Gathering Moss, Gathering Lots of Moss

Seeing the cover of Rolling Stone this week reminded me that Wired magazine recently reported a sweeping, curmudgeonly generalization coming out of the mouth of a musician so boring and antiquated he was once not the subject of Rolling Stone but a PBS documentary. On the recording industry: "I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really." On music piracy on the internet: "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway." Guessed who it is yet? That's right, it's Bob Dylan, quoting his next album straight into the bargain bin!

I have to put my foot down now with such comments, I really do. I am sick to death of this trend among songwriters of Dylan's era and stature revelling in their own documentaries and swan song albums, and using their press cycle to shit on the progress of modern music. These eulogies for their own careers aren't even worthy of the term "masturbatory" because no one gets off.

Now perhaps "trend" is too strong of a word, but consider this: back in March, Neil Young said of his latest album (in which he rhymed "war" with "door", and then followed that with "door" and "war" -- brilliant songwriting, no?) that he was just frustrated to no end that young musicians weren't writing war protest songs. How about the Dresden Dolls' "Yes, Virginia"? Or even more directly, what about, oh... this entire list of protest songs?

It appears that what Young is frustrated with is the fact that the anti-war movement hasn't magically resuscitated the 1960s/70s era folk idiom (that style of direct and pointed lyric-writing), so much so that he comes across as a dinosaur, or worse, a bad writer. You don't have to sacrifice poetic language to write an anti-war song -- in fact, it does the entire art a disservice to require all political content in songs to sound like campaign literature, like Young's "Let's Impeach the President for Lying".

I would love to impeach the president for any number of reasons. I would love to write a song about it. But setting the latest post on leftyblogs.com to music kills all the depth and complexity that is songwriting. Mr. Young, put the microphone down.

And as for you, Mr. Dylan, and your carefree attitude towards internet piracy: arrrrrgh, matey, prepare to be boarded!