Are some songs bounded by their own time?

Anna wrote:

Your love of Bob Dylan seeps through your postings.

Let me now tell you my love is for Willie Nelson. Like you, it’s the sound, the words, the music, and more.

Here’s my story.

Grew up in B’klyn with a dad who enjoyed Country/Western music on the radio. (He was born in PA, then Long Island, go figure.) Anyway, I liked it. A lot.

Fast forward to my growing appreciation of Willie Nelson. I won’t go there (Patsy Cline, etc.). It would take too much time. I will add a major disappoint here, missed seeing him at Radio City, dag nab it!

Fast forward, again, to my residence in Greensboro, NC.

Willie Nelson in concert here at our baseball stadium! I buy tickets for the whole family! As life would have it, I get pneumonia; as luck would have, it’s not Yankee Stadium. Family helps—a few steps up, a few steps down, I’m in my seat!

I have the poster on top of my bookcase. It reads The Bob Dylan Show, and Wille Nelson.

The crowd enjoyed Willie, I loved it. I’ve appreciated Bob forever, but that night he was cacophonous, not suitable to the venue.

Since then I’ve reintroduced earlier Dylan songs to my daughter. Here it is of interest, Mr Auster, that what we may think of as timeless, she sees as times gone by.

LA replies:

Yes, but I wonder if people who see something of value merely as “times gone by” are capable of seeing anything as timeless.

I had a childhood friend, who once (when we were older, in our teens) dismissed something that had come before our own lifetime (I forget what it was, maybe a movie, a book, a song), “Who cares about it, that was before I was born.” . Her comment made a lasting impression on me. I remember thinking: are things only meaningful if they happened in our lifetime? Then everything that has ever been is of no value. I don’t think I replied to her at the time. But I remember inwardly rejecting her attitude—which, I now realize, was an early version of the dismissal of “dead white men.”

However, maybe I’m being too tough on your daughter in implying that she has the same attitude I’m describing. Maybe there is something so peculiarly “Sixties” about Dylan that his songs do inevitably seem to people as bounded by that particular time. He is a specialized taste, not for everyone.

However, for me, the things that are valuable about Dylan are precisely the things that do not feel bounded by the Sixties, even though they certainly were of the Sixties. The same is true of everything of quality. I never listen to a Sixties song out of “nostagia.” I hate the very idea. I listen to it because it’s good.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 01, 2008 02:00 PM | Send