#protest singer

Yo Yo Yo Discogs!

You featured Shuhada' Sadaqat on your front page the day after her death was announced. And the next day you feature Madonna, who once picked a fight with Shuhada', mocking her for her hairstyle? Remember? It was in 1990 or so when she still called herself Sinéad O'Connor (like you choose to call her although you surely checked her Wikipedia page and learned the name she preferred). This was one of her answers to Madonna's statement: "There’s a woman who people look up to as being a woman who campaigns for women’s rights. A woman who, in an abusive way toward me, said that I look like I had a run in with a lawnmower and that I was about as sexy as a Venetian blind. Now there's the woman that America looks up to as being a campaigner for women, slagging off another woman for not being sexy (…)" (O'Connor in Spin Magazine 1991).

On October 16/1992 at Madison Square Garden Shuhada' was booed when coming on stage and this is how she reacted (the booing is hard to hear in this video though).

Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991 (1991)

Absurd as it sounds (and was), this unwieldy, 3-CD, 5-LP, 58-song behemoth was the catalyst for my belated appreciation of Dylan’s greatness -- after spending much of my 1980s youth looking at Bob as a washed-up dinosaur who couldn’t sing.

And it wasn’t just me, since that decade’s ill-placed glorification of modernity at all costs -- especially when it came to oppressive production practices -- conspired with Bob’s inconsistent output to muddle his incomparable works of the ‘60s and ‘70s, most of them issued before I was born.

That’s why this expansive collection of demos, live recordings, alternate takes, outtakes, and even mistakes (assembled to celebrate Bob’s three-decade career and to finally “beat the boots,” as they say) were such a revelation to me in the ‘90s: they stripped back all of that unnecessary sonic “interference” and let Dylan’s voice, words, and guitar bewitch me, at last, as they had an entire generation.

It was here that I learned about the young, barely proven protest singer, both modest and savvy enough to demo songs like “When the Ship Comes In” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the Witmark Publishing Company, so that other artists could cover them.

I also learned what a talking blues was, via the Carnegie Hall-recorded “Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues” and the knee-slapping-funny “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” (I spent a few weekends at Bear Mountain myself, as a kid).

I learned that each of his legendary ‘60s LPs had jaw-dropping outtakes to spare, including his debut’s “He Was a Friend of Mine,” The Freewheelin’’s “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” The Times They Are A-Changin’’s “Seven Curses,” and Another Side’s “Mama, You Been On My Mind.” 

I learned there were even buried treasures from the ‘70s and ‘80s (though these accounted for barely a third of these tracks, like Planet Waves’ psychedelic “Nobody 'Cept You,” Desire’s country-fried “Golden Loom,” Shot of Love’s plaintive “Angelina,” and, best of all, Infidels’ rambling groove, “Foot of Pride.”

And all this “learning” duly led me back to Bob’s essential discography, through the ‘60s (most of ‘em), ‘70s (some of ‘em) and ‘80s (maybe one of ‘em), proving that even box sets as intimidating as this one could educate and convert listeners who were curious and dedicated enough to invest the time.

Bob Dylan deserves nothing less, don’t you agree?