Bob Dylan ain't talking: one man's vast comic adventure in American music, dramaturgy, and mysticism

[Extract] Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime despising the nineteen-sixties - all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar. This comic tale of mistaken identity is the the story of his life. No matter what he says - let alone what he sings - it seems to make no difference. When he wrote a percussive-pulsating one chord rant-chant against living in a 'Political World' in 1989, it was dismissed by critics - sub-standard Dylan, they said. What they were really saying was: no, we don't believe you. You are a protest singer at heart. You don't really loath politics, whatever you might say or do. So books continue to be written about him as if he was a nineteen sixties political radical playing loquacious-hipster king to Joan Baez's platitudinous-remonstrating queen. No matter how much he might excoriate this notion of his marvelous biography, Chronicles, Volume One - one of the great pieces of American literature, on a par with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Angie March - it changes nothing. Left-liberal writers still compulsively lionize him in their own image - and their feckless children, who populate the modern media machines, regurgitate the same risible clichés about him