I disagree, not completely, and not certainly about pop music, which has to be dopy and simple and about first love and cars. Frank Loesser, who wrote Guys and Dolls, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and a host of others, wrote fabulous, worldrending songs, much better songs, when they were older. Stephen Sondheim is writing at the peak of his talents right now, in spite of Gypsy and West Side Story. It depends on the tone -- the cliche is right: you need to develop a taste for the bittersweet, like scotch; life and love are not all candy bars.

The great artists get past the muddles of middledom, and burn with a late simple fire: Yeats, Titian, Rembrandt. What I find interesting/depressing about Dylan is that he is going about it in the right way -- the return to the folk song tradition (read Greil Marcus again!), etc., the eclectic styles. But he has this odd passivity which comes over him, exemplified by the way he can stall for years. This is a way of going forward, but one does lose patience -- particularly with someone who can misread himself so completely. You would think that he might be getting some self-knowledge at his age (his book, which I have now read, is astonishingly well written and full of insights marred by these blank walls of pig-self-ignorance; and as someone said, lack of humility). Oh, well.

yours,

Peter T.