Bob Dylan’s 70th anniversary was celebrated worldwide on May 24th. Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation, Dylan has sold more than 58 million albums, and written more than 500 songs recorded by more than 2000 artists. Dylan has described himself as “a person who owns the Sixties.” At the same time, he has spent a lifetime “despising the nineteen-sixties — all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar.”[1] To post-1968 generations, the remarkable success of Robert Allen Zimmerman – alias Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham — remains “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” While the success of his precursors Elvis and Sinatra is easily explainable, neither looks, nor voice, nor charisma can explain Dylan’s unique and enduring iconic status. He has been described as diffuse, ugly, even dirty — “His ‘diffuseness’ muddies all the waters whose streams make him up.”[2]
Deconstructing the binary high/low culture divide
In postmodern discourse, the status of ‘high culture’ –- perhaps reaching its historical climax with Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” –- has been undermined through exposure of its “inherently White, class-based, West-centric, and gendered elements.”[3] Postmodern discourse tends to break down distinctions between subject and object, consciousness and the unconscious, “oppressor” and “oppressed,” spectacle and spectator, “high” and “low,” etc. The movement of “canon into kitsch, or identification into stylization or exaggeration”[4] can be seen in the art of Andy Warhol — often seen as postmodernism’s chief avatar, “the locus classicus for the deconstruction of ‘mass production,’ and the figure who summarily disrupts every distinction there is, especially the difference between high and low.”[5] Hence, postmodernism seems to express a kind of cultural logic that sociologist Charles Lemert has described as relativistic:
The most important feature of the matrix is that, being relative, it overthrows the rationalist distinctions between the “big” and the “small,” the “greater” and the “lesser,” the “higher” and the “lower,” and so forth. In other words, while the principles of complementarity and indeterminacy rebel against the rationalist epistemological distinction between knowing subject and known object, the relativistic principle overthrows the rationalist ontological perspective that views the natural and human world in hierarchical terms. Relativity radically equalizes all things, persons, events, and facts in reality. All things become platitudinous and, simultaneously, the platitude reigns supreme.[6]
Bob Dylan seems to fit into this picture as a figure heralded by intellectual elites as erasing the distinction between “high” and “low” culture. Rock music has oftentimes (stereotypically) been portrayed as ‘low culture’ — as “anti-intellectual, concerned with the sensual, bodily effects of music rather than with rational thought.”[7] Beneath the surface, however, Dylan’s gravitas — attained from being a ”serious” folk artist — has been important for the ideology of rock as a “higher” cultural form. This ideology (or cultural strategy) has been staged through an alloy of myths, branding and cultural codes.
As Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron have outlined, the name of the game in cultural innovation is to deliver an innovative cultural expression, consisting of an ideology “brought to life” with the right myths and cultural codes in the aftermath of major historical changes and social disruptions (e.g., the “culture wars” of the 1960s).
Dylan certainly did that. The messages of Dylan’s music consistently dovetailed with the countercultural views of the wider Jewish community and with the nascent Jewish intellectual elites that came to dominate intellectual discourse in the period following WWII. In the following I will trace the Jewish nexus of Dylan’s reputation.
Electric Blues Jews
Dylan started his career in the early 1960s by writing activist songs with civil rights themes — “Oxford Town” (1963), about the first Black student at the University of Mississippi; “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (1964), about the death of a Black maid; “When the Ship Comes in,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’”, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, etc. In 1965, however, Dylan stopped writing protest songs and switched from acoustic to electric guitar, merging folk music and rock-and-roll (labeled folk-rock) with a strong Black influence. When he shocked the world with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, half of the fans booed at his fall from grace:
The story of Dylan’s appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival is legendary. In its usual form, Dylan went on stage with an electrified group to the shock and horror of the folk audience, for whom electrified music was anathema. He was booed and, in some versions, Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk revival, looked for an axe to cut the cables to the electric guitars.[8]
It might be described as a Jewish moment. The electrification of the blues had been going on since the late 1930s. What was new was Jews playing electric blues to White audiences. Electric blues was synthesized with White popular music ultimately to produce what became known in the 1970s and 1980s as hard rock. Stratton suggests that some of the shock of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited was “its electrified, rock backing, the real scandal for the White folk audience, as it was at Newport … and on the subsequent Dylan tour, was its electric blues feel, its Blackness.”[9] Furthermore, Stratton observes that
what many people in the folk movement found disturbing about the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s performance, and that of Dylan, was not so much that they were using electric instruments, but that they were playing versions of African-American music that could not be understood as safely contained in an acoustic past. In other words, there was a racial element to the response. More, there was a racial element to the performances that were predominantly by Jews and African Americans. These two performances at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival publicly aligned Jews with present-day Black, electric blues played in the northern city of Chicago and, therefore, with ‘real’ African Americans. This was what shocked the folk movement the most.[10]
All the members of the New York-based Blues Project were Jewish except for the lead singer Tommy Flanders, who left before the release of the group’s live first album. Stratton notes that the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Blues Project were the first predominantly Jewish and African-American groups to play electric blues.
In New York, which was the centre of the folk revival, many of the Jews who moved from the folk revival to electric blues did so by way of an increasing interest in acoustic blues. For example, the folk revival Even Dozen Jug Band was founded in New York in 1963 and made one album for Elektra in 1964. The band had a varied membership, but at its core were Jews: the guitarists Peter Siegel, Steve Katz and Stefan Grossman; the mandolinist David Grisman, and Joshua Rifkin, who went on to a career in classical music.[11]
The two Jews in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (the group who backed Dylan at Newport) – the guitarist Michael Bloomfield and Al Kooper, who played organ for the first time on the recording of Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ which was released as a single five days before Dylan’s 1965 Newport appearance — were of central importance to the sound of Highway 61 Revisited.
At the two big dress rehearsals for the tour to promote the Highway 61 Revisited album, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in New York and at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Dylan’s backing band consisted of three Jews — Robbie Robertson, Harvey Brooks [Goldstein] and Al Kooper.[12]
Stratton points out that the importance of the blues influence on Highway 61 Revisited is often subordinated to the shock for Dylan’s folk revival audience of him “going electric.” But once the blues influence on Highway 61 Revisited is recognized, Dylan can be understood “as a part of the movement of Jewish artists into electric blues”[13] —essentially an electrification of Black culture presented by Jews to White audiences.
The construction of Jews as Whites in the 1960s included a reaffirmation of their Whiteness within the overdetermining American racial structure (“the Black-White dichotomy”). Stratton (p. 87) suggests that their role as mediators being positioned between the two racially polar groups in the United States was crucial to the role Jews were playing in the spread of electric blues into a White audience.
Dylan’s music may be seen as an aspect of the Black-Jewish fusion or commonality of interest that was so critical to promoting the Civil Rights movement – a movement that hosted hostility toward the traditional culture of the West typical of 20th-century Jewish intellectual movements.
