CAN YOU UNDERSTAND MY PAIN?”*
Despite some SHAMELESS name-dropping (never a good sign), Goldstein’s “Satellite Dylan” piece in The Nation (nice cover!) steers things back to the bard’s misogyny, which he usually skates on:
I don’t claim that Dylan is determined by machismo — there’s much more to him than that. But I will say that he reaches many men of a certain age and status on precisely these grounds. He digs beneath their ambivalent embrace of sexual equality, the insistence that they acknowledge their interests as a sex, and he proposes that these demands insult the fundamentals. Liberals won’t accept that regressive message when it’s wrapped in conservative politics, as it often is in country music. But because Dylan is as critical of injustice as he is of liberation, he overrides such reservations. And if you take a purely textual approach, it’s possible to forget that his mystique rests substantially on his sexual politics. Dylan is a liberal man’s man.
Richard Goldstein
Goldstein in LookSmart
Out of Ear’s Reach, Riley on Ricks in Slate (June 2004)
Wiki Dylan links
[*Actual lyric from “Is Your Love In Vain” off of 1978’s STREET LEGAL, notoriously omitted among Ph.Dylanologists.]