Eccentric Flower:199811/whats to protest

two eleven twenty-three

what's to protest?

Listening to the Bob Dylan "Royal Albert Hall" concert. I couldn't stand Bob Dylan until recently - then something happened. I do that.

This concert was an eye-opener for me, listening to it all the years after the fact. The first half of the show is acoustic, the second half electric. All through this tour, Dylan had been encountering hostility from the audience, who felt that by going Loud and Electric he was Selling Out and abandoning his core audience of folk-music and protest-song fans. (Dylan hated the idea that he wrote "protest songs," and he was desperately trying to escape the box his folkie fans had confined him in.)

On these tapes you can hear fans boo him, deliberately clap out of time with the music, so forth, all during the second set. At one point someone shouts "Judas!"

Can you imagine?

I like folk music OK. What I dislike is pigeonholing. So you don't like country. Does that mean if I want to put a fiddle and a banjo on top of my twelve-bar blues, I'm not allowed. I don't like commercial country either - Mr. Garth "I Am God" Brooks comes to mind - but there are country performers out there who never forgot bluegrass, like Dwight Yoakam, and those who utterly defy characterization, like Lyle Lovett.

Protest songs were always a harder sell to me, because it strikes me that, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, it's a lot easier to listen to a protest song than to actually protest. Aussie is now going to speak up and tell me there was quite a bit of actual protest going on in the sixties - yes - I don't disagree, but I still think protest songs are largely a crutch, a way to give a false sense of social conscience. And sitting somewhere and singing them is not a protest.

I think if I had something I felt strongly enough about to protest, I'd want to go chain myself to a factory door or hurl tomatoes at someone or at least hand out leaflets. Something a little more ... actual. But like most of my generation, I'm too content.

We will know that the situation in this country has become dire when the younger generations actually begin protesting once again. They are facing bleak existences even now - it might happen in my lifetime.

Oh, well. If this rant tires you out, you can go look at the Boston gallery, where I have added five new photos which were taken on 12 october.

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