The Undocumented Mark Steyn (34 page)

Maybe Hollywood directors should get themselves a new bumper sticker: “We Support Our Troops. But Our Troops Can’t Support Our Business Model.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MISTER BOB

The National Post
, May 24, 2001

I FIRST NOTICED
a sudden uptick in Bob Dylan articles maybe a couple of months ago, when instead of Pamela Anderson’s breasts or J-Lo’s bottom bursting through the
National Post
masthead there appeared to be a shriveled penis that had spent way too long in the bath. On closer inspection, this turned out to be Bob Dylan’s head. He was, it seems, getting ready to celebrate his birthday. For today he turns sixty.

Sixty? I think the last time I saw him on TV was the eightieth-birthday tribute to Sinatra six years ago, and, to judge from their respective states, if Frank was eighty, Bob had to be at least 130. He mumbled his way through “Restless Farewell,” though neither words nor tune were discernible, and then shyly offered, “Happy Birthday, Mister Frank.” Frank sat through the number with a stunned look, no doubt thinking, “Geez, that’s what I could look like in another twenty, twenty-five years if I don’t ease up on the late nights.”

Still, Bob’s made it to sixty, and for that we should be grateful. After all, for the grizzled old hippies, folkies, and peaceniks who spent the Sixties bellowing along with “How does it
feeeeeel
?” these have been worrying times. A couple of years ago, Bob’s management were canceling his tours, and the only people demanding to know “How does it
feeeeeel
?” were Dylan’s doctors, treating him in New York for histoplasmosis, a fungal infection that in rare cases can lead to potentially fatal swelling in the pericardial sac. If the first question on your lips is “How is histoplasmosis spread?” well, it’s caused by fungal spores which invade the lungs through airborne bat droppings. In other words, the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

He has, of course, looked famously unhealthy for years, even by the impressive standards of Sixties survivors. He was at the Vatican not so long ago, and, although we do not know for certain what the Pope said as the leathery, wizened, stooped figure with gnarled hands and worn garb was ushered into the holy presence, it was probably something along the lines of, “Mother Teresa! But they told me you were dead!” “No, no, your Holiness,” an aide would have hastily explained. “This is Bob Dylan, the voice of a disaffected generation.”

It is not for me to join the vast army of Dylanologists who’ve been poring over his songs for thirty years. As Bob himself once said, “They are whatever they are to whoever’s listening to them.” End of story. But it does seem to me that, while most rock stars pursue eternal youth, Dylan has always sought premature geezerdom. The traditional elderly rocker look is best exemplified by Gram’pa Rod Stewart: peroxide hair with that toss-a-space-heater-in-the-bathtub look, tight gold lamé pants with extravagant codpiece, pneumatic supermodel on your arm. By contrast, Bob, barely out of his teens, consciously adopted an aged singing voice and the experience it implied, a quintessentially Dylanesque jest on pop’s Peter Pan ethos.

When he emerged in the early Sixties, he was supposedly a drifter who had spent years on the backroads of America picking up folk songs from wrinkly old-timers, and who provoked Robert Shelton of
The New York Times
to rhapsodize about “the rude beauty of a southern field hand musing in melody on his porch.” Actually, he’d toiled instead at the University of Minnesota—a Jewish college boy, son of an appliance store manager. The folk songs he knew had been picked up not from any real live folk, but from the records of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. Ramblin’ Jack had rambled over from Brooklyn, dropping his own Jewish name—Elliott Adnopoz—en route. “There was not another sonofabitch in the country that could sing until Bob Dylan came along,” pronounced Ramblin’ Jack, with a pithiness that belies his sobriquet. “Everybody else was singing like a damned faggot.” It remains one of the more modest claims made on Dylan’s behalf.

His first album was composed almost entirely of traditional material. But by the second he was singing his own compositions, pioneering the musical oxymoron of the era, the “original folk song”: No longer did a folk song have to be something of indeterminate origin sung by generations of inbred mountain men after a couple of jiggers of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sisters. Now a “folk song” could be “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” I’m reminded of that episode of, appropriately enough,
The Golden Girls
, when Estelle Getty comes rushing in shouting, “The hurricane’s a-comin’! The hurricane’s a-comin’!” “Ma!” Bea Arthur scolds her. “
A
-comin’?” With Dylan, the songwriting styles they were a-regressin’, the slyly seductive archaisms and harmonica obbligato designed to evoke the integrity of American popular music before the Tin Pan Alley hucksters took over.

