2023-06-08 18:10:38
Bob Dylan doesn’t want you to use the phone because 20 minutes after the concert you need to know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow in Toledo, if the artichoke recipe was 150 or 180 degrees or if Sumar y Podemos already such. He doesn’t want you to have your cell phone in your hand because the reels from your Instagram magnifying glass are more entertaining than what is happening on stage. Someone ventures to call it the “unfriendly” concert. It is a euphemism for what is simply the concert of a very distant ancestor. That Dylan has a problem with the 21st century is self-evident. Not just because you want to take a photo or video of him while he sings When I paint my masterpiece.
He proclaims his incapacity for the new times in all the themes included in the film Shadow Kingdom, which he has just turned into a new album and which he has launched on the market a few days before doing so against the Madrid public. Dylan comes across as a misfit, but has no live arguments to back up the pose for him. The first night of two with everything sold, he vindicated himself as a capital figure and incapable of breaking the internet. He delighted in his most characteristic grunts and licked his lips in his most popular impostures to delight his very fanatics who came to listen to him on a rainy day on the Complutense university campus. At 82 years old, his formula still works for him, even if it is pure mannerism. Some of the audience got up and left before half was over and another tried to get up from their wet chairs to dance something. It was impossible.
The star of the night was the 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. Removing some old themes like Every Grain of Sand o To Be Alone With You, the 16 songs he chose to play have been composed in the last three years. Because Dylan resists being Dylan.
The most interesting thing about the product that he offers in the Noches del Botánico concert cycle is his confrontation with new behaviors linked to new technologies and that very symbolic denial: putting the mobile phone in a neoprene case to neutralize it. The kidnapping of viewers’ phones has been sold to the show as a corrective measure against shared life online and live. Something like a force detox from our digital distractions. The reality is that the product that Dylan sells has not wanted to cross the 20th century and forces everyone back several decades. But those who come from those years know what it means when the best part of the concert is the band.
Bob Dylan prefers to hold you captive and remove any possibility of digital escape, because what he offers is an outdated, unbearable and predictable cultural product. It’s not Bob’s fight against distracting technology, it’s his fight against time. If Dylan takes the device away from you, it’s so you don’t have an escape, so you don’t stop taking care of him. So that you look at him until anger. Because he is not going to do anything to make the two hours an unforgettable experience. Capturing mobile phones means hijacking attention and in the media we know very well that the rules of the game change and we must adapt. It is possible that the best of the night was the version of Not Fade Away, in which he forced his best-known vocal gestures. That gift was only allowed to the 2,000 people who sat watching it. Maybe stunned. He also put some of Nashville Skyline (To be alone with you) and of John Wesley Harding (Slow train coming). The 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature became entangled in an infinite blues, in which the color was provided by the companions.
According to Loquillo’s crazy theory, North American rock is the music that the authentic European listens to. Tonight the reasons for giving Karol G the Princess of Asturias of Letters have been clarified.
Lately I think a lot about the human remains on display at the National Archaeological Museum, with the most bizarre excuses. There is hardly any justification for a mummified corpse to be exposed due to the quality of its conservation, because its tendons are visible, because it even has its nails… On Wednesday night, with the staff sheathed in blue plastic to resist the rain, against the archaic background of the buildings of Madrid’s Ciudad Universitaria, I have seen an archaeological scene. It is what has come down to us from Bob Dylan, the remains of him. Before they freed my phone from that case and I started writing this on my phone, on the subway, on the way home, I think about the 120 euros for the ticket. And that Dylan is the worst thing that can happen to you today if you haven’t sat down with your bank to negotiate that the interest rate on the variable mortgage doesn’t ruin your life.
#house #Bob #Dylan