The Political Art of Bob Dylan
David Boucher, Gary K. Browning
In this exciting new work, David Boucher and Gary Browning explore Bob Dylan's radical and changing engagement with the "political." The contributions deal with various aspects and periods of Dylan's career, including the early protest ballads, the artistic high-point of his mid-sixties electric period in which his songs question the very notion of ordered collective politics, and present alternative disturbing images of a counter-reality. Finally the book explores the more personal and religious songs on issues of identity, alienation and ethical striving. Whereas in the early protest songs the diagnosis and prognosis did not always give rise to answers, the later religious analyses of the world gone wrong appeared to generate a very clear and simple remedy in Jesus.