“Without Bob the Beatles wouldn’t have made
Sergeant Pepper
, the Beach Boys wouldn’t have made
Pet Sounds
,” said Bruce Springsteen. “U2 wouldn’t have done ‘Pride in the Name of Love’,” he continued, warming to his theme. “The Count Five would not have done ‘Psychotic Reaction’. There never would have been a group named the Electric Prunes.” But why hold all that against Bob? If rock lyrics wound up as clogged and bloated as Dylan’s pericardial sac, that’s hardly his fault. Bob, for his part, has doggedly pursued his quest to turn back the clock. He’s on the new
Sopranos
soundtrack CD, singing Dean Martin’s “Return to Me,” complete with chorus in Italian. Just the latest reinvention: Bob Dino, suburban crooner.

Visiting America a few years ago, Dave Stewart, of the Eurythmics, said to Dylan that the next time he was in England he should drop by his recording studio in Crouch End, an undistinguished north London suburb. Dylan, at a loose end one afternoon, decided to take him up on it and asked a taxi driver to take him to Crouch End Hill. Cruising the bewildering array of near-namesake streets—Crouch End Hill, Crouch End Road, Crouch Hill End, Crouch Hill Road, and various other permutations of “Crouch,” “End,” and “Hill,” not to mention Crouch Hall Road—the cabbie accidentally dropped
him off at the right number but in an adjoining street of small row houses. Dylan knocked at the front door and asked the woman who answered if Dave was in.

“No,” she said, assuming he was referring to her husband, Dave, who was out on a plumbing job. “But he should be back soon.” Bob asked if she would mind if he waited. Twenty minutes later, Dave—the plumber, not the rock star—returned and asked the missus whether there were any messages. “No,” she said, “but Bob Dylan’s in the front room having a cup of tea.”

It’s a sweet image, compounded by the subsequent rumor that Dylan had been seen with local realtors looking for a house in the area. Perhaps deep inside his Southern field-hand persona is a suburban sexagenarian pining for a quiet life in a residential cul-de-sac, dispensing advice over the fence to the next-door neighbor on how to keep your lawn free of grass clippings: “The answer, my friend, is mowin’ in the wind.”

Happy birthday, Mister Bob.

WE AREN’T THE WORLD

The National Post
, January 2, 2003

WELL
,
IT
’
S JANUARY
2 and you, the loyal reader, have a right to expect that we media types have given up sloughing off lame-o “Best of the Year” lists for another eleven-and-a-half months. But not so fast. If I were compiling a “Best Lists of the Year” list, my best list of the year would be this one: the BBC World Service poll of the Top Ten Songs of All Time.

I know a bit about these kinds of surveys from my disc-jockey days. Listeners are always surprised to find that the Beatles and Elvis get nowhere. That’s because their vote gets split between a dozen hits all about equally popular. A superstar needs a mega-ultra-anthemic blockbuster big enough to counter his vote getting dispersed among the rest of his catalogue: Sinatra has “My Way,” Simon and Garfunkel “Bridge over Troubled Water,” Queen “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Whitney Houston “I Will Always Love You-ulating,” all the big hit-list reliables.

Not everyone goes for these all-time standbys. Among several minor celebrities who voted in the BBC poll, Bianca Jagger opted for Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Kevin Spacey for Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife,” and Imelda Marcos for the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s
Messiah
—the widow of the late Filipino strongman usefully reminding us that pre-Sixties smashes were also eligible for the survey. Over 150,000 votes from 155 countries were recorded, and this is how it all came out. To add to the suspense, I’ll count them down in reverse order. As the host Steve Wright put it, “Enjoy listening to the world’s favorite songs!”

