Bob Dylan's 70th birthday

Rock music anniversary

Bob Dylan, the poet and musician who laid the foundations of protest rock and spent his entire life trying to get rid of the image of a rebel singer, turned 70. BORIS BARABANOV reports.

On the eve of his 70th birthday, the progressive international community once again accused Bob Dylan of betraying the ideals of the 60s. Having agreed to perform in the People's Republic of China, he allegedly agreed to the request of local cultural officials to remove protest songs from the concert program. That is, "Like A Rolling Stone" and "All Along The Watchtower" are okay, but please remove "Blowin' In The Wind". But much more worthy of attention is the fact that the official main songwriter of the 20th century did not attract a full house in the arena for 13 thousand spectators on his first visit to China, and of those who came, the majority were expats. Almost the same disappointing picture as in June 2008 at the St. Petersburg Ice Palace, with the only difference that of the spectators who came to the hall of the Beijing “Workers' Gymnasium”, 2 thousand were secret service officers. At the next stop on Bob Dylan's tour, Shanghai, announcements of his concert were illustrated with photographs of country singer Willie Nelson.

Seventy-year-old Robert Allen Zimmerman is still not known by sight everywhere. But the intellectual elite still believes that he owes them, and on a global scale. He is seen as an artist who personifies protest on the barricades with a guitar, although he has long been giving concerts in comfortable halls, bent over the keyboard.

As if anticipating the anniversary hysteria, Bob Dylan chose the song “Maggie’s Farm” to perform at the last Grammy ceremony, which in the mid-60s symbolized his desire to isolate himself, to get away from the tired associations with the “protest” folk movement. This is actually a satire on the American folk scene, the antithesis of the thesis "the artist must be hungry." After all, Bob Dylan's vast number of songs made him tons of money in versions by other artists and as absolute pop hits.

However, "Blowin' In The Wind" still can't be beat. So the Chinese are afraid of it, but their compatriots still honor it as the anthem of the civil rights movement. “That the raucous troubadour of the 1960s, who sang about freedom, would go to a dictatorial country and refuse to sing protest songs there seems to me a betrayal,” New York Times journalist Maureen Dod wrote on the eve of the tour. The elderly bard even had to make excuses. “At the concerts we played all the songs we wanted, and no one told me about any censorship,” the poet wrote on his blog after news agencies reported his blatant compliance. The musician was also accused of not defending artist Ai Weiwei, who was arrested shortly before the start of the tour. The label “civil rights fighter” was firmly attached to the gentleman, just as it was to U2, during whose visit it was not the music that was most actively discussed, but Bono’s role in protecting the Khimki forest.

Bob Dylan, he said, found it strange to discover that the young Chinese who came to the concert did not perceive it at all in the context of the counterculture of the 60s, but, on the contrary, enjoyed listening to songs from the last four or five albums. In fact, an artist of the stature of Bob Dylan should thank God that there are still places on the planet where they love you not for what you did in the middle of the last century, not for what newspapers write about you, not for what you pleased liberals or dictators, but for what you are doing right now.

The protest singer is not in the mood