Dylan versus Veloso: The Debate Continues
After I suggested that Caetano Veloso was perhaps a more accomplished and radical figure than Bob Dylan, a number of you rose to Dylan's defense. Dylan, you commented, was the "soundtrack of the '60s in the U.S." Was Veloso in Brazil?
In fact, pretty much, yes.
Here's a concise description of the nature and import of the tropicalia movement.
In late '60s Brazil...
....the progressive impulse is subverted in a right-wing military coup (supported and encouraged by the United States) which profoundly affects the Brazilian arts and the public. Television and Opera maintain a certain degree of freedom from censorship at first, but revolutionary socialism seems unable to articulate an effective resistance.
Enter Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. In this matrix of political and nationalistic uncertainty, and through the use of pastiche, disassociative imagery, irony, parody, and a concern with the everyday frustrations of Brazilians, they construct an insurgent music that gains a wide reach and audience, while mostly flying underneath the dictatorship's radar screen. Refusing the government's attempts to force a highly nationalistic concept of unity on the populace, Tropicalia deploys the benign imagery of tropical paradise, only to subvert them with references (sometimes overt, sometimes oblique by necessity) to social and political trauma. The more orthodox leftists, of course, criticize Tropicalia for not directly inciting the masses to act, and instead promoting escapism. Yet Tropicalia's moment in the sun is not only threaded in the past of Brazilian historical discourse on modernity, but serves to feed a growing countercultural movement in Brazilian culture throughout the late 1960s and 1970's. By foregrounding areas of Brazilian socio-economic underdevelopment, Afro-Brazilian religion (Macumba, Candomble), and the historical legacy of Portugese colonialism, Tropicalia stakes out a lasting ground, and a usable past for Brazilian counterculture.
But of course, since we Americans had our own problems, we weren't paying much attention to what was going on in a country that's actually larger than our own. (Well, if you exclude Alaska.)
As one alumnus of the era puts it,
We changed the world while dancing to [Dylan's] tune. Veloso may be a brave man, and the struggle in Brazil at that time may have plenty of meaning for Brazilians, but it doesn't compare to what we did.
[A digression: You can dance to Dylan?)
The poster is right: Caetano's work doesn't compare. It was actually more courageous, if not quite so celebrated by the self-involved American left.
Meanwhile, Harvard classicist Richard Thomas eloquently stands up for Dylan, quoting some perhaps unfortunate Veloso lyrics ("I hate, I hate, I hate") and citing this Veloso quote:
Dylan
“is an artist who hides his personality behind the art he is creating. He would never ever touch his work with explanation or analysis. And I am the opposite. I am almost not an artist.”
Since this presentation of himself is obviously untrue, Veloso is here playing with words and ideas. (Which is to say, he's messing with us.) His remarks can not be taken at face value—although, since we Americans are so inclined to believe in our cultural superiority, as manifested by Dylan, and therefore the generalized inferiority of South America, we are inclined to interpret this remark as, merely, appropriate modesty. In fact, one of the knocks on Veloso is that he is arrogant—he is—and so I would suggest that this comment actually means the opposite of what it says. Veloso defines an artist in a way that suggests that he is more analytical, more intellectual, less calculating and perhaps more candid than Dylan is. But since he is engaging in false modesty, perhaps he isn't so candid after all; perhaps he is profoundly calculating. Which, by his definition, would make him more of an artist than Dylan.
Got that?
But rather than risk over-interpreting one quote—although I don't really think it's over-interpretation, because Veloso is a thoughtful man whose words can sustain deconstruction—let me just posit a few thoughts.
First, a premise: I'm an admirer of Dylan and don't mean to take away from his lyrical virtuosity (although, Mr. Thomas, I'm sure that one could easily enough find a Dylan lyric, take it out of context, and make it look silly).
But, come now—Dylan had it much easier than Veloso. First, he was drawing on a long tradition of protest music—for a time, frankly, merely imitating it. (The
Dylan exhibit at New York's Morgan Museum makes just this point.)
Second, Veloso was making his music of protest under a military dictatorship. He was jailed and then exiled for his troubles. Dylan never operated under conditions remotely so perilous. He became rich and famous and adored. He was counter-culture not just because it was right, but because it was cool. Could this be one reason why, as Veloso says, Dylan doesn't explore his own motivations?
And finally, Dylan benefits of course from the narcissism of the American Baby Boomers. He was, as someone put it, their "soundtrack." (Although black Americans might disagree with that.)
Now, in his recent period of critical rediscovery and adulation, he benefits from that aging generation's desire to finalize its history—a Dylan exhibit at the Morgan Museum! Could there be a more appropriate metaphor for the '60s generation, a once embraced and entombed within a gilded mausoleum of all-conquering American capitalism? The current vogue of Dylan reflects little more than a generation's ongoing desire to memorialize itself by establishing critical monuments for its celebrity heroes. Not only that, but because Dylan is American, he is automatically coronated as "#1!" by the Baby Boomer cultural hype machine. It's the jingoism of the American haute bourgoisie. Dylan is to the intellectual set what Barry Manilow (whom the New Yorker also recently rediscovered) is to middle America.
Professor Thomas, for example (who, to be fair, is English, I think) describes Dylan's latest, "
Modern Times," as "brilliant." All due respect to Professor Thomas, but...not a chance.
Don't get me wrong: Modern Times is a very good record. But it's not innovative and it's not all that interesting. It is well-executed and comfortable; it is your favorite sweater, your most beloved
Barcalounger, brunch music for the coffee shop generation(s). It's no surprise that
Dylan signed an exclusive deal to sell it at Starbucks. As a soundtrack, it makes great background music.
Truth is, one of the reasons we all like Modern Times so much is simply that
it doesn't suck—and after such a long career, that's not nothing. It inspires all of us who won't again see our 20s. But brilliant? I'm sorry, no.
And we haven't even talked about
Dylan whoring himself out to Victoria's Secret.....There's only one reason to compromise yourself so, and that's sex, and somehow, I doubt that that is the currency in which Dylan was paid.
