The genre Bob Dylan thought would be the future of music: “It’s an incredible art form”
The 1980s represent a very strange period in Bob Dylan‘s back catalogue. It was unusual to see his timeless folk songwriting transposed onto the glossy and gaudy production of the period. While it might not have been Dylan’s most glowing decade, it was an era with some unbelievable songs and groundbreaking movements—an era where music raced towards the future.
One such movement was the rapid uptake of hip-hop. Oddly, it broke into the mainstream via an unlikely source in the form of Blondie with their 1981 single ‘Rapture’. This new wave hybrid became the first rap video ever broadcast on MTV. While pop culture may be a palette whereby all genres rub off on each other to colour the canvas, Dylan was, nevertheless, an even more unlikely figure than Debbie Harry to sneak into the hip-hop studio.
In 1986, he did just that, laying down the deeply confounding opening verse to the Kurtis Blow track ‘Street Rock Duet’, rapping out with caustic societal disdain, “Kids starve in Ethiopia / And we are gettin’ greedier / The rich are gettin’ richer / And the needy’s gettin’ needier”. However, his appearance in the track was not just a novel experiment from an old stalwart with little less to try, but rather his chance to see firsthand the genre he thought heralded a cutting-edge new future for music.
Dylan agreed to feature on the song after borrowing a couple of Blow’s backup singers for Empire Burlesque, but it was a collaboration that proved very impactful. And he would later explain that logistics were far from his only impetus to participate.
The track might not have reached the lofty heights of his era-defining works like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, but it represented much more than just another curious step in his most wayward decade. It aroused a love for hip-hop within the songsmith and, in doing so, reinvigorated his resolve for the potential of the song and the deliverance of music.
Reflecting on the start of his career, he noted, “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic.” With MTV suddenly commercialising the landscape, this viewpoint seemed to belong to a bygone age. However, hip-hop was an emerging genre that the station had eschewed. This, to Dylan, was a very good sign.
It was this galvanised passion stirred up by rap that the freewheelin’ folk star waxed lyrical about in his 2004 memoir Chronicles, Volume One. The New Morning legend recounts celebrating his 1989 return to form record Oh Mercy, and, although it was his best record for years, Dylan speaks with a touch of lamentation about not being able to provide his friend and producer Daniel Lanois with the utmost spiritually profound music of old like ‘Masters of War’ or ‘Gates of Eden’.
He might have been pleased with the music, but he knew it would shift society in the way his songs once did. He explains that to reach such sagacious summits, “you have to get power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once, and once was enough.”
Nonetheless, Dylan was not dismayed that such heights could never be achieved again, merely that it would take another artist to reach them. Owing to his brief period with Kurtis Blow, he was convinced that it would be a rapper to grab culture by the lapels this time out.
Kurtis Blow had familiarised Dylan with “Ice T, Run DMC, Public Enemy and NWA”, and their iconoclastic verses struck a note with the folk star dubbed ‘The Voice of a Generation’ because these guys “weren’t bullshitting,” they were, “poets who knew what was going on”. They weren’t being bombastic for commercial reasons – they hadn’t even been allowed entry to the commercial world for an array of nettlesome reasons – they were passionately making art in a similar manner to the counterculture movement from whence Dylan emerged himself.
The next voice of a generation, Dylan declared, would be a kid “with a chop top hairdo, who came from that world, who knew it,” and according to the man himself, these kids would change things in the same hard-hitting way that he had back in the ’60s. He regarded the music that he was making as worthy but archaic. He recognised that music would become increasingly urban, and he did not bemoan this heralded fate one bit. Instead, he championed it as a necessary transition to modernise the way in which society’s flaws are illuminated.
His love of rap seemingly endures to this day, stating recently: “I love rhyming for rhyme sake. I think it’s an incredible art form”. It is fresh and innovative, and that is always what dictates the sound of the future.
There is an argument that ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is a sort of folk rap song and that Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie’s unique style of talking blues is a central cornerstone in the development of the movement, so who knows, maybe a date with Blow is where destiny was directing Dylan all along.
Fortunately for us, Dylan was inspired enough by hip-hop to keep evolving and rolling out records, and we have rap to thank for that, but he left the urban side of things to the youngsters emerging in his wake. As he said himself, “The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”From Public Enemy to Wu-Tang Clan, he inspired more than his fair share of rap groups. And these folks certainly adhered to his prediction that “a new performer was bound to appear, and one, unlike [Elvis] Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words”.
Moreover, the broader sphere of hip-hop is now certain to ascend beyond his prediction and become the most popular form of music, but whether it retained its progressive edge once it broke into the mainstream is another matter.
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