If I could spend an hour with anyone in the world, it would be Bob Dylan. I don't even have anything I want to ask him, I just love the way he talks. I want an hour to listen to him in person and just catch his vibe.
I don't even want to see him perform, at least not in the present day. (I would do pretty much anything to be transported back to Royal Albert Hall in 1966, though.)
Why do I love the way he talks? From a recent interview, published in the Wall Street Journal:
Q: And since everything is at our fingertips, has streaming democratized music? Are we back to the days when “Strangers in The Night” can top “Paperback Writer” and “Paint It Black” on the pop charts?
A: We could very well be. There’s a sameness to everything nowadays. We seem to be in a vacuum. Everything’s become too smooth and painless. We jumped into the mainstream, the big river, with all the industrial waste, chemical debris, rocks, and mudflow, along with Brian Wilson and his brothers, Soupy Sales, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. The earth could vomit up its dead, and it could be raining blood, and we’d shrug it off, cool as cucumbers.
Everything’s too easy. Just one stroke of the ring finger, middle finger, one little click, that’s all it takes, and we’re there. We’ve dropped the coin right into the slot. We’re pill poppers, cube heads and day trippers, hanging in, hanging out, gobbling blue devils, black mollies, anything we can get our hands on. Not to mention the nose candy and ganga grass. It’s all too easy, too democratic. You need a solar X-ray detector just to find somebody’s heart, see if they still have one.
The entire interview — and it's long — continues in this register. Who on earth speaks like this? No one except Dylan, as far as I know. I don't really have any idea what he's talking about, but does that matter? It's like reading Nietzsche, if Nietzsche were a Jewish folk singer from Minnesota.
