Influences

13 Ramadhan 1430

In that back issue of Rolling Stone I mentioned getting cheap in KL there's a great article on Dylan (who features on the cover - wonderful mugshot) entitled Bob Dylan's America. It's by a professor at some university in Houston called Doug Brinkley and it's both well-written and neatly constructed. Of course, with a centre based on the wit and wisdom of the Bobster it has a head start over most other subjects.

And that made me think of something that seems oddly characteristic of Dylan at most of the stages of his career. He's one of those artists who seems to exude a (mostly) benign general influence over all sorts of people around him. Consider The Byrds, The Band. I'm not claiming that the influence goes only one way and that Mr Zimmerman is somehow a superior model for all those him. Rather he sits at the centre of something that both draws in others and by a mysterious alchemy unleashes something in them.

I read something somewhere recently from a critic claiming that Dylan is and always has been overrated, but that he's brilliant at selling versions of himself. I think there's a degree of truth there, except that the whole idea of rating his special kind of greatness just is inappropriate. You don't rate artists who are simply forces of nature in and of themselves.

In the same issue there was an oddly contrasting article about some girl who is a star, or so they say, of pornographic movies. (I'd have preferred a bit more about music in the issue I must say.) I found this piece disturbing in a number of ways, but primarily because of its insistence on being non-judgmental about the kid's chosen profession, as if it were just another option in the great supermarket of modern careers. The problem inherent in the article is that this girl is obviously deeply angry, deeply hurt about something, yet speaks as if from some kind of wisdom.

She's obviously in need of some kind of therapy, but appears to be held up as someone who might reasonably be emulated. The writer, a female, seems to recognise this, but is way too cool to spell out the obvious. And so we get writing that is fundamentally deceptive, rather than pushing forward to some kind of truth or insight. It is also strikingly without any sense of compassion. The 'actress' is simply an interesting case, in a way that's reminiscent of pornography itself - the individual being stripped of what makes them human and reduced to a kind of parodic puppet strung on one essential desire, all other strings being cut away.

It's this sort of thing that makes many Muslims puzzled that they are the targets of a critique over the position of women in Islam from those whose treatment and view of women seem deeply irrational. This is not to say that the Islamic world should not open itself to criticism on this issue (generally it can and does) but its critics would do well to turn their gaze upon themselves.