Music fans and middle-aged dads across the country, here’s something to get excited about: the launch of the AmericanaramA Festival of Music, which will spend the summer launching in Florida, traveling across North America, and ending up in California. And what is the AmericanaramA, you ask? Why, it’s a rock tour fronted by Bob Dylan, Wilco, and My Morning Jacket.
Bob Dylan is famous for many things—brining a literary slant to popular music, galvanizing pop culture in general, writing several classic records and songs, folding multiple musical genres into the rock ‘n roll format, etc. He’s also known for being just a tad crotchety. So it should come as no surprise that in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, while discussing his critics, he would refer to them as, well, “wussies,” “pussies,” and “motherf***ers.” Read on for the details.
Well, this comes as kind of a blow for Bob Dylan fans—turns out Bob has been clearly plagiarizing a ton other artists lately. Breathe easy, though, music fans—the rip-offage comes not in his music, but in the singer/ songwriter’s series of paintings on display in the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan.
In an unexpected but certainly welcome bit of news, Spinner reports that the Chinese government has decided to allow Bob Dylan to perform in Beijing this April. Few expected this to occur, as Dylan–at least, 1960s era Dylan–is an icon of youth movements and revolutionary ideals. Not exactly values the Chinese government is known to fully support.
It’s not official, but Bob Dylan reportedly has signed a six-book deal, according to Crain’s New York Business.
The singer is expected to release the books through Simon & Schuster. The deal is rumored to include the next two volumes of Dylan’s New York Times bestselling Chronicles series and a collection of material from his Sirius/XM radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour.
What do Bob Dylan and Lil’Wayne have in common? pretty much nothing, although these two artists have made this week’s top 5 featured albums. Of course the cake winner is Dylan, with years of raspy crooning and twangy guitar tunes under his belt, still managing to please the critics and awe fans 30-some odd years down the road. Check out these other artists who’ve released new music as well, and see what critics have been saying about new music this week:
Yesterday, in an interview with the L.A. Times, Joni Mitchell dropped a bomb (well, for classic rock/ folk fans it was bomb, to everyone else it’s probably more like distant thunder or that noise your new MGMT record makes when you turn it down super-low out of embarrassment when people pass by your car) in insisting that Bob Dylan—you know, that guy who wrote some of the greatest rock songs and lyrics in the American canon—is nothing but a liar and a fake.
The more times a-change, the more they stay the same—though Bob Dylan has moved beyond the protest movement that he really only involved himself in from ’62-’63, apparently China still views the rock ‘n roll bard as something of a mind-altering threat. Therefore they don’t want him or his “crazy” music entering their country.
