Bob Dylan's abrupt abandonment of overtly political songwriting in the mid-1960s caused an uproar among critics and fans. In "Wicked Messenger," acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee describes the rise of Dylan's artistic ambition at the expense of his activism. Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. "Wicked Messenger" is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Beginning with the march on Washington in the summer of 1964, Marqusee traces the formation of the Southern voter registration movement and the rise of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen. The twists and turns of political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee says, were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic-anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk-of Dylan's mid-1960s albums "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "Blonde on Blonde." Dylan's anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was not what everyone thinks it was: a movement away from politics. It was a movement away from protest and from activism, it was a movement away from the front lines, it was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one." Mike Marqusee is the author of a number of groundbreaking books on politics and popular culture, including Anyone But England, War Minus the Shooting, and Redemption Song. Born and raised in the United States, he has lived in London since the 1970s.
Excerpt
As a student at Ohio State, Phil Ochs set out on his musical career performing in local coffeehouses as one of the Singing Socialists. He then dropped out of college and headed for Bleecker Street, arriving a year after Dylan. The Broadside team welcomed him and he was soon supplying the magazine with a flow of new topical songs - more than forty in eighteen months. At Newport in 1963, while Dylan dominated the main stage, Ochs made an impression at the topical song workshop with "Too Many Martyrs," his own response to the Medgar Evers killing (it also includes a reference to Emmett Till).
Too many martyrs, too many dead
Too many lies, too many empty words we've said
This was in 1963, and there were many empty words still to be spoken, and many martyrs still to be made. Already, the impatience and the anger rise up within the lament, just as they do in Dylan's early music. But Ochs was always a very different creature from Dylan. For a start, he was a much keener reader of the newspapers than Dylan, and, unlike Dylan, had a genuine intellectual curiosity about politics. His first album, All the News That's Fit to Sing, was released in early 1964, on the heels of Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'. There are songs about automation and unemployment, unjust imprisonments, poverty and slums, a tribute to Woody Guthrie and the Guthrie-like "Power and Glory," an appeal to reclaim America for American ideals ("her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom"). Ochs's undoubted social patriotism was, however, always inflected with an informed internationalism. The first album also includes attacks on militarism, an appeal for free travel to Cuba, a song about a Mexican peasant revolutionary, a satire on the missile crisis and "Talking Vietnam," the first musical protest against the embryonic war - composed half a year before the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He flays the cynicism of U.S. policy in supporting the corrupt south Vietnamese regime ("southeast Asia's Birmingham") and propping up "Diem-ocracy - rule by one family and 15,000 American troops."