Bob Dylan on George Floyd
“It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.”
The above words and the paragraph below comes from an interview Dylan did with the New York Times to mark the release of his 39th record on 19th June
In the 1960s and 1970s, following the work of black leaders of the civil rights movement, Dylan also worked to expose the arrogance of white privilege and the viciousness of racial hatred in America through songs like “George Jackson,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” One of his most fierce lines about policing and race came in his 1976 ballad “Hurricane”: “In Paterson that’s just the way things go/If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street/Unless you want to draw the heat.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/arts/music/bob-dylan-rough-and-rowdy-ways.html
Good news that he’s spoken out – the role of conscious musicians is to draw attention to the injustices of our times, whether it be George Floyd or Amadou Diallo. For a number of reasons, I’ve been listening a lot to Stevie Wonder albums from the 70s (and as late as the 80s) and it’s striking how contemporary the lyrics still sound to songs like ‘Living for the City’ (Innervisions), ‘Black Man’ (Songs in the Key of Life) and ‘Cash in Your Face (Hotter Than July).
That’s depressing, at one level, that the lyrics still, nearly fifty years on in some cases, have such resonance – but what’s more striking is that I can’t remember, at the the time, that the lyrics were particularly contested. Maybe that was me as a teenager not noticing some things, and of course the internet has changed the focus of debate in the meantime – but I can imagine that those lyrics would be so much more contested today were they actually written fresh today. Of course, there were more militant voices than Stevie in the 70s – and now, too.
Regardless, we are right now in the middle of a war, of some description (we are no longer between them), and we need all our artists today to speak out.