Abstract
In his introduction to The Gospel According to Bob Dylan, Michael Gilmour suggests that music can bring to its listeners ‘something approaching spiritual insight’ (p. xi). He explores this idea by focusing on that great cultural icon – musician, poet, and artist Bob Dylan – whose music, in Gilmour’s estimation, can illuminate everyday life with a rich sense of the divine, both in the many explicit biblical references that appear in his songs and, more implicitly, in the myriad other ways that the Judaeo-Christian traditions inform his lyrics and worldview. As such, his songs can serve as ‘dialogue partners’ (p. xv) for our personal reflections on transcendent themes.
Throughout the rest of the book, Gilmour walks us through Dylan’s life and career in music by contemplating his recordings, live performances, interviews, and the anecdotal musings of those who knew him. Gilmour portrays Dylan as a flâneur, a wandering prophet, and a potential conduit of the revelatory in our own search for spiritual engagement. Gilmour frequently ponders the relationship between artist and audience, who together, can locate religious meaning through the shared experience of music. Using Stanley Fish’s reader response theory, he reminds us that the taste of transcendence we may discern in Dylan’s music reflects not only the artist’s spiritual journey, but also our own spiritual views, experiences, and contexts. Dylan does not simply offer us a systematized form of religiosity in his songs and lyrics; instead, he looks to the sacred with a receptive gaze and a willingness to cultivate in his audience ‘an openness to whatever nourishes’ (p. 128). Moreover, as Gilmour stresses, Dylan’s engagement with the Bible is likewise not univocal; rather, he uses scripture to create ‘a montage, a prophetic pastiche’, adding his own stories and experiences to the biblical traditions and thus transforming them into something new.
Throughout this book, Gilmour’s passionate engagement with Dylan’s music positively shines. His writing is conversational and energetic, encouraging the reader to share his enthusiasm for this extraordinary artist. Each chapter packs in reams of fascinating insights into Dylan’s life and music, which Gilmour carefully structures around his wider focus on religion in/and popular culture. Reading this book is a bit like hanging out with an incredibly knowledgeable and ardent Dylan fan – we get to share in his delight over Dylan’s thoughtful, revelatory, and (at times) subversive use of biblical and sacred themes in his songs; we also share his fascination with the sense of transcendence which glows from Dylan’s music and which we, his audience, are invited to explore for ourselves. Gilmour’s enthusiasm is catching and this spirit of pleasure he evokes in his writing, as well as his rigorous attention to detail, makes The Gospel According to Bob Dylan a worthy contributor to the ever growing and ever pertinent research field of the Bible and popular culture.