ABSTRACT
One of the first major rock critics, Paul Williams launched the influential Crawdaddy! magazine in 1966, while still a freshman at Swarthmore College. At the time, serious examinations of rock music were rarely to be found in the popular press. One of Williams’s first significant articles, “Understanding Dylan” tackles the subject of rock’s most opaque poet, a figure whose complex lyrics virtually begged to be analyzed. What do we gain, Williams asks, from scrutinizing the songs of Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman, 1941), specifically those from his then most recent release, Blonde on Blonde? Are we searching for some hidden significance that we can attach to Dylan’s biography or some clue to the music’s cultural context? Williams’s stance is clear throughout. Such undertakings, he argues, are misguided; Dylan’s music is an art form that should be experienced, not interpreted. Williams’s opinions are radical and debatable, even more so because they echo almost to the word, contentious sentiments that had been bubbling over in the world of art and literary criticism, most notably in philosopher Susan Sontag’s provocative 1964 essay “Against Interpretation.”1 By aggressively digging at a text to unearth its meaning, Sontag believed that modern critics were becoming numb to art’s more immediate formal properties. What was instead needed, she argued, was an “erotics of art,” one that would restore the primacy of art’s sensory experience while celebrating its surface transparency. Similarly Williams insists that if we are to “understand” the substance of Dylan’s rock ’n’ roll poetry, we must approach it on an experiential level.
