The Right to Disappoint You
Cass Sunstein, on Ian Leslie's Ruffian, discussing "in what way can Bob Dylan be said to embody 20th century liberalism?":
He went electric, like a lot of times, once famously, but at least six other times.And the notion of self-invention and of not being tied to any particular tradition, unless you want to be, is very liberal.
'Like a Rolling Stone' is a liberal anthem. What it does is it takes the state of rootlessness and "on your own like a complete unknown" and turns that into an anthem of joy and victory rather than as a state of horror and terror.
And Dylan did that amazingly. 'Maggie's Farm' is a liberal song. And he sang that to the folk world as well as, I think, to himself. And the basic idea is not working on Maggie's Farm is a reflection of individual agency. The song 'ISIS' which is a song about travels and romance is a liberal song about connection and disconnection and back again.
So his liberalism goes really deep. His feeling of being eager not to be stuck. That folk music is kind of bald old people - I think he didn't really mean it quite like that as a semi-bald young person - I like to think that it's about agency and autonomy and when he sang to the UK when they started booing one of his electric songs he said famously “play it fucking loud” - that’s a liberal moment, really.
Liberalism, in Dylan’s hands, is the right to disappoint the people who think they own your previous self. Not because tradition is worthless but because it does not own you.
The crowd wants continuity. The artist needs movement.
Going electric was not a genre shift. It was self-ownership: “play it fucking loud”.