{"id":2564,"date":"2021-06-04T13:52:11","date_gmt":"2021-06-04T13:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/06\/04\/bob-dylan-at-80-a-sober-assessment\/"},"modified":"2021-06-04T13:52:11","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T13:52:11","slug":"bob-dylan-at-80-a-sober-assessment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/06\/04\/bob-dylan-at-80-a-sober-assessment\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Dylan at 80: A Sober Assessment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/bob-dylan-at-80?wallit_nosession=1\">Graham Cunningham<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\">It pains me a little to say it, given my own past devotion, but some cold perspective is needed here. Bob Dylan was\u2014from 1962 to the early 1980s\u2014an extraordinary singer-songwriter and, in terms of quantity of great material, simply without equal. For the last 40 years, though, he has mostly been trading on the reputation he built in those years. There are exceptions to this judgment, yes, but not many: the 1983&#0160;<em>Infidels<\/em>&#0160;album, a few tracks on the 1997&#0160;<em>Time Out of Mind<\/em>, and \u201cThings Have Changed\u201d from the soundtrack of the 2000 film&#0160;<em>Wonder Boys<\/em>, for example.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\">Did Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature that he won in 2016? I\u2019m not sure; he\u2019s probably not sure, either. He was consistently good for about 20 years, an amazingly long time for a rock star. And he can take credit for spawning a whole musical genre. Many other songwriters in the same musical territory, such as Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen, have, at their best, been as good or almost as good\u2014but not nearly so often, or for so long.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\">The truth is, Bob Dylan, now 80, will never get \u201cback on form.\u201d Aging rock stars don\u2019t do that; no one does. One of the most quoted lyrics of \u201cMurder Most Foul\u201d informs us that \u201cIt\u2019s 36 hours past Judgment Day.\u201d Dylan has been unquestionably the most influential songwriter of his era; no one can take that away from him. But as a long-time fan, I can\u2019t help but wish that he had hung up his songwriting boots decades ago. His musical stature could then have remained closer to that of artists who die young, unsullied by the inevitable failures that must come to all careers\u2014even one as extraordinary as his.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Graham Cunningham: It pains me a little to say it, given my own past devotion, but some cold perspective is needed here. Bob Dylan was\u2014from 1962 to the early 1980s\u2014an extraordinary singer-songwriter and, in terms of quantity of great material, simply without equal. For the last 40 years, though, he has mostly been trading on &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2021\/06\/04\/bob-dylan-at-80-a-sober-assessment\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Bob Dylan at 80: A Sober Assessment&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[196,167,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americana","category-dylan","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}