Bob Dylan
Blonde on Blonde

THE REVIEW

Robert Allen Zimmerman (to his friends, Bob Dylan), Blonde on Blonde, 1966, Columbia. Part I: "Anthropology of Bob"

In our courses, never paid but much appreciated by the rare, selected students, we have always emphasized that perhaps the most compelling characteristic of postmodernism, from a primarily historical-theoretical point of view, is not so much the citationist collage, but more radically, the aesthetic artifice, which shrewdly deceives like the Hindu maya: in the virgin forest, the root of the tree is mistaken for a snake. This escamotage often results in noteworthy authorial outcomes: that reveal rather than disclose. The drift, imaginal before musical, which most closely approaches the supreme realization of the meta-sonic fiction is AOR; in Italy, among the greats, its greatest exponent is Max Pezzali, who essentially leads the somewhat involute experiments of the Battisti panelliano back to an allegro con brio, freeing them from any weighted and introjected nihilistic substratum. Thus, the icy songwriting of the bear from Poggio Bustone is adapted within frames of precious, sentimental, accessible idyll. One must be fully aware of this: in the so-called mainstream of the terminal phase of the age of the wolf, treasures are hidden, whose Homeric depths are incomprehensible to most.

However, there are occasions when we are ashamed to belong to the white race: the Indo-European birth, in other ways a blessing graciously bestowed by the Heavens of Thule, in these cases appears as a terrifying curse struck by Fenrir. We will not speak of the Van Morrison case and his tattered laments of a mongrel, idolized by many. One of the most significant occasions of manifestation of this paradoxical heterogenesis of ends is represented by the human, anthropological, and discographic case that we are now, serenely, going to discuss in detail.

The European tradition finds one of its most evident—and therefore hidden—drains and channels of decomposition in the sinister lamentations of a Robert Allen Zimmerman, to his friends Bob, a professional Eskimo strummer and a grim stream of metacultural deconstruction by election: who swiftly reaches the cloaca maxima of psyscho-blues/folkish self-referentiality worthy of a one-handed applause.

We understand, the gentlemen will allow, how it is time now to put pen to paper, to continue our relentless operation of recovery, rectification, and metamusical orientation pro bono pacis. My sword is the pen, recited the adage of the samurai self-transmuted, for scene requirements, into an ascetic from a ubiquitous writing desk.

Zimmerman was already in an advanced phase of degeneration perhaps since the cradle, certainly from his youth: evidence of this is the poor cover—artsy like the prostatic hypertrophy of a dog howling from hell—of the definitive "Blonde on Blonde," in which the gloomy minstrel of protest entertainment launched the fashion of the shawl with a bow for vintage mugs: the close-up shows us his lifeless face aiming the lens and transcending it to the pneumatic void; while the hair, apparently, hadn't been combed since he was born. In the background of the late existentialist frame, we seem to see the bars of a cell: which somehow pick up the carré pattern of the Gnostic shawl. On the back, therefore, we must deduce, behind the bars, Bob hints at a circumstantial smile, holding a pair of pliers in his right hand, with on his chest a frame with a photo depicting a Mongolian portrayed in half profile: hermetic symbolism too deep to be rightly decoded (before the Mongolian, in the framed photo there was C. Cardinale, and here hermeneutics was replaced by beatific contemplation: but the rogue of Duluth did not ask the divine creature to appear on the fourth, and she rightly sued him: it's a shame she didn't bankrupt him, preventing him from continuing his activity as a corrupter of Western fools).

The seventh album of the minstrel of peace (between 1965 and 1967 he released four; he could have released one or eighteen, it wouldn't have made any difference to us), loved by the hippies (whom he despised, internally and externally) and by countless other subspecies of idlers, this double collection of caroms for ukulele players and pourers of wine stretched with Giuliani bitter flows smoothly like Gloria, on a surfboard along the Torvaianica seafront, a midsummer night: to be fair, one cannot say that all the tracks are contemptible. Some are even almost enjoyable, e.g., the one that describes murky visions of a ramshackle Slovak harlot, named Johanna, and the last one, dedicated to a woman with sad eyes because, perhaps to balance Johanna, with a recessed chest (a truly inelegant metaphor: landscape, in Western art, describes the movements of the soul, not the oedipal-onanistic disappointment of the false puritan). None, however, of these romances for Midwest shanties really leave a mark: at least Cohen wrote poetry to inconclusive but friendly tunes, and then he even became a Buddhist, renewing the trends good for those who understood nothing of the great white and Christian civilization; Drake continually whispered exquisite swan songs, and then he also died very young; Cash had a charge that Dylan can only dream of even when he goes to the toilet to unload the Thanksgiving turkey. Ours, who instead seems immortal, has tried in every way to revive the surreptitious mythology of the frontier with the most inane Protestantism (the religion of fools and/or usurers); lately, they even awarded him the meritocratic Nobel: which, it should be noted, he did not refuse, simply limited himself to not being present at the award ceremony —another gesture of oligophrenic snobbery, with the literal application of the theories of the stray N. Moretti on "absence as more acute presence"—, a show in which the tramp P. Smith flaunted her sulfurous cantatas, serving as furniture for the gnostic globalist cliques gathered there. It’s almost sixty years that, in his performances, ours plays (if one can say so: a burp by moonlight of Drake is superior to the entire production of Minnesota's bird of ill-omen), unfailingly not generating a laugh from all those incorrigible rogues who spent 700 dollars to idolize a wooden storyteller wallowing in the murky of his trinkets, and then leaves as if nothing had happened. And on this, he is right: musically, nothing has happened, even if everyone claims the opposite, because "Rolling Stones" wrote it or it was proclaimed to the four winds by the deracinated under the house, panting at the mere announcement of the next Coen brothers' film.