Radar: A Complete Unknown
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Bob Dylan: the musical equivalent of marmite. People either love his idiosyncratic singing style, or think it sounds like a cat being strangled. They either love his authenticity or loathe his self-regard. We have those who love the his early folky stuff and those who prefer his later electric reincarnation. He's a divisive musician. But, I suppose it's this divisiveness which is the point of Bob Dylan; the point being that he doesn't really care whether you like his music or not. He's a musician, it seems to me, who's out to please himself and his own artistic fancies, and doesn't give a damn what anyone else might happen to think of him. Paradoxically, then, it's this attitude of indifference towards an audience which seems to draw an audience towards him. And what an audience. At the time of writing Dylan has sold an estimated 125 million records worldwide.
T. S. Eliot once remarked that W. B. Yeats was "one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." I think the same can be said of only a few figures from the music world, but Dylan is definitely one of them. It's no surprise then that there have been many films and documentaries made about him. And I'm sure many of these have varied in quality. I admit I haven't watched them all, but I have just recently watched 'A Complete Unknown', and thought it was terrific. I settled on it as my Sataurday night viewing after scrolling for what felt like an age through every streaming service available, without finding anything that seemed to take my fancy. Sometimes more is less, as they say. And by time I came across this film, I was a desperate man, seeking simply to end to the inertia of indecision.
I watched it and was gripped from the opening scene, where a young Bob Dylan arrives in New York, stepping out of a yellow cab, with nothing but a backpack and his guitar. The film charts his development through his early career, playing small gigs, meeting Joan Baez and getting discovered by Pete Seeger, and ends with a disastrous gig at Newport Folk Festival where, against all advice, he turns up with his band and, shock horror, his electric guitar, to cries from the crowd of 'Judas'.
So it's a film, in short, which charts the electrification of Dylan. It's a shame it didn't go beyond that gig at Newport, but those who enjoyed this can turn to the Martin Scorcese directed 'No Direction Home', which runs to three hours and twenty-eight minutes. Timothée Chalamet was excellent as Dylan, and convincing and carried the film through, capturing all of the crooners mannerisms well.
Dylan's electrification was such a seminal moment in pop culture and represented many things, not least a crossroads of old meets modern, in much the same way literary modernism of the early 20th century was to the Romanticism which preceded it. There's something incredibly political at stake too: if folk music represented the music of the people, or the man against the machine, (a musical form of socialism) then electrified rock was a product of capitalism – a kind of industrialised, machine made sound, that was designed to be sold and consumed in three-minute audio capsules. So, while I've always liked to separate poets from songwriters like Dylan, and refuse to call them poets, when I think of Eliot's notion of Yeats' history being the history of his own time, I think the same can be said of Dylan, whether we love him or loathe him, and whether, indeed, he would care anyway.
