Cass Sunstein on Bob Dylan!

 The brilliant law professor - Cass Sunstein- turns his attention to Bob Dylan!

Sunstein on Dylan!

REBECCA LOWE: We’ve been thinking a bit in this season of our podcast on arts and liberalism about particular artists, or other kinds of—writers, producers of art objects—thinking of them as liberals. This question can obviously mean lots of different things. I think it can lead us on to some questions I’m keen for us to discuss about the relation more generally between liberalism and culture. But I know you are there, in writing, having stated that Bob Dylan is a liberal. I’m just wondering, what do you mean by this? In what way is Bob Dylan a liberal?

Liberalism in Dylan’s Music

SUNSTEIN: Well, have a listen to “Maggie’s Farm,” which is a song about freedom, and not working on Maggie’s farm anymore. Some of the energy of the song comes from the embrace of freedom that the song instantiates. “Like a Rolling Stone” is an anthem. It’s an American anthem. And it turns the situation of rootlessness, and no direction home, into a situation of liberty. That’s why it’s an anthem. And it’s a liberal song in its celebration of people’s ability to make choices.

Now, that’s not all liberalism is, by any means. The liberal tradition is pretty subtle on this point. But the enthusiasm for agency and autonomy is at the center of Dylan’s work. And my favorite moment really for that was when he sang “Like a Rolling Stone” in the UK, and he got booed, and he turned to his people, and he said, “Play it f-ing loud,” which was a liberal moment.

LOWE: That’s good. I should say, I love classical music; it’s only really in the last two years, I’d say, I’ve started listening to non-classical music. So I’m not the best person to ask you about Bob Dylan. Although I have recently, I think, had a change of view about Bob Dylan. I think I used to be one of those silly people who thought, “I don‘t know, it sounds quite good, but why would you give him the Nobel Prize for literature?”

But recently, I have been listening to some—partly in preparation for this. And it did strike me, I mean, some of these ones you’ve mentioned, they seem quite obviously liberal songs. Some of the civil rights songs seem to be. These anti-establishment songs. It seems to me that “Maggie’s Farm” is an anti-establishment song. It seems to me—what is the one where he lifts up the little cards? “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, that seems anti-establishment. There are some anti-war songs, obviously. There’s “Hard Rain.” And then there are the more explicit civil rights ones. These seem liberal because they are engaging in a political sense.

SUNSTEIN: I think we want to be very careful about this. So, Dylan talked about protest songs with revulsion rather than identification. He described protest songs as basically the songs of dead people. He described political posturing in songs as a way of losing your spirit and just spouting cliches. So the “Hard Rain” song, I don’t think it’s a political song in the narrow sense. I think if it’s a liberal song—and I think it is—it’s about freedom and about obstruction of same.

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