A lot happened to young Bob in a few short years, from Song to Woody to Like a Rolling Stone.
I saw the movie and it moved me. How about you?
Here is a good article about Dylan's falling out with Seeger.
A Complete Unknown isn’t that interested in clarifying this point. Because the film almost entirely ignores politics. And it should ignore Dylan’s politics, whatever they might be. But it makes an unforgivable error in ignoring the politics of his Greenwich Village confederates who adhered to the Maoist dictum that art must serve the people, avoid manifestations of the individual, and reject commercial concerns.
As one critic complained in the aftermath of Newport, for the new, electrified Dylan “the words [matter] less than the beat.” What he “used to stand for, whether one agreed with it or not, was much clearer than what he stands for now. [Which is] maybe himself.” Irwin Silber, the rigidly Communist editor of Sing Out! magazine, the in-flight magazine of the radical folk scene, excoriated the New Dylan for having abandoned political songs in favor of “inner-directed, innerprobing, self-conscious” music. Decades later, Silber reflected on his criticism by acknowledging that his “biggest concern was not with the electricity. . . but with what Dylan was saying and doing about moving away from his political songs.”
Dylan was so desperate to slip out from folk’s rigid ideological strictures that he would simply deny the politics even of his most transparently political songs. “Blowin’ in the Wind” wasn’t topical but “just a feeling I felt because I felt that way.” Already in 1964, he would shrug at a song he wrote about the lynching of Emmett Till, “which in all honesty was a bullshit song. . . . I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony.”
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