A few people are up in arms about Bob Dylan licensing “Blowin’ In The Wind” for an ad in the UK, what with the song being all iconic and such. But really, this shouldn’t ruffle as many feathers as it has; Dylan, after all, licensed “The Times They Are A-Changin'” to a Canadian bank over a decade ago, and he’s lent other songs to Cadillac, Victoria’s Secret, and Apple. If anything, the piece of Dylan licensing that may debut during the Super Bowl this Sunday is way more offensive to these non-Boomer ears, thanks to it bringing one of the greatest, yet still most annoying, beneficiaries of the Barack Obama Presidential campaign into the mix:
During the Bush administration, everyone seemed to agree: there were no protest songs. Or, at least, no good ones. At any rate, it definitely wasn’t like the ’60s. In her latest blog post for NPR, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein provides a welcome correction to this idea, noting both how many protest songs there were and how widespread the perception was that releasing a protest song was a bad idea. But even if there were protest songs, surely they didn’t have the same effect as in the ’60s, right?
Odetta, famed African-American folk singer, songwriter, actress, and activist, passed away in New York City at the age of 77 last night. Beloved by everyone from Maya Angelou to Bob Dylan to Martin Luther King, Jr. Born in Birmingham and raised in Los Angeles, she began her career in musicals before heading up to San Francisco and falling in with the folk crowd, mixing it up with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. She was signed to Vanguard Records, which was home to darn-near everybody who was anybody in the folk scene at the time. It’s important to keep in mind that “folk music” of that time was more than just people singing sad songs on acoustic guitars. It was more of a movement than a sound, and it tied directly into the social movements of the time, of which Odetta was an active participant. It was also more than a little non-white, led by artists like Harry Belafonte and Odetta. In fact, MLK himself called Odetta the “The Queen of American Folk Music.”
One of the things you find yourself saying about music when you’re a teenager, along with “I like everything except country,” is “I respect them, but I don’t like them.” You say this partially to not look like the sort of ignoramus who doesn’t appreciate Yngwie Malmsteen’s tapping technique, and partially because you don’t want to piss off your friends. But it turns out this simple formulation stands in for an entire complex relationship between bands and their audience. Kevin Roberts, CEO of marketing giant Saatchi & Saatchi, calls the sweet spot where loving and respecting come together a “lovemark.” And there’s a graph!
Supermarket shelves in other parts of the world (and at certain specialty shops in the US) contain a food product called Marmite, which is basically a bread spread made out of yeast extract. I personally tried it when I was 16, after an Australian pen pal sent me a few packets, and my Cool Ranch and Domino’s-trained palate found it absolutely repellent; I haven’t tried it since, because the thought of doing so makes me shiver. But apparently it’s pretty divisive in the UK, to the point that the product name is actually being used by some music-biz insiders to describe certain artists who have a love-’em-or-hate-’em appeal. The musical omnivores at Popjustice explain: “the phrase describes the sort of band or artist which divides opinion as strongly as the disgusting/delicious yeasty food product Marmite. It is not a phrase used to describe how good or bad something is–there’s no value judgment involved.” Popjustice says that Alphabeat, the Scissor Sisters, and Bob Dylan are all “Marmite artists”–although a shitty band being pushed by a publicist to no avail is not, so don’t try it next time, publicists. Confused yet? Well, in keeping with our English-class form, the term is used in context after the jump!
Come November, the UK charity War Child will… More »
Bob Dylan has a pair of poems, titled “17” and “21,” in the new issue of The New Yorker. All well and good, but I fear that some contrarians won’t be convinced of his genius until he pens a caption for a cartoon. More »
Oh, wait a second–you mean that Bob Dylan’s video for the 1997 track “Dreamin’ Of You,” which stars Harry Dean Stanton as a roving salesman of rare material from the singer, wasn’t crafted from footage from the upcoming season of Big Love? My mistake. More »
A few attendees of the mall-store sponsored New American Music Union Festival over the weekend got it in their head that the songs Rock Band had to offer were much more interesting than the ones being performed by Bob Dylan: “As the legend, now 67, performed ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and other ’60s… More »