Jews have channeled aspects of African-American culture into White culture, most importantly in music the emphasis on emotional expression and the practices through which that emotional expression is given form. More recently, Jewish musicians have invoked elements of Yiddishkeit, most importantly klezmer, to assert a ‘Jewish’ difference from Whiteness and a Jewish place in the American multiculture.[14]
An archaeology of the causalities involved would have to include Jewish middle-class alienation from White culture — an aspect of the culture of critique. Starting in the folk revival’s celebration of acoustic blues, by the mid-1960s, and epitomized in Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the electric blues movement, pioneered disproportionally by Jews, expressed increasing disillusionment with White middle-class suburban society by promoting a constructed image of a marginalized working-class African-American culture.[15]
Most of the characters involved were Jews coming from middle-class backgrounds: Stefan Grossman, Danny Kalb, Roy Blumenfeld (the drummer in the Blues Project whose father was an orthopaedic surgeon), Andy Kulberg, Al Kooper, Michael Bloomfield (who detested the White middle-class, conformist suburbia of his childhood), among others.[16] The bulk of the group that backed Dylan at Newport came from the Chicago-based electric blues group Paul Butterfield Blues Band — one of the first integrated American popular music groups. Stratton retells a story about how Bloomfield joined Butterfield’s group:
Paul Rothchild, a producer with Elektra, was taken by Butterfield to see Bloomfield’s group play. Butterfield had asked Bloomfield a number of times if he would join his group, but Bloomfield had always refused. Rothchild tried: “Michael comes and sits down at our table. We shake hands. We then do a half hour intense intellectual Jew at each other. He found a kindred soul, I found a kindred soul.” Bloomfield agreed to join Butterfield’s group. Rothchild first recorded the group in December 1964, and produced their first release the following year.[17]
Michael Billig (Rock’n’ Roll Jews), among others, has pointed out that a crucial number of influential songwriters and behind-the-scenes operators were Jews. Dick Weissman observes that “it was the infrastructure of the folk music business that was largely dominated by Jews.”[18] Stratton confirms that
all three major folk-oriented record labels, Elektra, Vanguard and Folkways, were owned by Jews, and most of the important managers — including Harold Lewenthal, who managed Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and Judy Collins among others; Manny Greenhill, who managed Joan Baez among others; and Albert Grossman — were Jewish. Grossman … at different times managed Peter, Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot, Dylan, the Band, the Electric Flag, and Janis Joplin among others. He was born and grew up in Chicago and, before moving to New York, opened the first folk club there in 1956, the Gate of Horn, where Bloomfield used to go before he graduated to the black blues clubs. Gillian Mitchell, in The North American Folk Music Revival, argues that, ‘Many of the most significant and pivotal figures in the American folk revival were Jewish’, and goes on to explain that this included both performers and organizational figures. Ned Polsky, in his ethnography of the Greenwich Village beat scene in 1960, notes more generally that, “The Village devotees of ethnic music are historically minded, scholarly, middle-class youths, mostly Jewish.’ Clearly, Jews were central to the folk revival.[19]
This list could be extended. Jerry Schoenbaum, for example, was the Jewish president of Verve Folkways, the label to which the Blues Project were signed. Chess Records — for whom most of the well-known Chicago electric blues artists recorded — was run by Jewish brothers Leonard and Phil Chess, born Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz, who had migrated from Poland in 1928.[20]
Mainstream historiography reports that post-WWII USA, from the late 1940s, became “positively philo-Semitic in its embrace of Jewish culture.”[21] The war itself and the early Cold War “helped to speed the alchemy by which Hebrews became Caucasian.”[22] At the same time, there was a “disproportionately Jewish involvement” in the counterculture during the 1960s — with Jews playing a key role in the folk revival movement of the 1950s and 1960s.[23]
Andrea Levine suggests that the Jewish-American preoccupation with counterculture, Black culture, and the electric blues, in the 1950s and early 1960s, was motivated by an effort “to appropriate a powerful phallic ‘Blackness’ for the White hipster [that] functions in part to mask the presence of another racial body: the Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust.”[24] Levine argues that “The White Negro’s” fetishization of an aggressive African-American response to a history of persecution is in part “an effort to obscure the image of the cowed, impotent Jew, going meekly to the gas chamber”.[25]
The blues revival has been judged as a reaction against White, middle-class society, a stylized revolt against bourgeois values: “Rejecting conformity to middle-class values, blues revivalists embraced the music of people who seemed unbound by the conventions of work, family, sexual propriety, worship, and so forth.”[26] Stratton cites Mark Polizzotti, describing how a photo of Dylan and Michael Bloomfield at Newport “catches them grinning at each other in amazed delight at the sounds they’re producing: two Jewish cats making the music come to life, reviving the blues, a faith more real to them than the religion of their fathers.”[27]
End of Part 1
References
Dettmar, Kevin J. H. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009
Lemert, Charles. Durkheim’s Ghosts: Cultural Logics and Social Things. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006
Meisel, Perry. Blackwell Manifestos: Myth of Popular Culture: From Dante to Dylan. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
Murphy, Peter & Eduardo De La Fuente (eds.). Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music. Vol. 8. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010
Stratton, Jon. Jews, Race and Popular Music. Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate, 2009
[1] Peter Murphy, “Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism”, in Murphy & De La Fuente 2010, 49 — 50
[2] Meisel 2009, 166
[3] Dettmar, Kevin J. H. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 107
[4] Meisel 2009, 71
[5] Meisel 2009, 71
[6] Lemert 2006, 74
[7] Dettmar 2009, 105
[8] Stratton 2009, 83
[9] Stratton 2009, 86, 89
[10] Stratton 2009, 84
[11] Stratton 2009, 85
[12] Stratton 2009, 83
[13] Stratton 2009, 85
[14] Stratton 2009, 198
[15] Stratton 2009, 93
[16] Stratton 2009, 90 — 92
[17] Stratton 2009, 82 — 83
[18] in Stratton 2009, 97
[19] Stratton 2009, 97
[20] Stratton 2009, 87, 92
[21] Karen Brodkin cited in Stratton 2009, 109
[22] Matthew Frye Jacobson cited in Stratton 2009, 109
[23] Stratton 2009, 79 — 80
[24] cited in Stratton 2009, 95
[25] in Stratton 2009, 96
[26] Jeff Titon cited in Stratton 2009, 93
[27] in Stratton 2009, 99
Facing the Future as a Minority
Was the Immigration Act of 1924 Illiberal?
This is a great piece. Thanks for incorporating Post-Modernism and high-low bro explications! This is the paradigm I’m most familiar with since it’s basically revered as Holy scripture by Marxist Academia.
- I really wait in anticipation for an authoritative piece further highlighting the tribe’s subversion of the WASP cultural paradigm by way of Pop-Culture revolutions bathed in Gramscian tradition. It seems that once white America firmly grasps the magnitude of subversion aimed at us and our children for the last 50 years, the tide will forever turn in our favor. But this cursory introduction is NICE! KUDOS!
FYI, here’s the Israeli usage of the term WASP, originally a play on words and now used frequently: “In other words, people of Sderot and similar towns identified Moshe Feiglin as an Israeli WASP – a White Ashkenazi Sabra with Protexia. (In Israeli terminology, one who has “pull” with the establishment is said to have protexia.)” (From the Israeli right-wing rag Arutz Sheva.)
Enigmatic: Ouch! The term “WASP” is some Jews favorite slur word for the diverse white Americans, and it is odd to appear on this blog. The only time it is really appropriate is when “WEJ” appears as a slur against Jews (“White European Jew”)
Why do we beat ourselves up over Jewish issues and then turn around and adopt a nasty label propelled by the animus many Jews bear toward the diverse white Americans.
You’re right Cary, I always listen to the guy who poses questions followed with periods. LMAO Just slow down, take a deep breath and realize that we will get through this. -wow-
-And check this logic out, I happen to like the term WASP and am therefore prone to use it how I please and in the context of my choosing. If this confuses you, an analogous situation would be the “N” word and it’s prominent usage in the black community although it remains negatively charged, far beyond the term WASP.
-So the bottomline is: Who are you, Cary, to be making judgement calls over usage? LOL The N word mocked the low status of blacks whereas the term WASP criticized the dominant, hegomonic white culture of the day. So let’s bring back the term WASP as it reminds me of a better day when whites wielded more power. But I guess Cary just can’t see that vision while equipped with his juvenile lens of limited observation.
Thanks, Enigmatic, for clarifying usage of WASP. As you probably know, the first person to ever use the term was Andrew Hacker in 1957 as part of his work to create the Anti-White Narrative. He hated us, notwithstanding he was one of us, and its adopted parents among the Semitic peoples frequently enjoy pasting it on us.
Chris Matthews used it as a slur against Mitt Romney as recently as June 13, 2011, and many, many Jews agree with you that it is a fitting label for us all, even the non-Anglo Saxons and the non-Protestants.
I don’t make “judgment calls over usage,” I just point out that WASP smothers white Americans’ diversity & nationality, and works against our being inclusive of all white peoples.
Cary if you want to play mental tennis, you’re just going to have to bring a racket next time!lol You’re emotional right now, I understand.
Maybe if America returned to WASP rule it would help your recovery.
Not WEJ (white european jew). Better would be TIC (talmudic international caucasian).
Liberte, I like it. We’ll go with TIC (pronounced “tick”?).
“Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation” — by his fellow tribesmen. Is there any better example of someone with marginal talent being elevated to the level of icon as a result of the power and influence of God’s chosen people?
BTW, Ruben “Hurricane” Carter was almost certainly guilty. Zimmerman’s ode to the ham-and-egg pug was pure fiction.
Dylan’s impact on popular music can’t be overtated, but his ability can, and usually is.
These jewish musicians of 1960′s (and later) pop and folk music brought virtually none of their own musical heritage to the mix. It was “borrowed” from black culture (as with Bloomfield) or white Appalachian culture (early Dylan and David Grisman.) They only thing they really added was an almost indefinable dissonance.
Stefan Grossman was notorious for turning a small corner of forgettable black esoterica into an industry.
