“She's been a major influence on some of the most celebrated strains of current pop culture: spoken word, female rockers, the revival of punk. Perhaps with the renewal of her career, she will finally achieve her long overdue success.”
“Historical events as vast as the overthrow of world communism can be analyzed on a cosmic scale, the way astronomers study the universe by peering at whole galaxies. Or they can be analyzed in miniature, by focusing on a molecule”
“He remains an invisible man in black music history. Rumors swirl — some say he's a junkie, others insist his masculinity is a fraud... Gospel singers whispered his name, women followed him home, junkies and drag queens idolized him.”
"We went in thinking, we'll document the Band's last concert and maybe we'll get something, maybe we won't. Then when the footage came back I just said, 'Wow. This is fantastic. We've got a movie.’ ”
“Black culture doesn’t lack for modernist and postmodernist artists, just their critical equivalents. And now that, like Spielberg’s Poltergeist, they’re here, might as well face up to the fact that there’s no avoiding the recondite little suckers”
“Hell really was the quintessential avant-punk. With no more irony than was mete, he presented his nihilistic narcissism not as youthful hijinx but as a full-fledged philosophy/aesthetic”
25-year-old Dylan has already won this generation of rebels, just as Kerouac and Camus have won earlier generations: his words, values, imagery, even his eccentric life-style, are grooved into more under-30 brains than any other writer's.
“No tricks, just music, hard, lyric, joyous — pure and together, dense and warm as a dark summer country night. There’s the Dead, and then there’s everybody else.”
