Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone.
Bob Dylan was 70 years old this week, and the editorial board of Germany’s Die Welt published this open letter in tribute to the American music icon. Die Welt’s message?: keep showing the world how to change with the time – because “the times – they are a changin'”
The open letter from the Die Welt editorial board says in part:
Dear Bob,
So how does it feel now that you’ve done everything in your life as a pop star right? When no one can credibly claim that Dylan is a good-for-nothing who has done a terrible job and is totally irrelevant besides? When all of those who take pen in hand to write something on your 70th birthday seem deaf and dumb, like ants looking up at the brightly shining moon? It’s probably easier to write about God than to write about you, Bob. Is that what you wanted?
Other heroes of the 60’s didn’t even make it into the 70’s. For you it was child’s play. Albums were produced that almost incidentally, competed with the great works of the 1960s. And then when everything was up and running again, when everyone believed in Bob Dylan again, you took another 180 degree turn – toward God! There were two albums of Christian gospel music. The man who all those years ago had apparently relied on himself alone, who had categorically refused to believe in higher authorities, those with influence, or whomever, was now singing about the need to serve someone – and no one better than Jesus Christ. Since then, you’ve been on your never-ending world tour during which, more than anything else, you’ve enjoyed reinventing yourself and your songs on a nightly basis. You deconstruct your music and your lyrics, tearing apart, crumpling up and destroying your own songs. You try to surprise yourself. You don’t make it easy for us.
If there’s one thing we can learn from you, Bob, it would be this: We have to change if we really want to live. We have to shed our skins and slip into new lives now and again – even if it hurts. We must learn from our mistakes and change – even if it surprises those around us and leaves them behind and disappointed. And if we don’t have the strength or courage to change, then we can simply leave that to you. We listen to your albums, despair over your incomprehensible lyrics, marvel over your transformations, listen to your Bob Dylan voice, feel your eternal breath flowing through your Bob Dylan harmonica and hope that you’ll stay with us a few more years. Do it for us, Bob!
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
