Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Icons of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)David Yaffe portrays a series of Bob Dylans in this tightly-packed volume, and whether you grin, gimace, or notice the inside reference to Dylan's song "A Series of Dreams" in the first half of this sentence may signal whether you want to delve in or move on. If you grinned, read on. If you grimaced, you may want to save your dime. And if you didn't notice, be forewarned Yaffe doesn't always tell you what you've missed as you go. But for the initiated, it's still good fun.
He titles his opening chapter, for example, after poet Philip Larkin's reference to Dylan's "cawing, derisive voice" on "Highway 61 Revisited". Yaffe wonders (and wanders) briefly about where to place Dylan among The Poets (including Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens and TS Eliot) before moving on to the Necessity of Dylan for enabling history to know such voices as Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Patti Smith. The certitude of the author's voice is in little doubt here, but his theses will need more fleshing out for those new to studies of Mr. Dylan.
So, for example, from Yaffe one might bridge to greater detail on Dylan's (and Larkin's) "Songs, Poems and Rhymes" in Chistopher Ricks' 2005 volume "Dylan's Visions of Sin", and on to "The Ballad of Bob Dylan" by Daniel Mark Epstein for a masterful blend of biograph and listener experience.


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Bob Dylan is an iconic figure in American musical and cultural history, lauded by Time magazine as one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century. For nearly fifty years the singer-songwriter has crafted his unique brand of music, from his 1962 self-titled debut album to 2009's #1 hit Together Through Life, appealing to everyone from baby boomers to the twenty-somethings who storm the stage at his concerts. In Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, literary scholar and music critic David Yaffe considers Dylan from four perspectives: his complicated relationship to blackness (including his involvement in the civil rights movement and a secret marriage with a black backup singer), the underrated influence of his singing style, his fascinating image in films, and his controversial songwriting methods that have led to charges of plagiarism. Each chapter travels from the 1960s to the present, offering a historical perspective on the many facets of Dylan's life and career, exploring the mystery that surrounds the enigmatic singer and revealing the complete unknown Dylan.

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