Bob Dylan’s big problem with heartland rock: “That don’t mean nothing”
Bob Dylan is a lot of things, but ‘upbeat’ isn’t a word that could often describe the veteran songwriter. Despite the countless different genres and styles he has explored since his days as a young folk singer, there are a few specific sounds that inspire little but boredom in Dylan’s mind, and heartland rock is at the top of that list.
First emerging during the latter days of the 1970s, heartland rock isn’t so much a sound as it is a spirit; detailing the lives and plight of American blue-collar workers and everyday folks through socially-conscious rock and roll music. On the face of it, that description doesn’t appear all that far away from the kind of socially-conscious folk music with which Bob Dylan revolutionised the airwaves during his 1960s heyday, and the irony in his apparent dislike of heartland rock is that it likely wouldn’t have existed without him.
If you look, for instance, at the premier voices in the heartland world, Bruce Springsteen is undoubtedly the most prominent, but with the likes of Tom Petty, Bob Seger, and John Mellencamp also up there, all of them tend to cite Dylan as a major influence. During the early days of Springsteen’s career, in fact, he faced an endless onslaught of comparisons to Dylan, to such an extent that he began pursuing the heartland style as a means of escaping those expectations.
Inarguably, then, Dylan was directly responsible for the emergence of heartland rock. Then again, artists often grow to despise their own influence, and in the mid-1980s Dylan certainly had no love for the heartland realm, himself coming to the end of a period of gospel obsession. During a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone, he declared, “I’m not particularly into this American thing, this Bruce Springsteen-John Cougar-‘American first’ thing.”
Quickly, Dylan clarified his comments by adding, “I feel just as strongly about the American principles as those guys do, but I personally feel that what’s important is more eternal things… This American pride thing, that don’t mean nothing to me. I’m more locked into what’s real forever.”
Although Dylan didn’t explain what exactly he meant by “what’s real forever,” it seems as though the songwriter fell into the classic trap of mistaking heartland rock for a blindly patriotic, overly Americanised offshoot of the rock and roll world.
Admittedly, if you hear a song like ‘Born In the USA’ and don’t pay attention to any of the actual lyrics, Springsteen’s track does come across as a little too proud of its stars-and-stripes spirit.
In reality, though, the song isn’t so much an advert for American pride as it is a lampooning of those who use patriotism as a means of keeping the working classes servile to the establishment – a fact that numerous politicians and right-wing nationalists continue to misunderstand. ‘Born In the USA’ is certainly a patriotic song, but patriotic for the realities and plight of working Americans, rather than the political establishment.
Of all people, you might assume that Bob Dylan would catch that real meaning, and the grassroots spirit of the heartland rock landscape more generally, particularly since he helped in no uncertain terms to formulate the sound in the first place. Nevertheless, the songwriter didn’t seem to have any love for the scene during its mid-1980s heyday.
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