Dylan was always such a weirdo and creep. I’ve read that at a party he sat outside by himself while everyone else partied.
jews give meaning to the term “sleeper cell”. Who would have ever thought that Dylan was a little jew creep working feverishly trying to destroy White America? He even converted to Christianity at one point. Infiltrating and destroying from within is their specialty after all.
This is why I don’t like it when others say “not all jews”, how the heck are we supposed to figure out which jew is innocent and who will slit our throats the first chance they get.
It would be so nice if we could corrupt the children of Israelis the way they have done to us. They propagandized us as children and now they are doing it to our children. There is no other race on Earth as vile as the evil jew.
The only way you can win freedom is thur force and violence. That is why jews always end up being driven violently from other people’s countries.
You have to wonder, at what point did Dylan, I wish he used his jew name, conceive of subverting and sabotaging us. The word didn’t come down from the small circle of powerful jews at the top. There wasn’t a message that went out to all jews appointing Dylan to do this job. He did it because he’s a jew.
Bred in his bone, wired into his brain, in his DNA. This is who they are, this is what they do.
There were even clauses in the Magna Carta regarding making jew financial machinations illegal.
“…how the heck are we supposed to figure out which Jew is innocent and who will slit our throats the first chance they get.”
That is precisely the problem that confronted the Germans back in the 1930′s as well as other countries which suffered from their presence. You have to use an all or nothing approach. Of course, innocent Jews would suffer but that is the price that has to be paid. Otherwise you will never solve this problem.
How many white guys do you know who have ever promoted anything? Bands, athletic events, rodeos, you name it? Bet most of you can’t name one White man.
There was a time when White men were always promoting events, and there are still a few ancient White promoters alive.
The Jews rushed in to fill the void, that the White man created by his absence. You don’t go to college to be a promoter. Right. LOL.
I liked this article. I grew up with Bob Dylan and have only slowly come to see that the disaffected sneer in his lyrics owes something to Judaism. I lived through a lot of this and Woody Guthrie, The Band (think of The Day they drove old Dixie down) or the Grateful Dead weren’t seriously influenced by Judaism and they put the Left, the blues and folk music together. It was something that had to happen.
According to Phil Rushton, blacks have quicker reflexes than whites, so no surprise they invented reggae in the 1970s. In the UK, Brian Epstein managed the Beatles until his suicide in 1966, but I don’t think he was a major musical influence.
“The most important feature of the matrix is that, being relative, it overthrows the rationalist distinctions between the “big” and the “small,” the “greater” and the “lesser,” the “higher” and the “lower,” and so forth. In other words, while the principles of complementarity and indeterminacy rebel against the rationalist epistemological distinction between knowing subject and known object, the relativistic principle overthrows the rationalist ontological perspective that views the natural and human world in hierarchical terms. Relativity radically equalizes all things, persons, events, and facts in reality. All things become platitudinous and, simultaneously, the platitude reigns supreme.”
Not for nothing, but does anyone here actually understand what ludicrous nihilistic bullshit this is?
Let’s deconstruct it a little. It destroys logic and any possible standard of comparison, butchers the actual meaning of relativism, annihilates any possibility of sense or order in society and the natural world before it can so much as poke its snout out of an obscure wrinkle in spacetime. It couldn’t possibly be more obviously intended to confuse and disorient the reader, wiping clean the slate of his or her muddied, befuddled mind preparatory to filling it with the most God-awful tripe imaginable to even the most depraved member of the Frankfurt School.
When the geeks and freaks of the twisted intellectual creep show most accurately described as “Academia, Inc.” jumped on this consummately Jewish brand of transparent pseudointellectual bilge like wharf rats on a garbage scow, the hands of the cultural clock began to whirl around as ominously and crazily as the pinwheels and merry-go-rounds of Ray Bradbury’s darkest carnival.
And now here we are amidst the rubble, with the pathologically liberal, terminally Judaized Children of the Sixties spasmodically wrenching and mangling the control levers of society like bloodstained hand-puppets adorning the claws of vampires at a feeding frenzy.
Thanks for the “cultural enrichment”, Zimmerman.
I am happy to see another critical essay about this overrated “artist” and snob, Robert Zimmerman.
Here, I must admit, that I used to listen to his songs, especially the “socially-conscious” protest songs of his early years, and be quite moved by them. What an idiot I was! (Well, I still am, but, hopefully, one that is not quite so stupid.) After learning of his love and work for Chabad Lubavitch, whatever feeling of respect and admiration that remained went right down the toilet.
I am so sick of this feeling that we have been played like fiddles. I am so tired of learning that our sense of fair play, our legitimate desire to learn from mistakes and evolve, our abhorrence of cruelty, and our desire to do good have been so exploited, abused and spat upon. Yes, and one of the main reasons why “Bob Dylan” became a household name has much to do with these admirable tendancies.
Damn! Really.
One of the first relatively well-known folk artists to earn the title of “the next Bob Dylan” was John Prine (a Goy!). However, in several ways, the songs of the two men are worlds apart. When listening to Mr. Prine’s work, one discovers that there is a notable absence of the pretentiousness, condescension and manipulativeness that litters Mr. Zimmerman’s. Also, Mr. Prine’s songs that deal with social issues, reveal a real thoughtfulness, and a genuine compassion for working people, rather than a contempt for the culture and inheritance (the good, the bad, the warts and all) that formed them.
It is very interesting to listen to Zimmerman’s “Lay Lady Lay” and to, then, listen to John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves.” Both are “love” songs. The first is considered a “classic,” even though the false modesty, false self-deprecation and manipulative nature (not to mention its general awfulness, lyrically and musically) is as obvious as a kick in the eye. Mr. Prine’s song, which he sung with the wonderful and neglected Iris DeMent, is quirky and hilarious. It is also one of the sweetest things I have ever heard.
I am so sick of this feeling that we have been played like fiddles. I am so tired of learning that our sense of fair play, our legitimate desire to learn from mistakes and evolve, our abhorrence of cruelty, and our desire to do good have been so exploited, abused and spat upon.
This is exactly what happened. I have been shocked at how easily Whites were manipulated. I remember in my teen years hearing White kids moan about the mistreatment of Indians and how evil Whites had been. Often they were Whites that for some reason, felt at odds with the majority. They wanted a way to strike back at the Middle Class types. Jews have spent generations manipulating these people.
“I am so sick of this feeling that we have been played like fiddles. I am so tired of learning that our sense of fair play, our legitimate desire to learn from mistakes and evolve, our abhorrence of cruelty, and our desire to do good have been so exploited, abused and spat upon. ”
I’ve been there.
We were innocent, we were of goodwill, unlike our undeclared enemies. We can not afford naiveté anymore. The anger we feel at ourselves for letting ourselves be duped needs to be used: directed outward in a methodical, engaging and proactive fashion. No sense in crying over spilt milk.
Comparing Prine and Zimmerman is very useful. Prine has a soul. Zimmerman has a good agent.
“I am so sick of this feeling that we have been played like fiddles. I am so tired of learning that our sense of fair play, our legitimate desire to learn from mistakes and evolve, our abhorrence of cruelty, and our desire to do good have been so exploited, abused and spat upon.”
Sometimes I think that this has something to do with White man’s religion – Christianity.. It’s plausible that Christianity exposes us to this type of manipulation en mass..
That’s true Facio, at least our interpretation of religion in the modern world – the worship of weakness and pity. And maybe it has something to do with White men rather stupidly falling for the obvious trolling tactic of calling everyone a Jew to cause problems ….. Facio.
@Squeaks
You’re still a suspect to me Squeaks.. Your take on 9/11 is quite revealing.. Actually, I don’t take anything you type seriously because of it. Your take makes you persona non grata in my mind.. As long as you maintain that position I don’t think you can overcome that.. a la guerre comme a la guerre..it is what it is..
You need to review your analytical approach Facio. If you “suspect” me, then, with respect, analysis is not your strong point. Look back at my posts over the months. You are hung up on one pet theory and you accuse all who don’t accept that one theory.
Not smart. And it probably means you are not serious about White Advocacy.
@Squeaks
“You are hung up on one pet theory and you accuse all who don’t accept that one theory.”
Oh really?? Why don’t you remind everyone once again what exactly is your position on the events of 9-11. Why don’t you tell us what is your theory? I think people who read your daily comments here have a right to know where you stand on this issue..
Facio,
What the heck is your motivation? Do you even care about White Advocacy? No one is concerned about my speculation or your speculation about these events. And if they were, my views have been put forward long ago. Why are you encouraging a long divisive digression – yet again?
