Decoding Dylan by Jim Curtis
In Decoding Dylan, Jim Curtis takes readers behind Dylan‘s image as the quintessential rebel of the 1960s to reveal a new Dylan—Dylan the careful craftsman, a student of the art of songwriting. Curtis is the first Dylan scholar to draw on the revelations in his memoir Chronicles as well as a variety of sources about New York culture in the 1960s. He uses this material to arrive at a radically new interpretation of Dylan’s amazing songs, which revolutionized American music and which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Curtis shows that these songs are actually collages in which he ingeniously combined themes and images from American popular culture with themes and images from European high culture.
Readers of Decoding Dylan will come away with a new understanding, not just of Dylan, but also of his place in the history of American popular culture as a whole. .
