sunfeather

Just been watching Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home documentary about Bob Dylan. Now I am an unconditional Dylan fan, consider him probably the greatest songwriter the world has ever known, in a whole other league to, let's say, Lennon and McCartney. Lennon and McCartney are like circus clowns next to the prophet that is Bobby D. So of course I appreciate the chance to just look at Bob, to see how he awkwardly inhabits his body and wrestles uncomfortably with a talent he doesn't understand. This is the one true and unforgettable revelation of the film: that Bob didn't know what he was doing, didn't know what all this meant, he was just the channel through which it flowed. No wonder he gave such obtuse and goofy responses in interviews.

But this ultimately depresses me. For I am reminded again that there are basically two kinds of people in the world: people who think about what they are doing, and people who do it without thinking about it. I am of the first type. Bob Dylan, and all great artists, and everyone I have ever been in love with, is of the second type.


I'm also a little disappointed to find that the film stops in the late 1960s after the controversy that followed Dylan's turn to electricity. Undoubtedly this was an important moment in his career, but it's hard to relate to nowadays: the old folkies that booed his new rock sets come across today as the ridiculous, antiquated luddites they obviously were and Dylan as someone who instinctively understood evolution. What more is there to say about this? Surely, rather than obsessively returning to it for three and a half hours, it would have been more interesting to show at least a little of what Dylan did for the remainder of his career, which after all amounts to nearly forty years.