Bob Dylan Has Been Calling America's Bluff

 

 

"How does he do it? How has he done it for going on 60 years now? How does he find exactly the right words for exactly the right moment at exactly the right time? How does he always—always—wrestle the baffling and formless zeitgeist into something so familiar that it fits perfectly into both our common history and our most uncommon mythos. How does he fit John F. Kennedy so tightly into the fabric of subterranean American history that also holds Staggerlee, and John Henry, The Butcher’s Boy and the Wagoners Lad, John the Revelator and the Coo Coo Bird, and Huck, lighting out for the west, for the newest frontier? How does brilliant, charismatic JFK turn into just another luckless victim, like Pretty Polly or the nameless corpse from “The Long Black Veil.” How did our entire country turn into one prolonged murder ballad, and how did Bob Dylan see it clearly enough to write it?"

read article by Charles P. Pierce

Bob Dylan Has Been Calling America's Bluff: