Bob Dylan, the 1960s musical legend and icon of the anti-war movement in the era of the Vietnam War came under heavy fire by critics and human rights groups following his performance at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing at the beginning of April. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times lashed out at the 69-year-old folk-rock legend for having “broken creative new ground in selling out.” The fiery commentator expressed her deepest regret that legendary troubadour of the 60s freedom anthems had sunken below the level of other known sellouts “ – even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.”

Dylan built his extensive career on a foundation of so-called ‘protest songs’ such as The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Like a Rolling Stone with lyrics that voiced the counterculture of the 1960s and labelled him the poster boy for a disenchanted generation, the BBC explains. However, the musician was never comfortable with the label and has been quoted for saying “Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it.”

Still, Dowd complained that the old-school touring pro had failed to live up to his own words as he let the Chinese government “pre-approve his set.” She also criticized Dylan for keeping his lips sealed on the artist Ai Weiwei’s disappearance, whose detention happened in the days running up to his first performance in the Chinese capital. Faced with the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade, the lack of reaction from the aging musician was a thorn in the columnist’s rosy image of Dylan’s 60s persona as he “didn’t offer a reprise of ‘Hurricane,’ his song about ‘the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.’ He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.”

A few days ago, the icon himself responded to the criticism in an open letter to fans and followers on his webpage. He insisted that he knew nothing of any censorship imposed on him from the Chinese government and that the list of the songs which was sent to the authorities did not make a difference. “If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.”

Bob Dylan dismissed the alleged ‘China controversy’, that he was refused permission to enter China last year, and also refuted the words of Mojo magazine that claimed the “concerts were attended mostly by expats and there were a lot of empty seats.” According to Dylan, the local press had heralded him as a sixties icon and the seats had in fact been nearly full with young, enthusiastic Chinese. He denies any suggestion of bad vibes. “Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.”

The New York Times explained how he has continuously tried to distance himself from the spirit of the anti-war movement and how his memoirs stress that he “had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the ‘cultural mumbo jumbo’ imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.”

According to the BBC, the notoriously stubborn singer-songwriter regularly surprises fans by changing his set lists. He is known for his lengthy concert tours, known as the Never-Ending Tour, which sometimes has him playing 100 times each year.

In 1963, the 22-year-old Dylan walked out on his first nationwide television appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

Image Credit: Heinrich Klaff

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

About the author

Claudia Sondergaard
Specialised in American foreign policy media discourse, I have a real passion for media and writing and feel comfortable in subjects such as human rights, politics, environment, social issues, movies, TV and books. Reporting from Denmark. Follow me @swirlgirlversus