Monday, July 31, 2006

If you're going to sell out...

Play it: Bob Dylan "Love Sick"

Lately, I've been engrossed reading Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, which paints a fascinating portrait of a public persona shaped through time via the ridiculous questions that are asked of him.

One of those interviews, a press conference in 1965, garnered one of most prophetic and flip answers from good ol' Bob (page 75, for those reading along,) and recently it has popped up on YouTube:


Bob is asked "If you were going to sell out to a commercial interest, which one would you choose." Bob's reply: "Ladies garments"

40 years later (last year,) Bob Dylan's "High Water" is sold to Victoria's Secret to use in a television commercial, one in which he even appears in. And if Bob Dylan, of all people, sells out, the story goes it becomes harder for other artists to resist the urge, thus the flood in the last year of many former holdouts.

It should be noted that Dylan sold "The Times are A-Changing" to the Bank of Montreal a few years ago, it did not appear in the US (and Bob was not in the ad, of course.)

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