The protest singer who turned out right

Published 7:24 pm Thursday, January 29, 2015

The times, it seems, really are a-changing. Bob Dylan has given an interview to the AARP magazine that will likely leave some of his more liberal fans confused. Work is redemptive, government isn’t all-powerful, and Sinatra is (and always will be) the measure of cool.

Dylan hasn’t totally disconnected from his protest-song younger days, but he has a more nuanced view of wealth and privilege and compassion.

For one thing, he calls for private sector solutions.

“The government’s not going to create jobs,” he says. “It doesn’t have to. People have to create jobs, and these big billionaires are the ones who can do it We don’t see that happening. We see crime and inner cities exploding with people who have nothing to do, turning to drink and drugs. They could all have work created for them by all these hotshot billionaires. For sure that would create lot of happiness. Now, I’m not saying they have to — I’m not talking about communism — but what do they do with their money? Do they use it in virtuous ways?”

The inner cities, he says, have been “oppressed by lack of work. Those people can all be working at something.”

Dylan is asked by his seemingly incredulous interviewer, “And productive work is a kind of salvation in your view?”

He responds, “absolutely.”

He also talks about Frank Sinatra — the very definition of the kind of music his generation rebelled against in the 1960s. Dylan’s latest record covers a number of Sinatra standards.

“He is the mountain,” Dylan says. “That’s the mountain you have to climb, even if you only get part of the way there. And it’s hard to find a song he did not do. He’d be the guy you got to check with. To be mentioned in the same breath as him must be some sort of high compliment.”

What’s interesting here is that Dylan seems to have arrived at some truths his parents had figured out a long time ago. Especially that bit about Sinatra.

It’s always refreshing to see cultural icons reject the predictable and bland leftism we usually see. In 2013, for example, U2 singer Bono shocked many when he defended, of all things, capitalism.

“Aid is just a stop-gap,” says Bono, who has made a second career of winning foreign aid for impoverished nations. “Commerce — entrepreneurial capitalism — takes more people out of poverty than aid. … In dealing with poverty here and around the world, welfare and foreign aid are a Band-Aid. Free enterprise is a cure.”

How refreshing.

Certainly there’s much in American society worth protesting, and much of Dylan’s music has performed a vital service in leading some important conversations.

Ideas are for engaging, and debate is all about trying to arrive at the truth. And throughout his life, that’s what Dylan has done. He no longer performs the protest song “The Hurricane,” for example, because he simply got the facts wrong — and acknowledges that.

Bob Dylan’s musings aren’t revelations, they’re maturations. But they might be surprising to his old Greenwich Village crowd.