Indie Entertainment Media celebrates Bob Dylan this month. The legendary artist turned 80 years old on May 24. We’re also celebrating the new book “The World of Bob Dylan” edited by Sean Latham, available now.
The new book chronicles Dylan’s lifetime of creative invention that has left a mark all over the world. Renowned rock and pop critics and music scholars address such themes as the blues, Dylan’s religious faith, civil rights, gender, race, and American and world literature.
Sean Latham, the introduction of The World of Bob Dylan –
Is there any writer or performer more haunting – and more haunted – than Bob Dylan? We recognize his songs, his vision, his inventiveness, his poetry, and especially his distinctive voice nearly everywhere: in music and film, popular culture and politics, global protest movements and intimate moments of self-reflection. As he now turns eighty, it’s a shock to realize that, for most of us, Dylan has always been there, singing, touring, laughing, snarling, and sometimes even hawking whiskey and underwear.
Like the members of the Nobel committee that awarded him the world’s most important cultural prize, we know he is a vastly influential artist. But which Dylan is it? The folk-singing activist who shared the stage with Dr. King at the March on Washington? The rocker in Ray Bans and a leather jacket who faced down hostile crowds by ordering his band to “play it ****ing loud?” Is it the country boy who went to Nashville and befriended Johnny Cash? Or the Beat-inspired hipster who took to the road with a ramshackle medicine show? The Christian convert? The brilliant curator of folk and blues? The Sinatra-inspired crooner? Or the weary old man who’s “standin’ in the doorway cryin’”?
The World of Bob Dylan edited by Sean Latham
ISBN 9781108499514
Hardcover/$25.95 May 2021
Cambridge University Press
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/world-of-bob-dylan/916BBA230743297755AA21B73EFDA599
Featured image courtesy of WikiCommons | XIART.at
