“Ain’t worth nothing anyway”: Did Bob Dylan predict the rise of streaming?
Bob Dylan has regularly made statements and predictions about the future trajectory of music, and invariably, he’s not been wrong about any of them.
His decision to start using the electric guitar in his work was something that critics scoffed at initially, but it ended up becoming the norm for folk artists to incorporate rock instrumentation. Nobody could have foreseen that this would be a move that was embraced by the stripped-back folk artists that Dylan surrounded himself with, except Dylan himself, and to say that taking this bold risk paid off for him in the long run would be a great understatement.
Dylan also recognised early on that rap and hip-hop would be the future of music, commenting when he heard some of the earliest forms of the genre in the 1980s that he knew people would begin flocking towards this new form of poetry. His style of lyrical delivery has always been poetic and often rhythmic, and therefore, there are some stark similarities between what he’s been celebrated for and the rise of rappers who do the same thing, just with a different musical outlook.
Similarly, he knew grunge would become a cultural mainstay and predicted its rise when the Pacific Northwest bands were just starting to form projects that played in what would become a style and genre. It’s safe to say that Dylan has always understood the way in which culture moves, with a firm grasp on the pulse when it comes to following these trends, always two steps ahead of many of his contemporaries in recognising both their importance and embracing them wholeheartedly.
But how about our musical consumption habits and the way in which records are created? This is something that is perhaps harder to wrap your head around if you’ve grown up in an era where physical media and radio reigned supreme, but even Dylan knew that technology was bound to stay and influence the music industry for years to come, and when he spoke to Rolling Stone in 2006, he made a stark prediction about the direction in which things were moving.
“The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way,” Dylan proclaimed, “Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a 100 tracks today,” adding with dramatic effect that “those days are gon-n-n-e”.
‘Zimbo’ continued in his fight against the digitisation of music. “You fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really,” he argued, highlighting, “There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ’em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, ‘Everybody’s gettin’ music for free’. I was like, ‘Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway’.”
Not only was he concerned that compressing the quality of audio was having an effect on the standard of the recordings, especially for his own record, Modern Times, which he released that year, but he was noting how music’s value was depleting as a result.
Knowing how things have gone with the advent of streaming, something that Dylan was initially sceptical about, he knew that something was gravely amiss when illegal downloads and torrenting were the most popular form of musical consumption. As for the quality of music, things aren’t exactly worse, but when you compare the sound of today’s music to the lusciousness of, say, Pet Sounds, you can’t help but feel like Dylan is right to notice some sort of regression.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.