The purpose of the site is to discuss White Culture, Interests, and Identity. Is there not enough work for you in that?
In my opinion, that’s one of the most recent key issues that is shaping our reality today. You cannot pretend to advocate White interests on one hand and then push Zionist Jew propaganda on the other.. and then have the nerve to try to convince me that these things are unrelated.. You know who you are Squeaks and most of the readers at The Occidental Observer do too..
Cheers!
Edit my post please..
Please remove “most recent ” from the first sentence.. The text should read as the following:
In my opinion, that’s one of the key issues that is shaping our reality today. You cannot pretend to advocate White interests on one hand and then push Zionist Jew propaganda on the other.. and then have the nerve to try to convince me that these things are unrelated.. You know who you are Squeaks and most of the readers at The Occidental Observer do too..
Cheers!
Facio,
I don’t think you are that concerned with White Advocacy at all. I think you love your pet theory and use this site as vehicle for it. Look, go forth, find evidence, build a case, do what you want. But people who don’t agree with your theory are not evil. Good lord. A lot of us see that theory for what it is: a rather immature attempt to have a magic bullet theory. You dream that by proving this one giant theory, the whole wide world will see the Jewish Conspiracy for what it is. Somehow, after it has been proven, all the people of the Earth will come together in common scorn of Israel and Jews everywhere.
So go work on it. Keep gathering evidence, keep funding serious researchers. If you turn out right, well great. But, to turn all sour on people who don’t buy it is silly. And it demonstrates a lack of seriousness about White Advocacy.
So, I am not pushing “Zionist Jew propaganda” by doubting your pet theory. If I am, then more than half the writers and editors of TOO are doing the same thing.
Facio Libre:
Not at all, you most certainly CAN, as our friend Jason Speaks proves to us daily – nay, hourly!
Nothing to do with him being Jewish but his music is horrendously appalling!
Dylan’s popularity may be a classic case of how the trend setters, or the constructors of culture, can take something exceptionally ordinary and hype it up so much that some people (non independent thinkers – fashion followers ) just say they like it so as to be “cool”. People will do and say anything to be accepted, conform to the group. So Dylan’s popularity shouldn’t be judged entirely on his music.
To be fair to the Jews, the Jew -I think his name is Hans Zimmer- who wrote the da vinci code score is really in the zone of Beethoven. That’s one of my favourite pieces of music – ever.
Dylan was a couple decades before my time, but as someone above alluded to, it’s amazing how wide and deep the Fifth Column has been working. This was an insightful drilling down.
I agree, Hans, with all but eight words (“Dylan was a couple decades before my time”) of your summation, and I dearly wish that I could agree with those eight.
Well at least in heart, The Great Pierre. Keep on, sir!
And by the way, Pierre, when we enter the Father’s House, won’t it be wonderful when time (as we perceive it) and relative age will recede into oblivion?
If not that, Hans, what’s a Heaven for? (with humble apologies to Robert Browning)
Dylan, a man who could write catchy tunes, and who could routinely turn an often nonsensical phrase into something that could almost make sense if you didn’t think about it too much, was always an acquired taste. I owned his records up until about Nashville Skyline, at which time I lost interest. One grows. In one of the liner notes to an early record he talked about dropping out of school and reading Kant in his spare time. College was said to be unable to “hold him.” Ridiculous.
Dylan had (and seems to still have) nothing but contempt for the “Iron Range” region of Minnesota where he grew up. It was a heavily Scandinavian/Slavic area of the upper Midwest, and mostly Christian. As often seems to be the case in such scenarios, he never outwardly states his contempt towards Christianity – he was from an era when many jews still weren‘t comfortable doing that.
He merely implies how doltish and boring Midwesterners are. By contrast, he finds New Yorkers in the Village to be intelligent and creative. I suspect this is, in part, code for the desire to be around his own people…even when they live half of a continent away. Someone loaned me his autobiography a few years ago, and, as I recall, his book ended with some sort of condemnation of people who still held out hope that he was Christian (from his “conversion” in the late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s.) It’s possible, maybe even likely, that his conversion was contrived from the start.
As I implied in my other comment, I’m struck by the jewish tendency towards musical/cultural affectation – taking the regional accents or musical styles of other cultures and donning them as if they were a costume. When Dylan was mimicking Guthrie, he used to tell people he was born in New Mexico or the Southwest. I can’t help but wonder if this an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to disguise his jewishness, or at least divert attention away from it. Many other performers, jewish and non-jewish, have done it since then in pop music.
In that sense, Dylan truly made a contribution to popular culture – the idea of lying as an art form.
Jim: “When Dylan was mimicking Guthrie, he used to tell people he was born in New Mexico or the Southwest.”
He certainly invented stories about his background, e.g., by presenting himself as an orphan from Oklahoma who had crisscrossed the country ‘followin’ in Woody Guthrie’s footsteps.
“Someone loaned me his autobiography a few years ago, and, as I recall, his book ended with some sort of condemnation of people who still held out hope that he was Christian (from his “conversion” in the late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s.) [...] Dylan truly made a contribution to popular culture – the idea of lying as an art form.”
Good points. Part 2 elaborates some of these aspects.
What is not mentioned is that Jews ARE the counterculture. Elvis was part Jewish, the absurd Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Most of the 1960′s radicals, Jews Jews Jews everywhere you look! Its ALL Jewish. It still is. ( ACLU actually defended the right for ‘NeoNazis’ to march in Scoki Ill, that would not happen today).
All the pro-illegal aliens movements are Jewish, half the cabinets since Bush 1 are Jewish (Reagan had only 25% Jews in his cabinet) Etc etc etc.
Problem is, the middle class Jews will suffer with the decline of the West, as they are finding out in FRANCE. (Jewish leader)
God it never ends does it?
Jimmy – I hate to scare the hell out of you – but now, Americans have elected a Black as the “First Jewish President of USA’ – Barack Ben-Obama.
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/obama-the-first-jewish-president/
Jimmy:
Calling Elvis jewish is pretty laughable. Perhaps you could mention some credible evidence?
Great article. This is the sort of writing that I miss at OO and that first hooked me to the website. Dylan has always been a muscian for whom I hold ambivalent feelings. I feel that Dylan grew over his career to finally break the bonds of the warped aesthetic his Jewish background hobbled him with. Most of his early songs are really about insulting someone or breaking painful and derisive news to someone–cf. Like a Rolling Stone or It Aint Me Babe. Dylan sings the equivalent of “you suck, everybody hates you!” to some hapless soul over a jaunty melody. His later song lyrics show a sense of romance and heart-felt tenderness as he develops his own sensibilities, as with Lay Lady Lay, for example. Dylan follows a similar trajectory to Heine over his career, as Heine’s early lyrics were mocking and derisive of German romanticism, while his later poems develop an earnestness and introspection all his own.
Thanks for positive feedback, Gray Prince + Enigmatic (above). Interesting analogy with Heine.
This is a fantastic article, very well written and informative. I note the mention of Pete Seeger, a White Christian from up North who was prominent in the social protest movement and also an avowed communist. Jews have played an enormous role in the deconstruction of the US, but these liberal New England White Gentiles have been almost as destructive.
This query is, I grant, a bit beside Professor Knutsson’s main point (one very well taken and expressed, may I say), but I would be grateful if he would explain in a bit more detail precisely what the quoted sentence means to him.
I ask because, to me, Greenberg’s essay represented the beginning of the end of what little comprehension there was in the USA—as a cultural outpost of the West, that is— of the nature of high culture and of what separated it from (true, worthwhile) popular culture and from trash masquerading and/or being peddled as culture. (Not coincidentally, “trash” is the literal translation of the German word Kitsch.)
The specifically Marxist (i.e., Jewish Bolshevik) point of the essay is that culture is too damn important an element of the Society of the Future to entrust to any but the elite governors of the new proletarian state. That is, the basis of Greenberg’s assertion of the distinction between kitsch and true art was political. His assertion was not founded in man’s nature or in anything describable as psychology or evolution or (God forbid) morals.
Professor Knutsson’s sentence, as I read it, implies something rather different from the foregoing. Thus, as I said above, I would welcome a bit of expatiation from him upon this very terse motif.
Perhaps in part 2?
