The Folk Devil

Dylan has been known to say: 'A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.' He is infamously difficult to interview (when he does feel like being interviewed, which isn't often), and has frequently lied to the press in order to protect his privacy (and possibly to perpetuate the sense of mystery that many of his fans are fascinated by). 'Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. So I disappear a lot'.

I think that it is the elusiveness behind this paradox that arguably makes him something of a 'folk devil' (Thornton 1995) - he caused an outrage from the Folk community when he 'turned electric', for example, as he 'deviated' from the genre he had been so appreciated for until that point (and so shirked his 'responsibility' to satify the demands of fans, and so at least temporarily alienated them). He doesn't seem to have ever behaved the way people, particularly celebrities, are expected to behave in the public eye. Or, arguably, behind closed doors either, but I digress...

There is felt to be a sense of 'authenticity' about Dylan's work, because he seems driven by the music rather than by the money, fame, or extra-musical commodities of the music industry. 'The idea that authentic culture is somehow outside the media and commerce is a resilient one. In its full-blown romantic form, the belief suggests that grassroots cultures resist and struggle with a colonizing mass-mediated corporate world. At other times, the perspective lurks between the lines, inconspicuously informing parameters of research, definitions of culture and judgements of value' (Thornton 1995: 116).

Personally, I think it would be fair to say that many Dylan fans express such a romanticised sense of the authenticity of his music (and personality/lifestyle), and have (in my experience) a tendancy to be quite scrupulous in their judgements of mass-produced, 'brainwashing' music.

Thornton, S. (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. UK: Polity Press.