Chomsky on “Bob Dylan”

Every now and then someone surprises me by seeing Bob Dylan the way I see him. He has received such great praise, so many awards, so much money, and so much attention, yet is so empty and false, that he pretty much epitomizes the last forty years.

So I was grateful recently to find Noam Chomsky's observation in Wikiquote on his experience of Dylan:

Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with [Dylan] from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I'd never heard him talk before -- if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he'd been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to "mess around with other people's lives" by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley "free speech movement" and said that he didn't understand it. He said something like: "I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period." If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice.