BuzzFlash Reviews
September 23, 2005
Bob Dylan - No Direction Home (DVD), Directed by Martin Scorcese
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Martin
Scorsese is a master director who moves easily from "Raging Bull" to
the "Goodfellas" to the "Aviator" to this 2-disc
documentary about Bob Dylan. Scorsese loves authentic American music,
which might explain why he also did documentaries on the blues, "Lightning
in a Bottle," and "The Band," "The Last Waltz."
As for Dylan, to some he represents the greatest living link to the early 60s when he broke forth with poetic, suggestive, impassioned and cerebral lyrics that represented a new generation of hope, social commitment, and individual romance. Before he went electric, he was America's troubadour for social change and counter-culture lifestyle. Dylan took the folk tradition and personalized it into a unique sound, feeling and mood that galvanized a generation.
Could there be another Dylan? That's highly doubtful in a Clear Channel age of branded music that is cross-marketed with other products and homogenized until it all sounds like teenage Muzak. What major radio stations would give airtime to a modern age Dylan? The closest that you probably come to the feel of Dylan is U-2, who deserve the acclaim they receive, but Dylan is and was 100% made in America.
Indeed, Dylan was altogether an American icon: the loner from Minnesota who took the folk music tradition -- particularly the spirit of Woody Guthrie -- and became the voice of a generation of rebellion, individual exploration and the questioning of authority.
As time went on, Dylan further sealed his image as a distinctively American artist by going through transformation after transformation of his music. He had -- and still has -- "a restless hungry feeling" that needs to be constantly refreshed in new bursts of creativity and new musical identities.
For the post-war college-bound baby boomers, Dylan was the inspirational soundtrack for the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movement. He didn't have the personal commitment of his on-again, off-again lover, Joan Baez, to advocacy. He was too much the idiosyncratic artist for that. But he wrote the anthems of a generation that thought the world was on the verge of transformation into a global community of peace.
In many ways, Bushevism is the delayed backlash to the era that Dylan ushered in and was the balladeer for. It is depressingly ironic that while Dylan still tours, "the Masters of War" are in charge now.
This documentary, released in late September of 2005, reawakens the excitement of an era that thought it was on the verge of changing the course of history, for the good. Dylan -- the complicated, poetic, ornery genius -- was at the center of it all. Scorsese goes right to the heart of the complex, fascinating personality of the man who was born Robert Zimmerman in the northern Minnesota town of Hibbing. And in these biographical revelations, we learn much about the hopes, expectations and dashed dreams of the 60s.
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