The counterculture at the time took a different approach. All approaches lead inexorably to some variant of a soundtrack metaphor, as if music was something that lurked behind or around the main action but remained nonetheless in the background. Literary scholars pry lyrics loose from notes and chords so that they can be dissected as poetry (Ricks). Those looking out from American studies enclaves have spotted family resemblances between various post-Second World War music-makers and canonized purveyors of national-literary myths, but leave us better positioned to ponder heroic individualism and creative genius on an epic scale than to observe a song or album in its own historical niche (Cullen Marcus,, Mystery Train).
Scholars who view popular music through the lens of academic sociology or cultural studies typically tell us more about consumerism and youth-about cultures and subcultures-than they do about the music (Frith Hebdige). The breadth of this consensus renders noteworthy the dearth of analytic strategies available to anyone who sets out to understand the role music might have played in the period’s distinctive movements and events. Dylan’s songs thus helped create the sensibility that would approve the deliberate coming together of personal rebellion and political activism after 1967.įew would disagree with the proposition that music was central to the experience of those who came of age during the 1960s. These innovations provided a framework for exploring the myriad forms of human desire-sensual, spiritual, political-as fundamentally indistinguishable. Further, his experiments with form were undertaken to capture the bedeviling entanglements of love and courtship as he and his peers experienced them in the mid-1960s. In our efforts to understand Bob Dylan’s achievement, scholars have yet to consider seeing him as he saw himself-as a musical craftsperson who created a new kind of song.
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