Phoenix
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Number of posts : 564
Age : 68
Location : British Columbia
Job/hobbies : Humanitarian work, writing
Humor : Hopefully sometimes
Registration date : 2008-01-13
 |  Subject: Viggo's Music News  Sat May 03, 2008 8:09 am | |
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From gazette.com
What Kansas and Bob Dylan had in common
May 2, 2008 - 1:50AM
By BILL REED
THE GAZETTE
Greil Marcus thinks Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" is a terrible song, maybe even worse than "Blowin' in the Wind."
And when Marcus talks about music, people tend to listen.
The "bespectacled Zeitgeist surfer," as the Boston Globe once called him, was Rolling Stone's first music review editor. He's also written for Creem and The Village Voice, among other publications, and his 1975 book "Mystery Train" is considered one of the finest pieces of rock criticism ever written.
But enough about his rèsumè. How the heck can he attack one of Dylan's best-known songs, a 1962 tune that's been covered countless times and come back with a vengeance during the current war?
"Really, it's like a political cartoon," Marcus said by phone from California. "Fat businessmen are smoking cigars while their heavily booted feet are clamped on the backs of helpless workers at the bottom of their table.
"It's self-righteous. It's smug and insulated. . . . I always disliked it; it always put me off."
And yet it has survived for 45 years. Marcus was fascinated when Dylan pulled out the tune while receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1991 Grammy Awards - in the midst of the Gulf War.
"I thought this was the most extraordinary thing," Marcus said. "And I thought it was one of the greatest performances of his career." (Note: He liked the performance, still hated the song.)
With the current Iraq war, the song has been covered in wildly divergent ways by artists that include the hip-hop band The Roots and actor Viggo Mortensen.
Marcus, who teaches American Studies seminars, has noticed that young people are looking back to music created before they were born in a search for resonance.
"I'm just stunned by their musical knowledge and their sense of context," he said. Perhaps, he mused, it's because of the "feeling that what is going on in music today isn't even trying to break through in any way."
Most Americans are insulated from the war, he says, and musicians are failing to "find images and words to bring reality to what is real."
To hear Marcus expound on those points go to his lecture, "On Bob Dylan's ‘Masters of War': Stories of a Bad Song," - at Colorado College today.
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