Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art By Mike Marqusee, The New Press, $ 24.95

There is no disengagement without engagement. In other words, “Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands” and “Visions of Johanna” could not have been written without “Emmett Till” and “The Lonesome death of Hattie Carroll” to precede them. Mike Marqusee’s Chimes of Freedom is a brilliant exposition of the rise and fall of Bob Dylan as the folk messiah.

But Marqusee is no party to turning Dylan into a Judas. There is no doubt that the protest movement’s loss was the creative arts’ gain. The way Marqusee sees it, Dylan’s songs never ceased to be political, although the nature of the politics may have changed from the social to the personal. The turning away from the civil rights movement and the Old Left was “in reaction to the sheer velocity of events [of the Sixties], the agonizing ebb and flow of struggle”, which were reflected in the “movement from messianic expectation to cynical defeatism” in Dylan’s songs.

Those who regard Dylan as having betrayed “the cause” fail to realize that he was staying true to his commitment to liberty, equality and justice in his own way, by refusing to be co-opted into “the relentless packaging of experience and identity in a consumer society”. Dylan’s moorings in folk culture, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Steinbeck, Ginsberg and Kerouac, Marx and Martin Luther King shaped his later works as much as the songs of his “protest” days. In fact, as he pulled away from the folk revivalist crowd, the edge of Dylan’s satire became sharper, and his critique of the “system” stronger. Take for instance this verse from “Abandoned Love” (1975): “Everybody’s wearing a disguise/ To hide what they’ve got left behind their eyes/ But me, I can’t cover what I am...”

Marqusee succeeds with this book at several levels. Few books written with the same academic rigour manage to be half as enjoyable. This despite the fact that Marqusee steers clear of the obvious simplifications that tend to creep into books on popular culture. The individual appraisals, and comparisons with Dylan, of Curtis Mayfield, Phil Ochs, Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Springsteen evince a rare understanding of their times and art.

But how could the same perceptive author call Dylan’s songs — some of the deepest and saddest love poems ever written — misogynist and sexist? Would Marqusee then find misogyny and sexism in Waste Land too?