My point is that Greenberg’s dogmatic emphasis on art (‘high’) vs. kitsch (‘low’) as opposites is outlandish or passé in a postmodern context. As Thierry de Duve points out (Clement Greenberg between the Lines, University of Chicago Press, 2010, p. 44), Greenberg is reluctant to admit that “the avant-garde, or at least the most politicized factions of the avant-garde, have dismantled the opposition between high and low and denounced the hegemonic pretensions implied by its maintenance … [Greenberg] confuses kitsch, a dated word denoting a condescending judgment of value, with the culture industry, a term that designates an objective economic reality.”
I appreciate your reply, sir. Understood in the postmodern context, as you say, the point about Greenberg makes sense. You will, I am sure, forgive me for saying that I still shudder at the prospect of thinking of him as an apologist for high art, no matter how grotesquely that term is redefined and distorted!
Growing up in the 60s, I was considered odd because my music preference was classical. Yes, I listened to all the usual groups – Beatles, Stones, even the Velvet Underground, but was never really comfortable with it. I was particularly chastised when I said Dylan was as talentless as his music.
I am fairly open minded about music. I can listen listen to Bill Monroe and Mozart and enjoy the music, but I put Dylan right up there with the other talentless morons claiming that Rap and Hip Hop is “music”.
It must have been my lifelong inner Nazi, but I never did like Dyllan’s caterwauling yammer musik. However that dislike turned into burning hatred for him after listening to Dr W Pierce’s, ‘The Hurricane’ about 12 years ago. The way he tells it the Black Journeyman Boxer, ‘Hurricane’ Carter, was seen murdering some Whites in a bar. Witnesses testimony led to his conviction for murder and imprisonment for life.
But along comes Zimmerman and a song which (typically) turns the facts of Carter’s ruthless murders on their heads, eventually leading to his full pardon and release. It wasn’t only Dr Pierce who doubted the veracity of this decision. A few weeks ago while motoring alone on a long journey, I listened to an in depth discussion concerning this case between the Radio anchor and an investigative journalist who is very familiar with the facts. He verified everything Dr Pierce said many years ago and much, much more.
Jews are congenital liars and swindlers. Zimmerman is a name changing Jew, lousy musician and a liar.
@ Floda
“Inner Nazi” ,what a good term!
“As I implied in my other comment, I’m struck by the jewish tendency towards musical/cultural affectation – taking the regional accents or musical styles of other cultures and donning them as if they were a costume. ”
The homophobic Jew is unable to create his own culture, since culture, as Baron Evola and others have noted, is created not by the ‘family values’ dolts but by the Mannerbunde.
American :’culture’ has been shaped [deformed] by the homophobic “Judeo-Christians” and the Jew-promoted “no Homo” rappers.
Why do you use the generalised term “the homophobic jew”? In keeping with recent trends to confederate various ethnic and gender-preferenced minorities (including jewish minorities) this is somewhat ambigious.
Funny how all composers, musicians, producers, critics, etc. all come from one, infinitesimally tiny segment of humanity.
But don’t ask why: that’s “anti-Semitism”!
Couldn’t someone also say that easy-listening music is a Jewish domain? Many of the leading easy-listening artists were Jewish: Percy Faith, Andre Kostelanetz, Herb Alpert, Ray Charles, Frank DeVol. At least half of the composers whose music they played were Jewish: Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, Rodgers, Arlen, Schwartz. And probably 90 percent of the studio musicians who performed in those recordings were Jewish. Could we say that easy-listening was as much a Jewish form of music as electric blues?
James’ comments are completely incomprehensible to me.
Equally incomprehensible to me was Bob Dylan. I went thru the 60s and was, thus, there. Unlike those who cannot remember the 60s very well because of drug use at the time, I was straight, anti-communist left and sometimes pacifist. I was around the SF music breakthru of about l965, learned to dance, was amazed by the hippies, and let my hair grow some. The hippies were the hippies and the politicals were political, and there was a fairly sharp division .
I recall going to my first be-in. For those unfamiliar with the term, it was an event with nothing programmed except “being” which seemed like a good idea to me, even if hard to understand. The thing was to be real social, listen to music, smoke dope if one wanted, be nice to one-another, and make love, not war. In the context of the Vietnam war fast developing in l965 with US army “advisors”..I will never forget that word, and Wastemoreland for Westmoreland, and “we had to destroy the village to save it,” the hippie alternative to demonstrations , of simply
declaring the war over..Phil Ochs? seemed at once crazy and also compelling in some ways…just leave the ignorant armies to clash by night. Still the TV continued night after night…delivering the body counts, and so on.
I went to a local concert sponsored by the very upper-middle class town of Menlo Park ( next to Palo Alto) this evening to watch the children (girls) dance and the kids play and my racial kinfolk have their own kind of be-in. Smiles, and even some adults danced to 1950s pop music. No beatles, not rollling stones, no dylan, etc. A good time was had by all. This was simple happy music, White music, with just a slight nod to black music.
Nostalgia, yes…sweet times for young white adolescents to come up in. And the music was uniformly upbeat, danceable, hand-clapping stuff, and all the kids ran around like kids should run around, many with ecstatic faces of pure childhood joy. One little girl of maybe a near-three who could get up some pretty good speed continued to run around for about an hour. She would start out slow and as she accelerated, her face broke out into glee and stayed there until she slowed down again.
So I remember the 50s very well, and then came the 60s. The hippie music of Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and I cannot remember well the various names because I was not that much into it being a serious guy and all, but it was still pretty good. Then came the later stuff, the Dylan junk (to me), metal, more black and nastier stuff, a real departure from black mo-town and do-wop, which retained some innocence, and I cannot even recall what it was called, but from then on the black music got nastier and nastier until here we are with rap cannibal chanting and ape gesticulating including genital fondling and fornication representations.
What the Jews did…the above article addresses in part at least…and I suspect that it fit right in with the stated objective of the Pete Seeger communists like the Weavers was to consciously use folk music to reach the “masses.” This was theoretically worked out by the communist party, and they deployed the “folk song” strategy completely consciously and deliberately. (What’s a 3 letter word for “communist?’ r no, j-e-w) Revolution thru music.
Was Dylan a commie? Who knows, but he and many others appealed to the alienated…a word from the 60s…like me,but i never quite got it. Joan Baez was more my cup of ordianry tea, and Joan was never a commie or even much of generic red, despite her sexual randiness, which afflicted just about everybody.
So, I am no expert because I never paid that much attention to the pop music scene. But the Rock ‘n’ Roll (rock being a black term for coitus) revolution and the sexual revolution, and the anti-war revolution all went down hill, the music getting more and more sick with Dylan types, heavy metal, disco, etc., and the sexual revolution went into its inevitable dionysian orgy morass (love the one you’re with) and anti-war activism succumbing to communists (SDS) ca. 1970, and Jews , Black Panthers, and Maoists.
So, the music of the 60s reflected the times, a stupid war (unwinnable), its inevitable popular refusal, good economic times which meant folks could live on almost nothing, and a revolt which asserted that there could be more, especially the hippies…whom I continue to list as one of the traits of Whites and no other race…that this was more good than bad, although it went down too as do all hopelessly optimistic and promiscuously “loving” experiments.
Dylan certainly was not like the hippies that I was around who were innocent mostly, and trying to be good people. Of course Dylan and his camp-followers dragged the good times down…bummer man. Mr. Jones was assaulted by the commies and Dylan, and stood by sort of sand-bagged by the leftish and drugged children of Revolt.
The smarter kids like myself could weather the cultural storm but when the working class got into long hair and drugs, it was all downhill. The snarling rodent face of the Jew Dylan and his mimetic clones came down on America as the Great Satan. Most of them grew up to vote for Bill Clinton and some considerable number turned into the homeless, and Charles Manson types.
So…White Altruism, in both its aspects, benign and baneful. Pick up some 50s pop, even black do-wop and motown and dance around a bit with a smile.
joe (and anybody interested in the so-called ‘hippie’ movement) -
you’ll want to read this entire series:
INSIDE THE LC – the strange but mostly true story of the laurel canyon and the birth of the hippie generation
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/
ALL of it is an operation. it is being done TO US.
It’s the story of Allison Benedikt, a film editor at the Village Voice. She was raised by her American Jewish parents living in Youngstown (Ohio) to love Israel more than her country of birth. She tells her shocking experience in her recent article entitled Life After Zionist Summer Camp. Her experience, though, is not as bad as the experience of another American Jew, Jack Bernstein, who made Aliya to Holy Land and married an Israel Sephardim Jewess.
Interestingly, sociologists Stephen Cohen and Ari Kelman in a survey had confirmed that more than half of American Jews under 35 would not view the destruction of Israel as a personal tragedy.
