Niels

When I wrote that post, I was thinking along the lines of the '50s country artists that Bob Dylan wrote about in that weird book of songs he likes (Webb Pierce, Johnny & Jack, etc.). He's also known to be a fan of '50s rock-'n'-roll artists like Buddy Holly, and he made like three albums full of songs that were popularized by Frank Sinatra

As for Joan, her early influences tend to be a little older, but some of the songs she played in the early '60s (like Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train", for example) hadn't been popularized until the '50s. She later recorded a cover of "Rock, Salt and Nails", which I know was written in the mid-'50s by U. Utah Phillips while he was in the Army. I can't really think of any more examples right now

So, I don't post on here very often. And when I do, it's pretty much always about Star Wars. This post is gonna be something completely different. And it's probably gonna sound a little self-righteous, but I feel strongly that I'm right.

I've been listening to Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and lots of other people associated with the mid-20th century American folk revival for my entire life (I didn't discover Joan Baez until high school though because my parents think her singing is boring). That music is at the center of my whole music taste that I've developed over the years. With my parents both being huge Dylan fans (they had Bob Dylan quotes in their wedding vows), that music has been engrained in my life since the beginning. And I know the same is true for a lot of other people, and that this music is just as important to the countless more who discovered it later in life.

If you've been on the internet at any point during the last few weeks, you probably know what I'm about to start talking about. I saw A Complete Unknown on New Year's Day, and it was much better than I'd expected. I've already posted an absurdly long review of the movie on Letterboxd, so I'm not gonna bother telling y'all my opinions about the movie itself (which are numerous, strong, and largely irrational). Instead, I want to talk a bit about some of the broader social responses I've seen to the movie.

I was thinking about those responses before I'd even left the theater, 'cause I have wanted more people to listen to '60s folk music (and especially Joan Baez) for years. People definitely thought I was kinda weird in high school for knowing so much about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, bringing them up all the time in my history and English classes, and posting about them on Instagram. A lot of my friends hated Bob's voice and I could hardly find anyone who was interested in Joan Baez except as a name to mention in history exams about the Civil Rights Movement. So I genuinely love that there's a popular movie that's exposing more people to that music and giving those previously exposed a greater appreciation for it.

But, holy shitsnacks, I've never come so close to being a gatekeeping asshole before. I was off TikTok for the second half of 2024 for a variety of reasons that don't bear going into, but went on that app again a few days ago. And, naturally, my 'for you' page was slowly taken over by folk music content. As much as I've loved seeing how much more attention Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger seem getting than when I was on TikTok before, this sort of explosion in the popularity of something that used to mark me as a weird kid is definitely new to me. I've experienced the urge to prove that I'm a fan of something before, but never with something that has this much emotional meaning to me. And I'll admit that I have now fallen as far as using my vinyl collection to prove that I was a fan before the movie (which . . . I think my perceived need to quantify how much I like things is part of why I collect vinyl records anyway, but whatever). Because, let me tell you, with all the good people who love folk music, there are also a few assholes.

In the past, I feel like those assholes have mostly been a small group of older fans. But now I've started encountering people my age who are suddenly being assholes about the same old people music that I've loved for years. Maybe those people were there all along, but they seem to have become more prominent now. Like, I've seen someone claiming that men shouldn't listen to Joan Baez--a claim I didn't want to take seriously, but I honestly can't tell. And I've seen so, so many people saying things along the lines of "no one loves Bob Dylan as much as I do; I was a fan before the movie". And that sorta thing reminded me of how shitty it feels to be on the receiving end of gatekeeping. I don't have much reason to be deeply affected by the gatekeeping because I've been a fan for so long and I've put up with the gatekeeping done by older fans, but that must feel like shit for people who are just now being introduced to the music.

