As much as one loves Bob Dylan, it is always best to resist the temptation to write about him. He is a slippery fish, who is routinely put-off by the industrial-level attempts to access his soul through the interpretation of his lyrics. And if Dylan makes albums—at the rate of almost one a year—as an excuse for introspection, then much of what we find obscure in his catalog is by definition intelligible only to him.
This leaves Dylan theorists with only his public persona to base their theories on, which allows the song and dance man ample opportunity to do the one thing he seems to love best: dissemble. Here is a recent Dylan comment on the media:
If we cannot get to Dylan through his lyrics, or through his public statements, what is left? Answer: his endorsement deals.
Endorsements are a wonderful interpretive lens because even the most asinine decision to do a commercial tells us a little something about the person. For instance, what can we infer about Michael Jordan through his Hanes partnership? Does he simply love underwear? Maybe he believes in the nobility of the Hanes brand? Or maybe he wants a big check. Bags of money would also explain commercial engagement with McDonald’s—precisely the kind of food you can bet was never on Jordan’s training table. It would also explain his deal with Coke; his endorsement of re-usable alkaline batteries; ballpark hotdogs; and sneakers made by the best child labor outsourcing can buy! Put it all together and you begin to get a sense of what the man values, or should I say value$.
So, what do Dylan’s commercials reflect?
Sometimes, Dylan does not appear in the commercial, choosing merely to license his song, like in this Chobani bit featuring a rampaging bear on a maniacal quest for yogurt; the background tune: Dylan’s “I Want You.” Other times, a montage of various, younger Dylan’s appear, like his split-screen appearance with Will.i.am in a Pepsi commercial. When he is not eating yogurt and sipping Pepsi, or listening to his iPod, Dylan enjoys taking a drive in his Cadillac…until he gets bored and decides to switch to Chrysler because, hey, “things have changed!” Where is America’s finest poet off to in such a hurry? A Victoria’s Secret commercial shoot, of course—and what red-blooded American wants to keep the models waiting?
All of these ads spur a question: Where has the usual Dylan disdain gone? There was no wink or nod or anything one might expect from the normally reclusive and ornery singer. Maybe Columbia Records demanded some kind of recompense for allowing the production of Christmas in the Heart? That, or the PR types knew better than to trust Dylan with any artistic input in his advertisements.
And then I spotted his most recent commercial for IBM.
(For those who can’t watch, the commercial proceeds as follows: Dylan walks into view and sits on a couch before a computer who then begins to speak. “Watson,” IBM’s natural language processing machine, informs Dylan that, in an effort to improve his language skills he has read all of the singer’s lyrics. He reports that his analysis shows Dylan’s major themes are that “time passes” and “love fades.” After Watson confesses he has never known love, Dylan offers they write a song together, to which Watson responds with some of his own lyrics: “do be bop be bop a doo.” With that, Dylan walks away, guitar in hand, while the words “IBM Watson thinks with us to outthink the limits of creativity” appear on the screen.)
Just how Watson, hand-in-hand with Dylan, will engage in “outthinking the limits of creativity” is impossible to tell. It is impossible, because “outsmarting the limits of creativity” is a meaningless statement, which brings me to my theory. What is at play here is the reappearance of that old Dylan mischievousness, this time at the expense of the very company he is ostensibly endorsing. IBM, in an attempt to promote a machine that will seamlessly interface with human beings, comes off as having created a tone-deaf bot that, when confronted with a paragon of human creativity, is literally abandoned. We don’t know where Dylan rambled off to, but we do know that the song with Watson does not get written. If this is a little joke Dylan is making about the limits of human ability to interact in a meaningful way with modern technology despite the best packaging efforts of Silicon Valley, then I have only one thing to say: Welcome back, Bob.
