“Horrible”: Why Bob Dylan thinks Disney destroyed society
Bob Dylan’s relationship with the real world seems to be changeable. When he first emerged, reality seemed like this number one focal point but as time went on it loosened, clouding his perspective instead with lies or indifference. Some would point the finger at fame. Dylan himself would point it at an animated mouse.
One thing that is clear is that Dylan has never been interested in being understood. From basically the first second he got any level of success or notoriety, he’s been evasive. He’s dodged interviews as much as possible, or sat in them firing out a chain of snarky responses, or even outright lies.
To throw people off his reality even further, Dylan has routinely been caught in lies about his origins, his whereabouts or his inspirations. While at first seemingly to believe that music was a real-world tool that should be used to address true stories and actualities, he didn’t seem to apply that to his own life. Instead, he was more than happy to fictionalise and fabricate that.
Given that Dylan eventually gave in on protest music and began to disagree with his prior claims that music could make a difference, it might be suggested that his relationship with reality was officially over. Instead, he wanted to be left alone to fly off into a fantasy land of his fake backstory and his songs about nothing in particular. But in a classic case of Dylan’s many contradictions, he said exactly the opposite in a rare interview when he pointed a finger and Disney and blamed them for everything.
“We live in a world of fantasy where Disney has won, the fantasy of Disney. It’s all fantasy,” Dylan said to La Repubblica in 2001. In his eyes, or at least in his eyes on this day, the world has descended into a fantasy one thanks to major companies like Disney.
It was a moment where he seemed to drop everything else he’s been saying for decades now and returned to his early 1960s politics, suggesting that Disney was distracting people from the truth of the world. “That’s why I think that if a writer has something to say he should say it at all costs,” he said.
But then he loosens, falling back into the apathy that captured him when he went electric as he added, “Fantasy has become the real world. Whether we realise it or not,” as if there is no longer any truth, Mickey Mouse killed it.
He’s impossible to decode and he always has been. Part of this strange statement could be a rallying cry for artists to push past the make believe and return to reality. Part of that checks out with Dylan’s own career as his recent releases don’t shy away from facts, like in the epic ‘Murder Most Foul’. But as he surrendered to the suggestion that everything is a fantasy, he begins to sound more like a man wearing a tin foil hat fishing for conspiracies rather than any respected and revered wordsmith of his times.
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