The unified theory is that Dylan just sort of smooshed together music and poems into new songs, like a sausage making machine.
> Which leads us to my Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan. The theory isn’t especially complicated or even novel... In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, Dylan has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. Anytime he has been in trouble, he could rely on that bottomless source.
> “These songs didn’t come out of thin air,” he said. “I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. . . . It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock and roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. . . . If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.
> “All these songs are connected,” he went on. “I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.”
I though that was sort of a given. That's how creativity seems to work for everybody. I'm trying hard to think of some exceptions. I don't know that it's "unified" either, since it doesn't explain why his songs are different than other people's songs. It doesn't explain very much, really.
But it's still a pretty good article. I liked that it wasn't trying to destroy the myth or somehow take down the artist, which I was afraid it would try to do.
> it wasn't trying to destroy the myth or somehow take down the artist
The only unified theory that seems to hold is that the artist himself doesn't want the myth or the artist. He likes music, he makes music, and he has occasionally given extra attention to his lyrics, but on the whole doesn't work his lyrics the way we typically expect a poet to do.
From the article, quoting "Don't Look Back":
“I got nothing to say about these things I write,” he informs the interviewer. “I don’t write them for any reason. There’s no great message. I mean, if, you know, you wanna tell other people that, go ahead and tell them, but I’m not going to have to answer to it.”
When I was younger, I listened to a lot of Dylan’s classic stuff and then drove 10 hours to see him in concert. I was massively disappointed that the era of a guy sitting alone on a stool singing poetry were long gone. He was with some sort of jazz rock band that was so god awful I left halfway through. Worse still, he faced perpendicular to the audience, never looked up from the keyboard, and left me with a distinct “Weekend at Bernie’s” feel. A few years later he played my hometown and I went again, ever the optimist hoping that the previous show had been a fluke, the consequence of falling in with a bad (jazz-rock) crowd. Alas, it was the same and I left twenty minutes into it. Seems the never-ending tour should’ve ended.
This is an impressive bit of historical revisionism, entirely in tune with the pro-war memes saturating American corporate media these days related to the continued war in Ukraine (and the official state opposition to a negotiated settlement). In particular, it manages to entirely avoid mentioning Vietnam! Is the author and editor really unaware of that aspect of Bob Dylan's history? Let's see if we can help them out:
> "Through Bob Dylan’s music, the Vietnam War was able to be fought through the use of music as a means of protest. His songs clearly addressed the war, demonstrating that people were speaking about it, as well as expressing the ambivalence that many in the field felt. Despite the fact that the majority of his anti-war songs were written to protest the Vietnam War, many of them are still used today to express opposition to current-day conflicts... Masters of War, The Times They Are A Changin’, and All Along the Watchtower all discussed the atrocities of the war, whereas The Weight, as well as All Along the Watchtower, addressed the general unrest and unease of the time."
> On June 20, 2015, the United States released its 2015 Summer Olympics schedule. The Times They Are A-Changin’ was released in 1963, when Americans were growing increasingly upset with Vietnam.
What? Was that article written by an AI? Your comment as well seems completely disconnected from the New Yorker piece and a flimsy excuse to use Dylan for your own gains. This is the type of behavior that drove Dylan away from the protest movements in the 60s.
There are about a hundred other articles on Bob Dylan and his anti-Vietnam war protest songs, if you don't like that particlar one. Here's something from a decade ago for example:
> "HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM (AP) - Bob Dylan, whose anti-war anthems made him the face of protest against a war that continues to haunt a generation of Americans, finally got his chance to see Vietnam - at peace."
Isn't it just a little bit odd that a New Yorker retrospective piece on Bob Dylan doesn't even mention Vietnam? And isn't that most likely due to the corporate media cheerleading for escalation of the war in Ukraine?
Quite so, Bob is foremost a troubadour who hated being called the 'voice of a generation' and the certain brand of hippies who titled him as such. Talk about missing the point.
> "In over 40 years, Bob Dylan has not performed in the United States."
I can't get past the opening of that article. Am I missing something? What is the forty year period that Bob Dylan has not performed in the United States?
> Which leads us to my Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan. The theory isn’t especially complicated or even novel... In order to stave off creative exhaustion and intimations of mortality, Dylan has, over and over again, returned to what fed him in the first place—the vast tradition of American song. Anytime he has been in trouble, he could rely on that bottomless source.
> “These songs didn’t come out of thin air,” he said. “I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth. . . . It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock and roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. . . . If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.
> “All these songs are connected,” he went on. “I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.”
I though that was sort of a given. That's how creativity seems to work for everybody. I'm trying hard to think of some exceptions. I don't know that it's "unified" either, since it doesn't explain why his songs are different than other people's songs. It doesn't explain very much, really.
But it's still a pretty good article. I liked that it wasn't trying to destroy the myth or somehow take down the artist, which I was afraid it would try to do.