Bob Dylan has gone from Tangled Up In Blue to tangled up in women’s lingerie. As part of a move to bring Dylan’s music to new audiences, the enigmatic singer-songwriter, one of the last cultural figures from the 1960s to continue to live outside the boundaries of mainstream pop culture, has made his first appearance as a celebrity pitchman — for Victoria’s Secret (Bobby, say it ain’t so). And, yes, the world is in a state of collapse.
In a Wall Street Journal story, writer Brian Steinberg details how the mustachioed, 62-year-old Dylan filmed a TV ad for the lingerie chain’s “Angels” line, while models cavort to a remixed version of his 1997 song Love Sick (and, really, don’t we all feel a little bit sick about this?).
Fans are, as you might well imagine, heartsick at the latest developments in Dylan’s career, expressing everything from dismay to incredulity, to outright and near apoplectic anger.
Update: Well, at least Dylan is consistent. VanRamblings offers this video in support of its contention that Dylan has sold out. The first part of the video is from a December 5, 1965 interview session with reporters, and the second portion of the video offers a clip from the Victoria’s Secret ad.
Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times begins a weekly series of articles about songwriters. This week they profile Mr. Sell-Out, er, I mean, Mr. Dylan.
Monthly Archives: April 2004
The Crimes of Courtney Love: America’s Sweetheart
 Courtney Love flashes the masses |
All of this continuous nattering about Courtney Love and what a disturbed personality she is, and what a terrible mother, and how dreadful that her life – from time to time, and certainly at the moment – revolves around drugs.
Who says that Courtney Love has to live like the rest of us? You? Me? Nope, I don’t think so. And, even if we thought so, when was the last time that either one of us composed music as raw and energetic as that which Love consistently produces, even if it is potty-mouthed and substance-fuelled?
Gritty, chaotic, unorthodox, ragged and raw, the life and ‘flash the masses’ times of Courtney Love is to be celebrated.
Turns out that the Executive Editor of the Village Voice finds himself in accord with the sentiments published above, and much much more it would seem. Comparing Love to Janis Joplin, Richard Goldstein writes …
“When I watch Courtney, I see the same failure to distinguish between persona and self, the same refusal to draw a boundary between expressiveness and excess, the same insistence on showing pain that made rock music in the ’60s so intense.”
Celebrating breast baring as an act of power, discussing Love’s ‘signature of civic strength’, and writing about the artist who has chosen “to grin and bare it at an hour when all good children are asleep, having whacked off in their beds”, Goldstein’s very readable cover essay may be found here.
No sex – we’re movie goers
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From today’s London Daily Telegraph, a story by Elizabeth Day: Films containing explicit sex or nudity do much worse at the box office, earning nearly 40 per cent less on average than more wholesome movies.
An analysis of 1120 cinematic releases over the past four years has shown that films without sex scenes, such as Disney’s Finding Nemo or Toy Story 2, earned an average of $41.1 million (all figures in U.S. currency), while films with sex have grossed 38 per cent less with an average of $16.7 million.
Ten Years On, Rwanda Seeks Lessons From Genocide
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an item posted below on the upcoming 10th anniversary remembrance of the death of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain — Michael wonders why it is that the almost exclusive media focus on the history of a decade ago centres on the death of a rock musician, to the exclusion of a remembrance and reflection on the mass genocide which took place in the tiny Central African country of Rwanda, around the same time of Cobain’s passing.
 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan holocaust |
In 1994, one of the most appallingly intensive killing campaigns in human history — possibly the most intensive — took place in 100 days of genocide that the outside world did little to prevent. Many of the majority Hutu (about 85% of the population) turned on the Tutsi (about 12% of the population) and moderate Hutu, killing an estimated 800,000 people.
Gendercide provides this case study on the Rwandan holocaust, while BBC News publishes this report on the more than 100,000 genocide suspects who remain in Rwandan jails awaiting trial.
Update: Sent in by reader Alison Fitch, this story from the Globe and Mail, a feature on how the Hutus tortured Athanasie Mukarwego’s husband to death and then told her: “You, we will kill with rape.” For the three horrific months that followed, literally hundreds of them tried to do just that. As Rwanda prepares to mark the genocide’s 10th anniversary, she can’t forget but “I have to forgive, so things are different for my children.”
Also, in production, The Guardian reports that filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April has set out to “recreate the killing zones to reach beyond cliche of ‘never again’.”