"This Time We Shall Escape": Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Period. Issue 1 (2nd January 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hughes, John
• Is Part Of: Rock music studies. Volume 3:Issue 1(2016)
• Page Start: 62
• Page End: 79
• Publication Date: 2016-01-02
• Subjects: Rock music -- Periodicals; 781.66
• DOI: 10.1080/19401159.2015.1129830
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1940-1159

Abstract

Abstract : Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder period—the two tours of 1975 and 1976 and Desire—manifests a significant shift in the subjective and cultural values of Dylan's creativity. The forward-looking ratios of critique and emancipation that had commonly marked the different phases of his 1960s' work have been replaced by themes and tropes of fate and escape. This betrays a certain belatedness that is all at once personal, cultural, and political in origin, and that reveals through Dylan's work at this time a politically significant and prevalent sense of subjectivity as a predicament rather than an opportunity.