I often find when watching a TV show that it fashions me into a character from that story. Critically evaluating LOST got me flashing back to when I originally saw the show as a kid; watching The Sopranos turned me into someone bitter and angry and pounding through the series out of stubborn tenacious habit more than anything. Working through the career of Bob Dylan is forcing me to take a Dylanesque attitude towards critically evaluating him, reinventing the process constantly. This particular essay was also forced by practicality, in that I don’t have the cash to spare even for the (surprisingly cheap) hobby of music collection. If I want to pick up new music, I have to do it the way most people these days access it: jumping from song to song on Youtube.

That said, when I started doing it, I began to really like the idea of it, the way it connected to me, my generation and Dylan. Youtube is the centre of my interaction with music; even when I’m not actively searching for music on it, I’m absentmindedly clicking through the ‘Recommended for you’ sidebar when a song finishes. Music fans always bemoan when traditions fall by the wayside – record fans wistfully think about having to get up to change sides, tape fans who remember recording songs off the radio – but when one tradition based on technology falls, it’s replaced by another. This particular approach is especially suited to Dylan’s career, probably moreso than any other kind of technology.

I’m incredibly conservative when it comes to taking in new music; I feel as if I have to get to know a musician before I can just bounce through their discography, and I’ve now reached that point with Dylan. He’s probably gonna have structurally and harmonically simple music aimed at creating an emotional atmosphere, and he’s gonna have some cool sounding lyrics where the precise meaning is less important than the emotion behind it; I can take a relaxed attitude towards the lyrics and allow myself to slowly pick up a meaning for them, and focus my attention on how it makes me feel.

Coming at it the other way, Dylan has a relaxed attitude to recording his music – to rerecording and rearranging it – is extremely suited to Youtube. I’ve listened to a lot of Beatles bootlegs, and while some of them are interesting, a Beatles song is so sculpted that the earlier takes, however conceptually interesting they might be, don’t feel as complete or definitive as the final album version. This is not a Bob Dylan problem; it feels intuitively valid to me that I prefer the 1963 “Live At Town Hall” version of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” to the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan version, because both are equally important to Dylan himself. It’s as if he sees his job as generating data and mine as organising and cutting it down, an attitude that agrees with my particular fannish instincts and is aided immensely by Youtube’s semi-random delivery of his music, indifferent to sound quality or official status. It must be an experience like being Jack Keruoac’s editor, except with fewer flung whiskey bottles and no deadlines.

A tiny bonus, something only I would consider a positive: the comments. Werner Herzog said not to avert your eyes from the collective anonymous body, and I often find myself rewarded with insight into what does and does not appeal about an artwork or artist. For example, Sopranos fans, regardless of their politics, have a certain contempt for life, the universe, and everything; Metal Gear Solid fans have a melodramatic and rather flowery flair to their observations. Like many artists in the canon, Dylan draws both aging hippies fondly remembering their youth and teenagers loudly declaring they like this way more than today’s music. It’s an instinct to roll my eyes at both, but at minimum it does speak to Dylan’s iconic status; he’s Important enough that having seen him is a deeply emotional experience, and a child can draw on him as a source of identity. And I’m inclined to take these two groups at their word – that Dylan is charismatic enough to leave an impression on someone over fifty years later, and that his timeless sensibility has the same effect on teenagers now that it did then, that he appeals to these kids on a level that current artists, for whatever reason, do not.

(What generally unifies Dylan fans is that each of them tends to be drawn to a different line that speaks to them on a level so personal they take it for granted that everyone knows what they mean – I was particularly struck by someone who said that “Just to think that it all began on an uneventful mourn” was a truly universal lyric)

I want to finish this with analysis of one particular video that struck me, his performance of “Mr Tamborine Man” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. The opening conveys his magnetic personal charisma; when some guys in the crowd yell out something, he casually quips, “Yes, yes, I hear you well! I think you have the wrong man!” I assume all of this is in reference to something, but I’m struck by the out-of-time construction of the sentence (it sounds like something a Deadwood character would say). When he starts playing, it’s as if something slowly comes out from within him; the effect is like possession, except possession traditionally involves a ghost coming from without to take control, not something a body generates. This is a deeply intimate experience, made even moreso by the fact that we stay in closeup for so long, and I can’t look away.

When the director awkwardly cuts to a wide, my heart skips a beat – this whole time, Dylan seemed like he was playing just to me, from across time, but he was actually playing to an entire crowd. Billy Connolly once remarked that standup was a conversation with a big group of people where he did all the talking, and most performers are the kind of people you’d expect to be drawn to that kind of thing, controlling a crowd with a great enthusiasm, with Connolly in particular getting pleasure about dragging them on different tangents he falls into. Dylan applies the same principle in the opposite direction, pulling them onto his level, forcing them to listen to him intently by talking with quiet, calm confidence, and somehow having the composure to do this in front of a large crowd.