Things Have Changed

I wrote a long post talking about the new Bob Dylan album that was released this past Tuesday, Tempest. The release of a new Dylan record is a big occasion for me under any circumstances, but this particular release carried special interest. Tuesday (when new recordings go on sale in the United States) was September 11th, the 11th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York, the Pentagon, and the foiled attack that crash-landed in western Pennsylvania, about 80 miles from where I currently live in Pittsburgh. This was strange in that Dylan had, in fact, also released an album on that fateful day, "Love and Theft." I went to sleep this past Tuesday after listening to Tempest a few times and being thankful that the anniversary of 9/11 (coinciding with the release of another Dylan album) had passed without incident. So it was a rude shock to wake up on Wednesday morning to the news of the violent protests and attacks in Cairo and Benghazi.

These attacks put my thoughts on Tempest in a new perspective. As did the the release of a few excerpts of an interview that Dylan gave to Rolling Stone magazine. The excerpts contain Dylan's harsh response to critics who have charged him with plagiarism for his quotation of the poet Henry Timrod and the Japanese writer Junichi Saga--as well as his copying of the melody of "Red Sails in the Sunset" for "Beyond the Horizon," a track which appears on 2006's Modern Times. (I should point out here that it was my wife Catharine who noticed this borrowing immediately and brought it to my attention.) Anyway, Dylan says that only "wussies and pussies complain about that stuff"--a sentiment I don't necessarily agree with, but find hilarious nonetheless.

Unfortunately, Rolling Stone decided not to put the entire interview online (and it's long: 10 pages in the magazine). So I actually went out today and bought a hard copy of Rolling Stone magazine, something I haven't done in years, so that I could read the thing. As usual, Dylan ends up raising more questions than he ever answers in this interview. Perhaps the interview's most head-scratching discussion is Dylan's suggestion that he experienced some sort of transfiguration, a realization he comes to after reading a book that mentions that Robert Zimmerman, a former president of the San Bernadino Hell's Angels, died in a motorcycle crash in 1964. (In fact, the book, Sonny Barger's Hell's Angel got the date wrong; the fatal accident actually happened in 1961.) Dylan himself--whose given name is, of course, also Robert Zimmerman--also experienced a serious motorcycle crash a few years later. I'm certain that I don't really understand what Dylan is getting at with this, but I'm in good company: the interviewer Mikal Gilmore also seems not to understand the significance, and Dylan himself may only be vaguely aware of what he means by transfiguration and the bizarre coincidence between these two events. Certainly he doesn't explain it very clearly, despite Gilmore's repeated exhortations to do so.

But then again, bizarre coincidences seem to be what Dylan traffics in these days. How else to explain how the two records he happens to release on September 11th, exactly 11 years apart, coincide with terrorist attacks against the United States?

I'll tell you what. If you're interested in these things, you should definitely plunk down the $4.99 to get a copy of this issue of Rolling Stone with the Dylan interview. I'm going to spend some more time with it, try to figure it out, and then I'll post my thoughts on Tempest here when I've sorted them out.

Hegel and Kanye

When Hegel talks about freedom and slavery in one of philosophy’s most celebrated passages, he isn’t just pulling this stuff out of the air. Or, rather, that’s exactly what he’s doing: he’s talking about things that were in the air at the time he was writing Phenomenology of  Spirit in 1805-1806. Specifically, as Susan Buck-Morss argues in her article “Hegel and Haiti” (later expanded into the book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History), the Haitian slave revolt was very much on his mind and provided the obvious inspiration for his thoughts on this subject. That no one has made this argument in the two centuries of commentary on Hegel strikes Buck-Morss as ridiculous, a kind of huge elephant in the room that has gone unremarked upon by generations of scholars. It's a reminder that philosophy, for all pretensions to exist in the rarefied world of pure thought is inevitably a product of time.

It’s this same kind “real talk” that I hear in one of Kanye West’s verses on “Diamonds from Sierra Leone.” The song is about the consequences of so-called “blood” or “conflict diamonds”—diamonds from Africa (including, as the song’s title suggests, from Sierra Leone) the sale of which finances sectarian civil war. But rather than issue platitudes about the evils of the diamond trade, Kanye comes clean:

When I speak of diamonds in this song
I ain't talkin’ ‘bout the ones that be glowin’
I'm talkin’ ‘bout Rocafella, my home, my chain.

Part of what I’ve found so compelling about Kanye over the years (but particularly in his earlier material) is that he’s a materialistic, misogynist brat—and he knows he’s a materialistic misogynist brat, and he feels guilty about being a materialistic misogynist brat, but he’s still a materialistic, misogynist brat. It’s a kind of honesty I find, well, compelling.