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Bob Dylan


TheLizard

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I love Bob Dylan's music. I love his acoustic stuff and his electric stuff. There is something I've never understood, because I was not around in the 60's. Why were some fans so offended when Dylan made the transition to electric? To me it seems like he was just adding another dimension to his already brilliant music, not like he's selling out.

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I'm not sure. I think it probably had to do with his image as a folk and protest singer. I think a lot of his fan base thought of it as selling out...to electric rock and roll, corporate interests, whatever. There were a lot of people dedicated to certain types of music, and the protest groups more than some.

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He deceived them. They were very conservatives and loved pure folk. Now he plays an electric guitar so he betrayed them.

People are afraid of change... You should watch "No direction home" by Martin Scorsese, it´s all there.

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edna and Cheech are right. The folks who felt betrayed by Dylan's going electric were a small group of dedicated folkies.

His "switch" had a tremendous impact on rock songwriting. It went from boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl to truly interesting social commenatary and more interesting boy meets girl (etc.) songs.

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Greil Marcus's book Invisible Republic is a superb history of Dylan's music, changing audeince and the cultural atmosphere of the time. Valuable reading.

Its a very complex question - more to do withe th audeience's (incorrect) expectations of Dylan than anything Dylan himself directly lead them to believe (he always denied he was a protest singer for example) - they assumed he was the messiah of American folk music, leading a kind of purist counter-culture revolution in opposition to the corporate and governmental might of American publich and cultural life. When he went electric it was as if, to the folk audience, he had abandoned them completely and gone over to the dark side. Read the book, it explains it a lot more eloquently than I ever could.

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