Rick's review of Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads
Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads by Greil Marcus
Pomposity reigns and if there are a set of Rock Criticism rules akin to the literary rules that James Fenimore Cooper violated so blithely to Mark Twain's delight, Marcus violates them all. Instead of research, he remembers. Instead of logic and measured insights, he flushes clichés, random associations, second person generalizations, and just plain old fashioned bullshit. “Dylan singing like William and Versey Smith chanting their version of the Titantic on the street in Chicago in 1927 and everyone agreeing that, yes, it sure was sad when that great ship went down, but everyone grinning, too, because it was such a great ship, and it went down, and they didn’t.” “The song was never the same after England, neither was Bob Dylan, and neither was his audience.” He compares the song to other songs, to movies, to books, to highways, rivers, oceans, to everything that, not just comes to mind because that would imply at least a cursory thoughtfulness, but everything that comes in...more
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