Benedikt, like the great majority of Jews around the world, is confused about her loyalty to her motherland. “The adjustment back to America is not easy. No one in Ohio understands me. Am I an American Jew or a Jewish American? If, hypothetically, America and Israel were to go to war, who would I fight for? I ask these questions”.
Benedikt tells her two love affairs before she married her husband John Cook. All of them happened to be Goyim (non-Jewish). Sadly, none of them had a good ‘Zionist view’ of Israel.
And here is the final blow which the Atlantic‘s Mr. Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, could not swallow: “John and I have two kids of our own and are raising them as Jews. Most of my Jewish friends are disgusted with Israel. It seems my trajectory is not at all unique. My best memories from childhood are from camp, and I will never, ever send my kids there”.
In a typical humiliated professional Israeli propagandist – Goldberg labeled Benedikt “a wicked child” in his June 22 article.
http://rehmat1.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/allison-in-zionist-wonderland/
Jewish cultural corruption? No surprises here, this is what the Anti-Race does naturally. Richard Wagner wrote about this problem in his monograph, JUDAISM AND MUSIC. This was also written about by David Noebel in 1974 in his book THE MARXIST MINSTRELS.
Wow, there’s actually an historiography on the topic. WHO KNEW? Well, nice adition to said historiography via Knuttson’s work.
There’s a irony at the beginning of the article, a lost epiphany. Folk music developed a “world peace” universal message . . . yet when african influenced sound entered their stage at the Newport Folk Festival the crowd booed. Will the white man ever understand the meaning of this?
Perplexus, you need to read the first chapter of The Culture of Critique where Professor MacDonald lays out the difference between a Jewish cultural movement and one that merely has a Jewish presence.
Anyway, easy-listening music is hardly a Jewish milieu. Were those the only Jews you could think of? The genre is dominated by non-Jews. Henry Mancini, Mantovani, Ferrante & Teicher, Peter Nero, Roger Williams, Lawrence Welk, Billy Vaughan, Arthur Fiedler, Paul Weston, Norman Luboff, Ray Conniff, Frank Chacksfield, Ronnie Aldrich, Richard Clayderman, Bert Kaempfert, Johnny Douglas, and on and on. If you included the singers usually classified as easy-listening it would be a pretty Christian bunch: Jack Jones, Andy Williams, Vic Damone, Perry Como, Al Martino, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. The only Jewish singer that comes to mind is Barbra Streisand.
Yes, a lot of the songwriters of that era were Jewish, but about half of the great ones weren’t, including Oscar Hammerstein, Johnny Mercer, Frank Loesser, Frederick Loewe, Cole Porter, Harry Warren, Henry Mancini. That allegation belongs in a different topic, about the Jewishness of popular music in general.
I’m not sure if you were kidding but I just don’t see easy-listening music as a Jewish cultural movement the way electric blues and obscene art are.
P.S. I think Perplexus was referring to Ray Charles of the Ray Charles Singers (Jewish and easy listening) and not the black Ray Charles (neither Jewish nor easy listening).
Me: A small point: both Hammerstein and Loewe had a Jewish father, and the latter was, I believe, fully Jewish.
Whatever Hammerstein’s formal religious affiliation, the Jewish Geist suffused him. Has there ever been a preachier, more pretentious lyric than that of “You’ve Got to Be Taught” from South Pacific?
Every little Jew sure knows to do his part doesn’t he? It was not white people who made Dylan an icon. It was the Jews.
The only way white people can understand any of this is to understand that Jews are insane with jealousy. Who can deal with insanity? Especially if the afflicted are an alien species? We are normal, well meaning white people. What do we know of the Jewish ego? What do we know of the Jewish psyche? We are not professionals. We are a live-and-let-live type of people. What do we know of the kind of envy that drives an individual or group over the edge of what is normal and commits destructive acts against an entire Race and culture?
Egotistical hatred drives the Jews. They are consumed with jealousy. Not because white people have done anything to them other than a few ineffective attempts to defend ourselves. The Jewish ego is determined to smash us. They want to be better than we are. They want to be the big shots, the best, the greatest, the most wonderful creatures ever created. They praise themselves and each other ad nauseam, they force their foul presence on us as the icons to whom all must pay homage, the most talented stars and writers and scientists, act the experts in all matters and preen like peacocks as if they are our superiors because they know we don’t have the means to put them down or show them up.
Being insane does not mean lack of intelligence and cunning. Jews have to be sly, smart and skillful to do what they do and keep their hands hidden enough not to get caught.
The ego has no human feelings. The ego is cruel, pitiless. No one is safe or exempt, no one is allowed to escape, not even animals or family pets.
Like any victim the insane mind confounds us. We are caught in clutches of insanity and don‘t know how to get away. Millions of white people know perfectly well the Jews have set out to destroy us utterly and completely. We know the Jews are pitting the world against us, they put us down as unworthy of living. It’s crazy, but we have got to deal with it.
I enjoy much of Dylan’s music but can’t avoid noticing his bias. He was — justly, I believe — an opponent of America’s militaristic foreign policy, yet he, to the best of my knowledge mever questioned, let alone criticized, Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians and wrote a song, “Neighborhood Bully” that defended the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Apparently, he only cares about injustice if non-Jews are engaging in it but is fine with it if the perpetrators are Jews.
charlottagenscher:
“never questioned, let alone criticized, Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians and wrote a song, “Neighborhood Bully” that defended the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.”
Just a few years after his “Christian conversion” where he was marketed towards the church crowd. Once he established his Christian “creds” he starts up with the Zionist propaganda. On cue.
B. Dylan’s singing tone and attitude expressed anger. Listening to him, I always think, “You’ve little to be angry about. This is a pose.” The angry voice of Bob Dylan taught countless young White men (and women) of the 1960′s that they were supposed to be angry, and how to sound and talk angry. It was a rather unpleasant experience for the mothers and fathers. Not to be too reductionist, but that’s all that I think Bob Dylan’s about. He both tapped into the natural anger of the young man coming of age and getting into loggerheads with his father, but also exacerbated and inflamed it. It’s the latter phenomenon — accomplished by a great many heavily promoted ’60s product personalities — that is the real interesting thing about Dylan. That is, taking the natural tension between Gentile fathers and their teen sons, and stoking it into a chasm, and a conflagration, branded as “the generation gap.”
CORRECTION to my hasty “all that Dylan was about.” I was obviously uneducated on the matter. I had no understanding of the black blues aspect of Dylan, or his connection with the Butterfield Blues Group. My apologies to the writer. This is a tremendous, loaded article. And it really takes me back into the mysteries of my brothers’ record collection around 1969-70. It’s moving, too, to realize that: Yes, there was a racial aspect to the reaction to Dylan’s change at the Newport Festival.
It gives me sorrow to think about it, you know. The sort of musical values that were high to the completely White folk crowd of the 50′s and 60′s. Melody, harmony, the old, harmony, the country, the lighter sound of bronze on wood, traveling, exploration of axioms or truths, and often a positive view of life. That White singing aesthetic: Open, straightforward, sustained notes. (Like the full-throated, ringing voice of The Seekers’ Judith Durham.) Not the “queerified” singing style of Dylan, with all of its affectations and disrespect for Gentile values like tone or even definite melodic structure. ‘Queerification’ is, indeed, is a basic element Blacks inject into the European musical substrate. (And I’m not using the word in any way related to homosexuality here. I like the old meaning of ‘queer’ anyway, and it serves here.)
Oh, and the Peace ethic! Here were White people expressing anti-war sentiments through art and music. That’s of the White spirit. Then one from the same tribe that likes to drag nations into wars dragged electrified Black blues into White folk music.
But to think about those people, if I could have sailed above the crowds and looked at the idealistic White women and men in the folk audiences in 1961 — what a thought. Dylan basically betrayed the musical and cultural values that the White folk audiences held dear. This was clearly because in reality he never held them. The only overlap in the first place was the lyrical “protest” content (rejection of the standing Gentile order), and the use of an acoustic guitar.
___________________________
On that note, there is an interesting anecdote from George Harrison about meeting Bob Dylan. This was after BD was already a big deal. Harrison was amazed at how few chords Dylan knew, and how he couldn’t even play bar chords. (A basic in guitaring.) At that time the Gentile showed the Jew a number of interesting new chords. These then upgraded his artistry slightly.
Always caring about the art of things, as Gentiles do, and always kindly giving, too.
