The sixties, then and now - Culture - Column

Progressive, The, Jan, 1996 by Elayne Rapping

For Dylan took the roots and traditions the Dead understood so well musically and superimposed upon them a sense of moral outrage at social injustice that he learned from Woody Guthrie and the tradition of folk protest. And then he went electric and added an attitude to the mix that allowed the rage and indignation that fueled the revolutionary movements of the day to come through in all their raw, righteous fury.

So where is he today? A lot of people think he's been dead longer than Garcia. Those who know he isn't, generally write him off as a fossil. Every once in a while he gets a Lifetime Achievement Award or something, and you catch a glimpse of him, cryptic and eccentric as ever, mumbling something meant to thwart the media's effort to get him in their frame.

It was only in the sixties--when mass movements had the power to anoint their own superstars--that a guy like Dylan could become the voice of his generation even though the mass media hated him because he gave few interviews (and insulted those interviewers to whom he did speak) and had even fewer Top 40 hits.

In today's world, when the media tell us exactly who matters and why in such constant, repetitive drones as to make dissent near impossible, someone like Dylan was bound to be "disappeared." Even the fancy new rock museum in Cleveland barely takes note of this ground-breaking genius, displaying only a few posters, while the likes of Rod Stewart are given huge blocks of floor space to display their glammed-up stage artifacts.

In this world of MTV, of rap and grunge and skinheads and mosh pits, the music of the sixties must seem as dated and irrelevant to today's kids as Frank Sinatra seemed to me in 1965. But is it?

If there is any musical genre that grows directly, if surely at an acutely depressing angle, out of the tradition of protest music--dating back at least to the 1930s talkin'-blues tradition that so influenced Dylan--it's rap. With all its well-known faults and offenses, rap (the best of it anyway, not the most horrifying examples which the media endlessly quote) taps into political and social reality and finds within it a rottenness that evokes rage.

And it's a rage that is significantly different from that of even the best white youth music of the day. Groups like Pearl Jam and Hole are full of rage, too, of course. But unlike rap artists, these groups most often express an excruciating self-absorbed, narcissistic anger, made up of self-pity and adolescent temper tantrums, directed aimlessly at anything in sight--often their own audiences. For all their talent and power, they lack a sense of social and political context for their much-vaunted suffering, a context that rap, in its own grandiose, excessive, often misguided way, most certainly has.

The comparison is politically instructive. Rap is now an endangered species: Time-Warner has just sold off its rap-label stock in an effort to appease the right and smooth the way for its recent merger negotiations, while Courtney Love is on her way to becoming the next Madonna. Everyone from Bill Bennett to Bill Clinton has demanded an end to rap because the truths it tells about the streets and prisons where black males live and die are threatening.