Hey, Mr Tambourine Man, You Sold Out…

The last time Bob Dylan was called a ‘Judas’ was when he switched from being a folk music singer-songwriter and ‘went electric’. No one has yet called him an Iscariot yet, but the fact that the Literature Nobel laureate, musical icon and iconoclast has sold all his recorded catalogue and future music to Sony Music may have left many baby boomers — who rely on their baby-boomy radical chic on their appraisal of Dylan’s purported anti-establishment street cred — sighing ‘Sell-out’.

Dylan, never into votebanking or crowdsourcing, has done what a smart human with great talent would do given the opportunity: maximise profit and reach. Especially with a lifetime of an oeuvre behind him, the Sony deal —rumoured at $150-200 million — is nobody’s business but his.

The trouble with bhakts is that they invest their heroes with qualities their objects of veneration don’t possess or want. Dylan’s appearance in a lingerie ad or creating a very unDylanesque Christmas album in 2009 — Christmas in the Heart — put paid to the notion of an artist having to do things at the bidding of his or her admirers.


The freedom Dylan embodies in his songs also applies to his making a pile by selling his songs to Big Corporation. It’s also a canny move, considering these streaming times are the best to sell and get out of the music industry