         
10. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen

           
9. “Chaiyya Chaiyya,” A. R. Rahman

           
8. “Believe,” Cher

           
7. “Reetu Haruma Timi,” Arun Thapa

           
6. “Ana wa Laila,” Kazem al-Saher

           
5. “Pooyum Nadakkuthu Pinchum Nadakkuthu,” Thirumalai Chandran

           
4. “Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu,” Ilayaraja

           
3. “Dil Dil Pakistan,” Vital Signs

           
2. “Vande Mataram,” various artists

           
1. “A Nation Once Again,” The Wolfe Tones

So much for the Great Satan’s suffocating cultural imperialism. I’ll bet I’m the only
National Post
columnist who can even hum the Number One song. It’s an Irish Republican rebel ballad from the 1840s. The reason I know is because I was once in a bar in Liverpool and a couple of lads started singing it and a couple of others objected and a fight broke out. As a loyal subject of the Crown, I was on the side of the objectors. We eventually prevailed, but, even if we hadn’t, “A Nation Once Again” is a fine song to get your head kicked into, at least when compared to “Believe” by Cher, which would rank pretty high on a list of numbers I’d least like to be listening to as my eye’s gouged out and I fall into a coma, although it would in a way be a merciful release.

But the point is we’re not in Casey Kasem territory. My cunning plan was to wait till the BBC announced the World’s Favorite Songs, record them on a CD, and make a killing at the mall. But I have a feeling it’s not gonna work. We must take the Corporation’s spokespersons at their word when they deny their poll was nobbled by a bunch of wily nationalist bog-trotters plotting to put one over on the hated Brit oppressor’s cultural mouthpiece. And, for all the talk of vote fixing, the sample’s a lot bigger than those polls that claim to measure anti-Americanism throughout Europe and the Middle East. But, whatever the problems of methodology, there’s something rather appealing about the way the list disdains Anglo-American pop hegemony—no Sir Elton caterwauling “Goodbye, England’s Rose,” no Céline and her
Songs for Sinkin’ Liners
.

Superficially, the chart has the appeal of those shows you hear late in the evening on public radio, usually called “Worldbeat” or “Rhythms of the Planet” or some such. They work less well on private stations. In the small hours of a snowy January night about a decade ago, I was driving through the Green Mountains of Vermont with Anthony Lane,
The New Yorker
’s film critic, and housewives’ darling Sebastian Faulks, whose novel
Birdsong
has enriched so many airport concession stands. There was a big Latin dance thing back then that was all the rage called the Lambada, but the overnight jock on WKXE said you’d never really heard the song until you’d heard the twelve-minute Hindu version.

“Wow!” said Anthony. “This is the best record I’ve ever heard,” said Sebastian, “except for ‘I Just Called to Say I Loved You.’” But it turns out there aren’t all that many Vermonters who want to hear Hindu versions of Latin dance sensations. About a month later, the station switched to soft ’n’ easy favorites, and the late-night guy got fired.

In that sense, the BBC’s Top Ten Songs of All Time are admirably multicultural. Certainly, a multitude of cultures is represented: the Irish rebel ballad narrowly edged out the Indian patriotic song from an 1882 novel by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay at Number Two and the pop national anthem of Pakistan at Number Three; just below them you’ll find a love song from Nepal, a Tamil Tiger song about the oppression of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the theme from a Bollywood version of
The Godfather
, and a perennial favorite by Iraq’s biggest pop star (Kazem al-Saher).

But the list is also multicultural in its rejection of a common culture. On the face of it, it’s preposterous that “A Nation Once Again,” a dreary dirge no non-Irishman has the slightest interest in, can now claim to be the planet’s all-time favorite song. But it’s no more preposterous than some happy-sappy mumbo-jumbo like “We Are the World” followed by Quincy Jones doing his usual acceptance-speech shtick about how, whether you’re a New York sideman or an Alabama gangsta rapper or an Uzbekistani bluegrass fiddler or a Saudi lounge act, there are no borders in music. Indeed, in its new role as underminer of the BBC Top Ten, “A Nation Once Again” is far more subversive than it ever was as a rallying cry against the reviled Crown: For what could be
more exquisitely mischievous than a virulently parochial anthem of unregenerate nationalism winning a survey intended to demonstrate that music is the universal language?

The great Canadian media seer Marshall McLuhan was never more wrong than when he was peddling that “global village” hooey. Multiculturalism is more like a global housing project where we all do our own thing and nobody knows their neighbors. Thus, fans of individual numbers in this Top Ten have no interest in hearing any of the other nine; try going into an Irish bar and singing “Vande Mataram.”