OPINION
Woke-washing Bob Dylan
Andrew Donaldson |
11 May 2022
Andrew Donaldson writes on the controversy over the BBC’s mutilation of the music ‘Hurricane’
A FAMOUS GROUSE
A COUPLE of Sundays again, a crudely “edited” model of Bob Dylan’s Hurricane was broadcast on the BBC’s 6 Music station. A line containing the N-word had been hacked from the music. Listeners weren’t knowledgeable beforehand that it had been censored and producers of the Now Playing @6Music programme have but to elucidate why they deleted the road. A row of kinds adopted.
The music, which opened Dylan’s 1975 album, Desire, is concerning the middleweight boxer Rubin Carter, who was wrongfully convicted for a triple homicide in a New Jersey bar in 1966 and imprisoned for all times. After a prolonged appeals course of, Carter was lastly freed in 1985 after a ruling that his conviction had been “predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure”.
Hurricane, with lyrics co-written by theatre director Jacques Levy, was thought-about to be a return to Dylan’s early Nineteen Sixties “protest” kind. It was not with out controversy. An earlier model, carried out reside on America’s Public Broadcasting Service, recommended that key witnesses in Carter’s trial had “robbed the bodies” of the victims, an allegation that Columbia Records’ attorneys warned might end in a expensive defamation lawsuit. The music was rapidly rerecorded and launched with altered lyrics. It nonetheless drew authorized motion: an eyewitness who claimed the music portrayed her as being a part of the conspiracy to border Carter sued Dylan for libel. Her swimsuit was dismissed.
Hurricane additionally stands accused of varied factual errors. Boxing aficionados, for instance, level out that Carter was by no means the “number one contender the middleweight crown”, as Dylan had claimed, however was, as an alternative, ranked ninth on the time of his arrest and had by no means been ranked larger than third in his complete profession. Others had accused the songwriter of “excessive poetic licence”; whereas he praised the music, one Dylan biographer complained it fails to say Carter’s “antagonistic rhetoric, criminal history, or violent temper”.
For all that, the music is an “impassioned anti-racist account of a notorious injustice”, as one lister complained to the BBC, and “the line you omitted is very much a key moment in the story; a key moment, because in Dylan’s story-telling, even black onlookers assumed Carter was guilty…”:
–>
All of Rubin’s playing cards have been marked prematurely
The trial was a pig-circus, he by no means had an opportunity
The choose made Rubin’s witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white people who watched, he was a revolutionary bum
And to the black people he was only a loopy nigger
No one doubted that he pulled the set off
And although they may not produce the gun
The DA stated he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed
Dylan isn’t any stranger to prices of “excessive poetic licence”. An earlier controversy considerations The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, a “topical” music from his 1964 album, The Times They Are a-Changin’. Given the occasions that impressed the music, the factual errors appear negligible.
Carroll was a 51-year-old black barmaid who died about eight hours after being assaulted in a racist fury at a Baltimore lodge by a drunk William Zantzinger, the 24-year-old scion of a rich Maryland tobacco farming household. She wasn’t Zantzinger’s solely sufferer that night. He had additionally lashed out and abused different staffers who had been sluggish in serving him drink. He’d even attacked his personal spouse, knocking her to the bottom and hitting her along with his shoe.
–>
An post-mortem later revealed that Carroll had suffered from hardened arteries, an enlarged coronary heart and hypertension, and {that a} mind haemorrhage had prompted her loss of life. Zantzinger was initially charged with homicide, however this was diminished to manslaughter, based mostly on the chance that Carroll’s loss of life was the results of a stress response to the verbal and bodily abuse somewhat than blunt-force trauma from the blow from a cane wielded by Zantzinger.
On September 6, 1963, Time journal reported: “Following a three-day trial, Zantzinger was found guilty. For the assault on the hotel employees: a fine of $125. For the death of Hattie Carroll: six months in jail and a fine of $500. The judges considerately deferred the start of the jail sentence until September 15, to give Zantzinger time to harvest his tobacco crop.”
Zantzinger was dismissive about his sentence. “I’ll just miss a lot of snow,” the New York Herald Tribune quoted him as saying. His spouse was nonetheless greatly surprised by the general public’s poor opinion of her husband after the trial. According to the Washington Post, she protested: “Nobody treats his niggers as well as Billy does around here.”
As for the errors in Hattie Carroll, thought-about to be one in every of Dylan’s best songs, Zantzinger—misspelt and mispronounced “Zanzinger” by the singer—was initially booked for second diploma homicide, and never first, because the music claims. Carroll was the mom of 9 youngsters, and never ten, as Dylan sang. Time, by the way, reported she’d given beginning to eleven.
–>
In a 2001 interview, Zantzinger dismissed the music as a “total lie”, claiming, “It’s actually had no effect upon my life.” He had this to say of its writer: “He’s a no-account son of a bitch; he’s just like a scum of a scumbag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail.”
It’s noteworthy that, by the point of the music’s launch, Dylan had grown uninterested in the “protest singer” label. In August 1963, he and Joan Baez had carried out on the Lincoln Memorial throughout the march on Washington the place Martin Luther King, Jr, had delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, however he now declined to look at any extra rallies and protest conferences. According to the journalist David Hadju, Dylan felt “especially uncomfortable as a white man in the civil rights movement”, unable to understand the “black experience”, whereas his personal sympathies prolonged “beyond race”. As the singer then defined, with some exasperation:
“It’s not that I’m pessimistic about Negroes’ rights, but the word ‘Negro’ sounds foolish coming from my mouth. What’s a Negro? I don’t know what a Negro is. What’s a Negro—a black person? How black? What’s a Negro? A person living in a two-room shack with twelve kids? A lot of white people live in a two-room shack with twelve kids. Does this make them Negro? What’s a Negro—someone with African blood? A lot of white people have African blood. What’s a Negro? An Ethiopian kind of thing? That’s not Negro—that’s ancient religious pyjama-riding freaks. I’ve got nothing against Negro rights. I never did. [But] anybody who is taught to get his kicks off a superiority feeling—man, that’s a drag.”
