined by his patient refusal to limit himself to one line of thought or to a single concern. Thus, Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment is certainly marked by eclecticism, but certainly this eclecticism is of the very best sort.

Bob Dylan, a songwriter, poet and a 2017 Nobel laureate in literature is often portrayed as the guiding spirit of the sixties counterculture. Dylan’s politically committed songs in the 1960’s articulated a vision of society that was radically different from the existing political realities. The paper highlights the cultural resonance of Dylan’s radical lyricism amidst the countercultural era. It depicts the close affiliations that existed between Dylan’s songs and liberation movements of the times.

European journal of American studies

In 2015 book: Protest Music in the Twentieth Century edited by Roberto Illiano, Turnhout, Brepols, 2015

2015

Dylan may come off as if he has all the answers in some of his music, but when it comes to religion he is as clueless as anyone. Although he would always keep his Jewish culture and education that his parents gave him, Dylan would wonder from Judaism into mysticism, the belief in some holy entity, and evangelical Christianity. His seemingly always cynical views of the world around him would lead him to be a mystic for most of his musical career. The influence of friends, love interests, possible born-again experience, and a need for new inspiration would lead him to his evangelical years. Although he would return to Judaism briefly, Dylan would eventually settle back into a culturally Jewish mystic. Gotta Serve Somebody: Bob Dylan in American Religion and Culture. Perf. Shalom Goldman. Duke Divinity School, 2013. YouTube Video. Duke Divinity School, one of Duke University’s graduate schools held a presentation comprised of musical performances and lectures exploring Dylan’s place in...

Rock Music Studies, 2018

Philosophy and Literature, 2024

Bob Dylan, like Dante’s Virgil, takes us on an odyssey through 66 levels of Songworld in The Philosophy of Modern Song. With playful prose rhythms measured for pleasure and effect, these vistas are almost all given through second-person portrayals. His gorgeous write-up on Uncle Dave Macon’s “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” (1924), for instance, conveys the “happy wanderer, the chicken thief,” embodying the flagrant aristocracy of freedom: “You’re the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk… The Thief of Baghdad…. prowling and shoplifting… Multiracial, bisexual, celibate…. freethinking… fucking and farting…. Long John Silver… a pastry chef… hash slinger” (p. 237–8). In Dylan’s telling, this great song shimmies through a Whitmanesque catalog of types united in aesthetic thrill.