________________________
But back to my original point, that Dylan’s angry voice was the gist of what he was. In the modern context, the point stands. Any time I walk through some place and a Bob Dylan song is on, that’s all I notice. Not Black blues, but a Jew pretending to be an “angry young White man,” singing in a voice that can be described as distilled disdain, and somehow transmitting to the ears of my brothers back then: “You ought to be danged mad about a lot of things!”
Sometimes I think I am completely off topic. Ha
The first time I heard Bob Dylan sing I knew he had to be Jewish. No gentile could become a star with a voice like his. That guy can’t sing. I guess we must be intrigued with how a Jew like Dylan could take our music, deform it and be made an icon by the music industry.
Heather Blue,
Yes. Or a little sick – diseases being contagious.
Some time ago I saw a video interview on vigilantcitizen.com (taken from YouTube) with Bobby in which he was asked why, at his age(70?), he kept touring? His response was, that he had agreed to a contract(?) many years ago and he was sticking to it. When the interviewer asked the obvious question given the implication: are we talking about a contract with the Devil? Bobby simply remained schtum. Perhaps he was being smart but, didn’t his looks undergo a radical alteration (for the better) sometime in the 60s or did I just imagine that? (and by the Devil Bobby could be referring to the Mafyia) I’m guessing that those on your list might have been offered similar ‘contracts’. Hit the road jack et al. And don’t you come back….no more…?
Dylan’s influence was certainly vast, but the people who deserve the credit for introducing white America to the blues and R&B are the lads who crossed the Atlantic in the British Invasion. Dylan gave rock ‘n’ roll intellectual heft–it was considered teenybopper music before he came on the scene. But it was the Animals, Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, Kinks, and Beatles, et al who recorded songs by contemporary blues artists and put them on the charts. Maybe Knutsson covers this in the next installment…
Greetings. I am not racist, in fact, I do not feel myself to part of any “race” in particular. However, the Frankfurtian deconstruction of all values- Mozart is the same as a drunken freak in a kazoo- has rejected fundamental realities of human consciousness and spirit. Please, do not reject the beauty of Black music and the Black soul. Do you think Paul Butterfield could even stand in the same room as Muddy Waters? We are in this together – what about the blacks exploitation by the Jewish slave trade? How the racial conflicts have been engineered to divide and conquer all against the zionist machine? Read Douglas Reed “The Controversy of Zion” to get an understanding of the roots of this agenda. Dylan is a hack, a load of bullshit propagated as culture. Have you listened to the Last Poets? Why do you think hip-hop and rap are so degraded? Open your minds. I am happy to see a website with some intellectual level, but to deride the problems of blacks in America is to reduce your understanding to the a racialist level that precludes the unity required to throw of the yoke of our oppressors. We must stand together and not allow the artificial constructions of our Zionist overlords to confuse our minds. The end game is happening right now, as found in the Talmud, wherein all the peoples of the earth are subjegated into a docile slave class. To understand the depths of this, look into the real history of Marxist revolution in Russia. That will happen here, and we cannot afford to divide ourselves against this threat. Our minds, our culture, our bodies, and very souls have been turned into a playground for these forces of cultural destruction. Research the slave trade, Hollywood, the music industry, and Satanic ritual abuse to get an understanding of the forces of pure evil that confront us. I pray that everyone reading this will move beyond the unnecessary divisions between races and cultures and understand the true enemy; unless this website is simply an NSA-run endeavor that is meant to drag the enemies of God’s chosen out to the light where they can enjoy the pleasures of the new USSA’s gulag. By the way, I am white.
By the way, I am white.
No, you’re just confused.
Why do you think hip-hop and rap are so degraded?
Because it sells.
And Jews, loving money, tolerate no restrictions on selling.
How the racial conflicts have been engineered to divide and conquer all against the zionist machine?
Indeed, racial conflict is caused by forcing races to live and work together as if they were the same.
We’re not the same.
EVERYTHING was bad about the 60s.
INCLUDING all of the “civil rights” nonsense.
unnecessary divisions between races
Good fences make good neighbors.
Whites have a right to live too.
On that there can be no compromise.
It is only whites that are forced to share their space, to have their sanctuaries annihilated. Whites — and ONLY whites — can’t have their own neighborhoods, schools, and countries. This isn’t at all a generic agitation of racial conflict that’s going on, as you slyly suggest.
What it is, is white genocide.
But your devilish appeal — and I don’t use the term lightly — will be attractive to many whites, making a vice of our virtues: Sacrifice themselves for the high ideal — “Never mind the death of your people, son, you go get that Zionist! You’ll be a hero! Non-whites the world over will thank your people! (Posthumously.)”
Straight is the path and narrow is the way.
Zionism is not the problem. Jews are our enemies but are not the problem.
Nice try.
It is obvious Jews always take on the look and manners of the host people and distort their culture. In Greece they probably looked nearly as Greek as the Greeks, at least enough to fool the masses. In Rome the average Roman probably could not tell the Jew from a Roman. We know Jews wore togas, took on Roman manners and swaggered around acting as experts in everything Roman. Now, we are afflicted with the Jews. One of my friends even asked me “are Jews not white?”
In America Jews have set themselves up as knowing more about being American than an American. It is astounding that this alien Jews always know more about being Egyptian than the Egyptians, more about being Greek than the Greek, more about being Roman than the Romans and more about being western than the western nations. In the final analysis Jews are nothing but Jews.
Excellent comment by the Born Agin’ Redneck:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/06/quantum-dylan-a-double-act-part-1/#comment-40858
In response to Dark star:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/06/quantum-dylan-a-double-act-part-1/#comment-40836
Elvis was not jewish.
The creeps picture….
It’s the old banana and cheap sunglasses – leather – menacing look .
Should be avoided like the plague .
“Greetings. I am not racist, in fact, I do not feel myself to part of any “race” in particular.”
Disconnect, non-identity, genericness: “Bor-ing!” \8o)=
Good comments Heather Blue, I think I’ll dig my copy of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” out of the closet and watch it again. Thanks for reminding me I had it.
I never could stand Dylan / Zimmerman. Just hated him.
Dylan is sometimes overrated or even misunderstood, but he has nevertheless been pretty influential, and is a good songwriter, if sometimes emptily snide or preachy. I can certainly listen to his stuff, along with a lot else, though not too often, or naively.
Some of the commentary here about jews is stupid though, generalising and vilifying in exactly the way that suits the alleged ends of the targets! “Whites” are not perfect and are largely to blame for their own problems, even if SOME jews have taken advantage of it. Wake up fools, don’t just whinge and whine about jews or whatever, educate yourselves and make precise judgements based on solid facts, and in a positive and not hateful spirit. But to just vilify and hate a whole group regardless of individual merit gets nowhere, Hitler taught us that if little else. It’s primitive stupid destructive and wrong, and gives the lie to alleged “white” superiority, especially as white societies slip further into marginality, largely as a result of just such subpar thinking. And btw, “whites” are themselves a mongrel “race”, and assimilated Jews are whites too, after a few generations and intermingling especially, even the Nazis couldn’t untangle that. “Race” is not what counts, it’s attitudes and actions – I’ll take a good jew over a bad “white” anyday, though I’ll try to educate the latter if possible.
@ Steve, july2,2011-6:07 am.
“Whites”(why the quotation marks?Are Whites not real?) are not perfect (nobody says so) and are largely to blame for their own problems (it is more a question of naiveté than vices) even if SOME jews have taken advantage of it. (they not only take advantage of it,they more often than not CREATE THE CONDITIONS for it.And it is not SOME but MANY if not MOST who do that) .
“…to just vilify and hate a whole group regardless of individual merit gets nowere…”
When you talk about GROUPS you talk about AVERAGES,not individual cases. If a group behaves ON AVERAGE in a destructive way to you,then it stands to reason to not take risks and not trust any individual of that group.Makes eminently sense.
“And btw “whites” are themselves a mongrel “race”…”
Is that now the new party-line after the idea that “race is a social construct” has been busted?And of which other races is the white race supposed to be a mongrel-race?Negroids+Mongoloids=Caucasoids,is that it?
“And assimilated Jews are whites too,after a few generations and intermingling especially…”
If a pure white race doesn’t exist in the first place, then why would Jews need to be mixed with it to appear white?You contradict yourself.
I wish a minimum of IQ and educational level would be required to comment on this forum.But allright, that’s democracy…
Steve,
You have a lot to learn. Hitler was an ordinary Soldier who rose to lead a defeated Germany and within a few years turn it into an economic and military powerhouse. All this while the West was still languishing in a long depression. He did it by circumventing Jewish debt based monetary systems and by inspiring the overwhelming majority of the industrious German people, not just for a few months, he did it for years.