Half a century later, that drag now directs the tradition. The journalist Marverine Cole, for one, defended the BBC for “absolutely” making the “right decision” in censoring Hurricane. She was one in every of two black broadcasters approached by the BBC’s Feedback programme for touch upon the problem.
–>
“I don’t like the word,” she advised presenter Roger Bolton. “I don’t like hearing it. I listen to it where I choose to listen to music that has a parental advisory on it. I’m still not a fan when I hear it, but sometimes, you know, the music is kinda groovy to me, when I like the beats and what have you, but I’m like, ugh, I roll my eyes and go, ‘Can they stop using the word?’ … I do not want to hear that on a network station … I don’t want to hear it when I didn’t expect it.”
But, as Bolton recommended, the N-word is heard within the music performed on stations just like the BBC’s Radio 1Xtra as a result of it had been “reclaimed” by black musicians; it was a part of their “lived experience” of racism. Trevor Phillips, the Index on Censorship chair and the opposite visitor on Feedback, thought this risible:
“It is the factor that makes me most livid of all. There was a phrase for a regime by which the regulation stated one factor for black individuals and one other factor for white individuals, and which you can do one thing, and I couldn’t. We known as it apartheid, we known as it segregation. I imply, it’s simply so surprising to me that the BBC has now basically created a regime by which I can say one thing and you can not, and vice versa. I believed we had left all that behind us thirty, forty years in the past.
“The truth of the matter is, if a word is meaningful, and we’re discussing it, and it has some significance, then there should be no distinction between professionals who are using it depending on their race. Or, by the way, their gender.”
Phillips was simply as scathing about censorship of Dylan. “He’s an artist, and he’s a genius,” he stated, “And with the greatest respect to the BBC’s producers, I don’t think anybody is qualified to tell me which bit of Bob Dylan’s output I should listen to and I should not listen to. If the word is good enough for Bob Dylan, who’s not going to put it into his song for some gratuitous reason, which, by the way, a lot of the output elsewhere in the BBC does, Bob Dylan has used that word for a particular reason in one of his most powerful pieces of work, which, by the way, is a proudly anti-racist work, and for somebody who, frankly, shouldn’t be there to judge a genius, to tell me I’m too fragile to listen to what Bob Dylan has done with his work of art, I think this is both absurd and insulting, and actually not what the BBC is there to do.”
The suggestion of a “fragile” society in want of “protection” from its harsher realities is … fascinating. Bolton warned his listeners beforehand that Phillips can be utilizing the N-word in full; he was going to utter the unutterable, uncensored. And, lo, he did, saying that he wouldn’t anticipate it to be excised in, for instance, a Radio 4 studying of a Toni Morrison novel. “Because the use of the word is part of what the artist is doing and, you know, you might as well decide not to play the song, not to read the book, if what you’re going to do is make some second-hand judgment about whether Toni Morrison was right to use the word or Bob Dylan was right to use the word. It’s absurd.”
Bolton’s “advisory” about Phillips’s feedback was no much less absurd. Why would Trevor Phillips be uncensored on the BBC, and never Bob Dylan?
But such paradoxes are attribute of the New Frailty. And they’re unhealthy for psychological well being, apparently. The psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary has expressed concern over the expansion of “collective anxiety-avoidance techniques” like “safe spaces” and set off warnings. “I think they’re counter-productive and, so far, the evidence suggests that, too,” she advised the Observer Magazine just lately. “What they tend to do is inform someone that they’re not up to the task and that difficult emotions are harmful.”
And so goes the tradition. What was as soon as merely “difficult” in creative expression is now decidedly harmful. There is maybe nothing new about all this, and we are able to draw some consolation from the truth that, like set off warnings, proscription can be counter-productive. Look at what banning did for Lady Chatterley’s Lover or, for that matter, Andre Brink’s profession. The large distinction, although, with the New Frailty is simply how anodyne and rightly right-on the act of shutting individuals up now seems.
Elsewhere, and blowin’ within the wind. . .
Breaking information: the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture has particulars on what it has termed the “national monumental flag project”. According to a BusinessTech report, “monumental flags” are put in by nations to specific their “identity and pride”.
The division has already launched into a course of to “conceptualise, design and ultimately install a national monumental flag, with a flagpole that will be more than 100 metres in height”. South African id and satisfaction being what it’s, this “national landmark” and “tourist attraction” will value R22-million. That’s R5-million for the pole and R17-million for the flag.
“The flag, as the brand image of the country, needs to be highly recognised by the citizens,” the division stated in a press release. “Rendering a national flag as a monument of democracy goes a long way in making it highly recognised by the citizens. This has the potential to unite people as it becomes a symbol of unity and common identity. The project is envisaged to contribute towards nation-building and social cohesion. During 2022/23, the project will be tracked in the operational plan and the feasibility study conducted will guide the way forward towards installing a monumental flag.”
Which is all effectively and good, however essential questions stay unanswered. Such as, the place will this monstrosity be erected, what might presumably cohere and unify the nation greater than the truth that the federal government has already beggared it, and, as my sister-in-law suggests, why not make the flagpole 200 metres tall and that method perhaps steal R44-million?
