The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob by David Kinney (review)

The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob by Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist David Kinney represents an intriguing contribution to the body of literature examining reception but developing outside academia. Kinney profiles a wide variety of Dylan fans in the book, all of which add up to a compelling, quasiethnographic investigation of one of popular music’s most devoted, sustained, and evasive fan communities. Although the book is not a scholarly investigation (Kinney self-identifies as a Dylanologist), his approach—in particular the insider perspective—represents a significant, popular application of Henry Jenkins’s concept of the Aca/Fan. There is much to recommend in Kinney’s methods, yet the sum total of the book offers a cautionary example of reducing reception to yet another way to reveal the “true” meaning of that which is being received. While Kinney’s investigation offers occasionally revelatory insights, he too often uses Dylan fans to better understand the elusive focus of their attention, Bob Dylan himself.

One of the unique challenges Kinney faces in his investigation is that Dylanologists, as a community, are not very cohesive or supportive of one another. They are fiercely competitive, each believing he or she (but more often he) has a deep and complete understanding of Bob Dylan. In some ways, the lack of congeniality makes sense because being a “serious” Dylan fan, Kinney implies, necessitates a certain degree of self-loathing, as Dylan has made a career of frustrating those who follow him or his songs too closely. Going electric at the Newport Folk Festival, for example, was one of the defining moments of popular music, yet Dylan did what he did not to change the world but, in a very deliberate way, to frustrate his acolytes and benefactors within the post-World War II American folk revival. Emphasizing that throughout his career Dylan has attacked his most ardent fans, Kinney argues that many of Dylan’s career moves have been executed as much to defy the expected reception of his music as they have been to express anything that might be burning within Dylan himself. In interviews, Dylan has said hateful things about his fans, telling them, in no uncertain terms, to “get a life.” Nevertheless, his fans keep coming back for more, a phenomenon shown most clearly in the final chapter of The Dylanologists, in which Kinney discusses those who continue to follow Dylan on his tours, most of whom concede that the once-great performer’s shows have become rather sad affairs with predictable set lists and inferior musicianship. Such dour assessments, however, do not stop these fans from lining up hours or days in advance to secure a spot “on the rail,” hoping to get as close as possible to the center of their universes.

Among the book’s more significant contributions are the examples of expressive culture within Dylan fandom. There are, for instance, endless parody songs composed and performed by Dylan fans, sometimes mockingly, sometimes lovingly, often competitively. That impulse to demonstrate that one is the biggest, most knowledgable Dylan fan is ever present. Likewise, an immense amount of what university academics would likely call amateur scholarship exists within the Dylan fan community. Countless zines devoted to Dylan and his music have come and gone throughout the singer/songwriter’s fifty-year career, a few of which have managed to survive Dylan’s many transformations and continue to thrive today, developing from mimeographed newsletters sent to a dozen or so diehards to comprehensive websites accessed thousands of time daily around the globe. Indeed, even though Dylan scholarship is quickly gaining momentum in scholarly journals, academics are frequently “scooped” by relentless armchair theorists like Chris Johnson, a high school teacher who is tracking Dylan’s late-career experiments with plagiarism. While some reviewers caught a few of Dylan’s borrowed phrases on his last three albums, Johnson has gone on to show that perhaps a majority of Dylan’s recent bursts of creativity, including those...