Wow! eBook
Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan And the 1960s Expanded Edition
Author(s): Mike Marqusee (Author)
- Publisher: Seven Stories Press
- Publication Date: October 4, 2005
- Edition: Expanded
- Language: English
- Print length: 376 pages
- ISBN-10: 1583226869
- ISBN-13: 9781583226865
Book Description
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 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. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan’s mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous.
Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, 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.”
Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan’s mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous.
Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, 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.”
Editorial Reviews
Review
“In this remarkable reflection on the culture of the sixties, Mike Marqusee restores the forgotten moral and political contexts of Dylan’s supernova years. In doing so, he rescues one of the most urgent poetic voices in American history from the condescension of his own later cynicism.” –Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
“Buy this now. Even as ‘The Times They are a-Changin” and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ played their crucial role in creating a new politically active youth culture, as Mike Marqusee notes, their author abandoned any interest in being the Voice of a Generation. Instead, Bob Dylan embarked on a far more personal and enigmatic quest that continues to this day. Marqusee makes a case for appreciating Dylan’s finger-pointing songs as more than apprentice work and proves an able explainer of the tether between them and their era.”
–Rolling StoneAbout the Author
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.