He and his inner circle also understood exactly what the Jews were about. They knew what was going on in Ukraine in 1932, how the Jewish NKVD were murdering millions of Farming families by confiscating their grain. They also knew this was being kept secret by the Jewish owned media. He and those around him saw the USSR under the complete control of Jews and knew sooner or later, there would be an attack on Europe with Jews doing what they have always done; use the Christian Russians to attack Europeans, just as the Israelis today use Americans and Europeans (Nato in Libya)
to attack Arabs.
In fact Nazism under Hitler in Germany was such a success the Jews HAD to destroy it and why they keep on having to destroy it today by subjecting White Europeans with laws, making refusal to believe their holocaust lie a criminal offense and denigrating Hitler in a thousand other ways.
Two excellent chapters in E. Michael Jones’ The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit address the labor music of the ’30s and the protest and folkrock music of the ’60s. I’m not a big fan of Bob Dylan’s, but I participated in the cultural revolution of that time and consider the music made then just as “folksy” as anything unearthed by musicologists in Appalachia or Louisiana, only more urban. Two good books (by asleep gentiles) about the American folk music revival are John Fahey’s delightful How Bluegrass Music Ruined My Life (actually about Jews on safari in the Mississippi Delta hunting for forgotten black bluesmen to exploit) and Eric Von Schmidt’s Baby Let Me Follow You Down. The later is an insider’s memoir of the Harvard Square folk club scene
and how it exploded into a pop culture trend.
Neocon Ronald Radosh’s autobiography, Commies: The Old Left, The New Left and the Leftover Left spotlights the education of musically minded Red Diaper Babies radicalized first at Jewish youth camps in the Catskills where Pete Seeger sing-a-longs were annual events and later at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where (I believe) Kevin MacDonald received his first comeuppance from the glib subversives on that campus.
Bob Dylan’s first Greenwich Village girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, has written a book about their affair in which she writes the folk music scene was crawling
with self-invented singing hobos, cowboys, hillbillies and sailors from middle class Jewish families. She remembers Ian Tyson, of the mellifluous Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia, as one of the few males she knew then who wasn’t a poseur.
Suze Rotolo was on the cover with Dylan strolling down a NY street in winter on one of his albums. She later said she could not get over how contrived Dylan’s image was, how they made him into this cult like figure. She deeply resented this worship creation of a man who was not so remarkable.
I remember watching a film made at the time of Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame, showing him as spokesperson and artist for the movement. What was so striking was how mediocre and infantile he appeared. It was clear to anyone paying attention Dylan was a media creation, not a talent. At one point in the film, when he sat down beside Donovan, and the two of them starting playing some tunes spontaneously, Donovan was so much more talented it was startling. You could see it in Donovan’s expressions that he was puzzled how this person sitting before him could be so lionized. And like the previous poster who commented on how surprised George Harrison was that Dylan didn’t know much about the guitar, I think this can be said of all musical aspects, as they relate to Dylan. Bottom line: Dylan was a contrived icon with very little talent and this was done by the Jewish media, which continues to do this today in all fields of endeavor.
blockquote>”Race” is not what counts, it’s attitudes and actions…”
Lots of things count. My world wouldn’t be worth living in without the particular look of my own people, especially the White women, aeons-made. And other White things, like cellos, pianos, their aesthetic, and other such.
“But to just vilify and hate a whole group regardless of individual merit gets nowhere, Hitler taught us that if little else. ”
Steve, you haven’t been allowed to know “what Hitler taught us.” All you know is what you’ve been told and you can see what a mountain of horsehit this is by walking into any university, chain or independent used bookstore in America and gazing at the Sargasso Sea of lurid swastikated Nazi titles on the shelves written by professors and pulp meisters 80% of whom have Jewish names. Furthermore, even if you can read and write German you’ll have a hard time getting a handle on what Hitler taught. Here it is over a half century after the end WWII and about 15 years into the Internet for most people and the truth about those events is just starting to trickle out. Any version of history, in which Hitler isn’t presented as a carpet chewing genocidal maniac with one testicle out to rule the world, remains so threatening there’s a danger we’ll be denied all digital access to it in the future. Don’t try to play the “good Jews vs bad Jews” card on me, with its specter of another holocaust looming in the background looking like a Joker, because I’m not having any of it. Compared to every shiny suited, furniture selling, lascivious and lying president and prime minister of Israel Hitler was a prince and you know it!
It would be incredible to know what the real Hitler was like. Based on the little I have read, there is little accurate information out there. I have read David Irving’s Hitler’s War but that is about it. I would welcome any suggestions from those who have read on the subject and can recommend some more elucidating books on Hitler. I don’t for a second buy the maniacal, crazed image the Jewish media has thrust upon us.
Whenever I hear him now I hear a Jew expressing his contempt for the White establishment, and hooking into the natural rebelliousness of White Gentile youth and cranking it up 20 notches. That’s all I hear.
Hitler was a latecomer and did it all wrong. Roughly 100 White European kings, queens, or leaders before Hitler taught us that when there’s no taboo limiting discussion of their Jewish network, and some restraint placed upon them instead of carte blanches and “no talk” rules — White societies get to survive and thrive.
Steve is simply uneducated. Hitler was actually the first Jewish-engineered anti-semitism phenomenon, with results intended to finally weaken their eternal policeman and restraint, the White Gentile.
A few comments to respond to – time is short so I can’t cover it all. Firstly I have studied Hitler WW2 the Jewish role in it etc probably more than you guys, from what you evidence here, and nothing you say I have not seen many times before. Read my comments on the Dutch Jews in WW2 article for an insight. The fact remains Hitler blew it big time in the end, and just about the no.1 reason was his blanket negative attitude to any “racial” group he considered inferior or antagonistic, Slavs as well as Jews, plus a few others on the side (eg Gypsies). He did well enough up to 1939-1940 considering his limitations and then led Germany into the toilet, despite having been within an ace of victory, but he couldn’t have used it properly anyway, his idiotic and criminal contempt for the Slavs alone (as “White” as it gets – ie the Slavs), even if not quite the gas chamber genocide it’s sometimes painted as, bears that out.
As for the Jewish role, yes in some ways it was devious and destructive on the part of some Jews, but a small minority like that can only “dominate” or determine things if they have a pretty stupid majority to play with, so stupid in fact that it doesn’t bear defending. In fact the blame goes all around as to groups, roughly proportionately to numbers. If you can’t handle it too bad.
And again, to vilify and blame ALL Jews or generalize to that effect is exactly what your “Jewish conspirator” would want, you are playing into his hands, that is if you aren’t actually him yourself. As I said, real arguments based on solid facts, in a cool and rational manner is what’s required. As for Hitler being “Jewish engineered”, he may have been one quarter Jewish though there’s no hard proof, and received some financial backing from a few early on, plus gained much of his power from reaction to Jewish influenced Bolshevism, and negative image from Jewish dominated media, but he still did more than enough on his own to stuff it up regardless. It’s the sheer weakness and stupidity of the “blame it all on the Jews” line I can’t stand, they’re not inherently that unified or powerful, and to make out they are both allows them to claim constant persecution and makes us look pathetic, and encourages substandard thinking, if indeed thinking at all. Plus it’s not needed, the facts specific to each individual and action are enough.
All “races” by now are very mixed and “mongrel”, they all blend at the edges into the next. And in fact genetics history and commonsense all argue for basically one race, the human race, with local sub variants anyway. Differences are important and should not be overlooked or obliterated, but neither should they be exaggerated to the point of pathology. I’m all for the preservation of what’s good in European/”White” societies, but not to idealize even the bad things, and have the sort of idiotic skinhead level attitude that never gets out of the gutter except to fall right back into it.
Btw I put “Whites” in commas to indicate the limitations of the term – many jews, latinos and other so-called “non-whites” have white skin and even fair hair and eyes – does that make them white? I prefer European, by which I include the Latin and Slavic and Greek “races”, as well as Hungarians etc. It covers both ethnicity and culture better then “White” which is used in different ways by different people. And yes Jews too if they are sufficiently assimilated.
I”ll never forget my first blue grass festival. It was held in God’s country under the sky. People camped nearby and sat in their own lawnchairs. The tickets were affordable and you had hours of entertainment by talented white musicians.
Writer, long time assistant to Dylan Robbie Robertson is half native and raised by his native mother.
His dad was jewish and absent as he was caught doing armed robbery.
If Robertson was raised in a religion i dunno.
Also his grandad was a rag man.