It's gonna be impossible for me to express any of this without sounding obnoxiously preach-y, but here goes. How much you love something can't be quantified, so can't compare it to how much someone else loves that thing. And if it's not something you created, you shouldn't try to control who can enjoy it. Folk music is for everyone--we're all the folk. Edward Norton as Pete Seeger in the movie literally talks about bringing the music to new people. That's what it's all about, and this movie has done a very good job at sharing the music with a lot of new people all at once. The community that exists around this music has always been overwhelmingly positive (despite the presence of some assholes, including Bob Dylan himself), and I still have a lot of hope that the positivity will live through this explosion in popularity.

And I hope that this movie will start people down the same path I started down when I was ~15, and lead to more people listening to Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Phil Ochs (whose song There But For Fortune was only briefly featured in the movie), all the weird '50s music that inspired Bob and Joan, and everything else that was touched by the folk revival. The more music everyone listens to, the more we'll understand each other.

Anyway, here's a little picture of Bob and Joan that I saw on Pinterest the other day. I hadn't seen this picture before, and it was the first time in probably over a year that I'd found a new picture of them together. It was uploaded to Pinterest by someone called 9ddana, but that's all I know.

- There's some juxtaposition between how Cliegg Lars reacts to Shmi's death in this movie and how Anakin reacts to the possibility of Padmé's death in RotS that I've never really thought about before

- I forgot about how Anakin explicitly states in AotC that he's going to learn how to stop people from dying. Three-ish years later, he's still committed to that goal

- I've watched a few movies from the late-'40s through mid-'50s lately, and you can tell how much George Lucas's writing style when it came to Star Wars was influenced by the movies he grew up with. The dialogue is weird in so many of the same ways

- Anakin backseat driving that LAAT/i is very funny to me

- did Palpatine do something to ensure that Naboo would elect really young queens because he needed the guy he created to fall in love with someone so he'd turn evil? Or was the whole Padmé thing just an unplanned situation that he took advantage of? I personally don't really like the idea that Palpatine had meticulously planned everything. He's just a weird little freak who made everything up as he went along

- how would anyone on Geonosis know where each of the Jedi fits into any sort of chain of command? Integrating a whole new group of people into an army that no one knew about until a few days/weeks ago seems like it would take more than a few minutes

- Anakin cut that conduit on the floor of the hangar during the duel with Dooku just because he thought the sparks would look cool

During the course of my crazy completion completionist Star Wars marathon, I went ahead and built a LEGO Star Wars MOC for the first time in years. I was displaying some of my LEGO military aircraft at a convention and saw some cool AT-TE models there, so I decided to try building my own. Obviously, I had to make it a 327th Star Corps one because they're the best clone unit, and I was able to keep it at 1/43 scale (like my aircraft models) while maintaining all the necessary details and articulation. It's not quite finished, but here are some pictures of the building process so far.

Every single member of the Jedi order at the time of the Clone Wars is completely incompetent. When they found out that the clone army was created (in part) by Dooku, they were basically just like "huh I wonder what that means" and then moved on and allowed themselves to get killed as a result. We all know that Dooku told Obi-Wan that the Sith control the senate and Obi-Wan just denied it and didn't do anything. I don't care that creating an army is maybe not a valid solution to any problem, but at least Sifo Dyas was willing to question the council's judgment and decided to do something about the fact that the Republic was collapsing. I think Qui-Gon should've been smart enough to figure out the whole plan (I feel like he probably inherited some of Dooku's skepticism towards the council and the Republic establishment) if he hadn't died but - guess what - we see in the very next episode after they find out about Dooku's role in the Clone Army's creation that Qui-Gon has kinda been alive the whole time and hasn't done anything. I guess maybe his abilities were just too limited because he didn't finish all of his force ghost training stuff before he died. Dooku was smart enough to question the council too but he obviously took things a little too far. If the council had been competent from the beginning, that wouldn't've happened, though.

Basically, I think that Dooku, Qui-Gon, and Sifo Dyas together could've prevented the Clone Wars and Palpatine's rise to power if two of them weren't dead (ish) and they had all made better decisions.