Bob Dylan on Lenny Bruce: More of an Outlaw Than You Ever Were
2011; Fordham University School of Law; Volume: 38; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0199-4646
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoThis Essay seeks to compare and contrast two contemporary performing artists: Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. An Essay that compares and contrasts is a traditional academic exercise. The genre may seem artificial, even corny, because it arbitrarily takes two subjects and analyzes how they are the same and how they are different. The exercise always yields insights about both, however. For me, comparing and contrasting still has value as a heuristic device. It is also the basis of metaphor. To be contemporaries means to be two individuals who are, or were, coexistent in time. (1) Contemporaries in any given culture, depending upon their geographic location and choice of parents, share common history and social, economic, and political conditions. Bruce and Dylan both became artists in the middle of twentieth-century America--in the same stew of ideas, myths, and shared assumptions. Both experienced the same winds of change, albeit at different stages of life, in the 1950s and 1960s, the post-World War II Cold War period, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. Both responded to these winds of change, and in so doing, transcended and transformed their respective art forms. Both became cultural icons: Bruce as a fierce warrior against governmental censorship, and Dylan as a symbol of all the myriad meanings that have been laid upon him--the gravely-voiced folksinger, the artist as protestor against war and injustice, the rock-and-roll poet, and the hoary prophet on the road, peddling his songs and his wisdom. Almost a generation apart, both Dylan and Bruce were born of Jewish families; both changed their last names, perhaps to make them more palatable to the mainstream. (2) Leonard Schneider was born on Long Island in 1926; the comedian Lenny Bruce died at his home in Hollywood Hills in 1966 from an overdose of morphine. (3) Robert Zimmerman was born in Minnesota in 1941; (4) the musician and songwriter, Bob Dylan, at the time of this writing, is about to celebrate his seventieth birthday. Their arrival on the planet's surface was staggered. The month before Bruce's death, Bob Dylan had wrecked his Triumph 500 motorcycle in Woodstock, New York, suffering a mysterious trauma to his body and spirit that caused him to go underground for a long time. (5) Dylan was twenty-five years old at the time of that accident; it was the same summer that Bruce died at age forty. Lenny Bruce began his career as a stand-up comic. Stand-up comedy derived from various popular modes of entertainment of the late nineteenth-century, such as vaudeville, music halls, minstrel shows, humorous monologists (e.g., Mark Twain), and even the antics of a circus clown. (6) Comedians of this earlier era often assumed an ethnic persona and drew on popular stereotypes. The early stand-up comics all started out in vaudeville: Jack Benny, Frank Fay, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, and Milton Berle. (7) They stepped out alone onto the stage, often in front of the curtain, and spoke directly to a live audience. (8) Bruce started out in this vaudevillian tradition--one that his mother had belonged to as a stage performer. (9) In the late 1940s, Bruce's act was hokey. He was a living black-and-white Brylecreem ad: greased-down hair, bow-tie, wide lapels. His movements only slightly exaggerated the stock-in-trade gestures of comic impersonators .... For the most part, Lenny echoed his burlesque-comedian mother's routine. (10) But Bruce was a lover of jazz, and of the lives that jazz musicians led. (11) He began to take on the trappings of the beat generation, using drugs, wearing casual clothes and dark glasses on stage, and becoming radically anti-establishment. (12) From the jazz scene, Bruce borrowed the notion of spontaneous rifling, sometimes taking himself by surprise on stage by his free association of ideas. (13) By the 1950s, Bruce's work had taken an edgier, confrontational, political, irreverent, and for some, vulgar, turn. …
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