Ten-ish years ago, I was conducting a choir in DC and made a choral arrangement of I Shall Be Released, inspired by its star-studded performance in The Last Waltz. I made a video of the choir singing it at a farmer's market. The video sucked. The singers couldn't hear each other outdoors and went flat, and the arrangement wasn't very good to begin with; but the chorus needed promotional material, so I posted the video online.
Within TWENTY SECONDS lawyers sent my youtube page a form letter informing how to give the proper attribution to Dylan and that failure to do so immediately would result in youtube taking the video down.
What amazes me about the Dylan mythos is how easily people buy into it when he tried so hard to create it. Dylan incarnates 'American authenticity' but he's as coiffed a product as Tom Cruise. Dylan mastered the persona of the folk hero, and he did so through a team of record executives, lawyers, and agents. Even the Copland 'hoedown' with which he enters the stage every night screams imposterdom. The real problem with Dylan was never his voice, it's the delivery. There's nothing of the real person in it. I always want to scream STOP PRETENDING YOU'RE JOHNNY FUCKING APPLESEED!
Dylan's greatness as a songwriter is so beyond doubt that if you doubt it you're not looking hard enough, but you could spend your whole life looking through them for insight into the human condition and not find a single one. As a human being, Dylan is The Beatles' Nowhere Man. He became the voice of a generation by the time he was twenty-one, he never knew an adult life as anything but 'Bob Dylan.' Where's the Robert Zimmerman beneath him? Where is the Minnesota childhood in anything but the Christmas albums (and did any of us want to hear three CD's of Christmas Classics sung by the Angel of Death?)? Where are his parents? Where's his brother? Where's the Jewish inheritance in anything but an Israel song and some Chabad shit which I'm sure he wishes never happened? Where are his children?!? He writes lots of songs about brief relationships with women, but memorable songs about long-term relationships or even friendships are very few.
There's no true sense in Dylan that he shares any part of his deepest self with us. He wants to have an advantage over us: he speaks to us, but we never speak to him. He commands worship from the music world rather than love. His biggest fans talk about him in religious terms reserved for a deity, and like the religious faithful, they seem sadomasochistic-ally disappointed by the vast majority of everything he gives them. McCartney and Springsteen may be just as manufactured, but there're real human beings beneath the personas who love their fans and want to be loved; but Dylan thrives on indifference to fans, and fans eat it up.
Dylan plagiarized his Nobel Speech entirely from Cliffs Notes, that was proven immediately, but he's also proof that you can be a simultaneous naif and a great artist. The implicit meanings behind his songs are so infinite that he's as much a fact of American poetry as Dickinson and Frost. They're sublime things, entirely American creations that sing a democratic worldview. They have nothing to do with the hierarchical world of old Europe, yet our relationship to Dylan is as fascist as anything in Wagner.
Dylan's problem is not a lack of greatness. His songs are awesome creations ringing with religion, history, myth, grandeur, and meaning, but they make us think of the world as a beautiful earthquake. The Dylan worldview sees violence and inhumanity as something epic and beautiful. The way we're moved by Dylan's best songs isn't to love each other more, but to think of ourselves as important because of how we take part in history. The Beatles teach us how to be small as well as great, but when Dylan tries to be human, he only shows us how inhumane he is.
I think the right way to view Dylan is with a mixture of affection, skepticism, and a weird kind of fear. Dylan incarnates American romanticism; not romanticism as in love songs, but the romanticism of reaching out for infinity - Dylan conjures an image of a transcendent world where we can create the world as we dream it. But we can't, and in that way, his songs are a beautiful lie. Art's as much fakery as truth, so Dylan is nevertheless a great artist, but he's also an imposter.
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