Frank Kogan

Okay, thinking about Berlin: it's true that some people or many people e.g. feel like hitting someone while going through a divorce; obviously, that people feel it, and sometimes do it (feeling like hitting someone isn't the same as hitting someone), doesn't mean it's right to feel it or to do it (don't know how much Lou was willing to make the distinction between the two, their relative wrongness, though the difference is huge); that someone feels this way doesn't mean that it's the only way that that person feels; but these feelings may well have felt more true to Lou because they went against him, put him in a bad light, hence seemed like better fodder for song.

This "feeling more true" is the basis for the question I asked in the "Autobiography of Bob Dylan" (focusing at the start on Dylan and Jagger of '65-'66, not on the Velvets of shortly afterwards), a short essay I wrote for Aaron's Cometbus fanzine back in 1984 and that twenty years later I thought was important enough to put as the first chapter of my book. I asked how it was that for a while self-destruction got to be the truest sound on the radio. Something I formulated a bit later was the idea of the negative fetish. In regard to self-destruction, it would be that "going against yourself" — losing by saying something rather than gaining by saying it — comes to feel like the active ingredient in "truth" (as opposed to saying something merely because it's true); so to take away or avoid the truths that garner you support and praise comes to feel — in song — like adding honesty, even though one isn't doing so. One is just taking something away. And what I was saying about Dylan and Jagger was that this sense of what comes across as honesty didn't come from them in particular, it came from us, the audience, the culture, the language; so the real Autobiography Of Bob Dylan isn't how he got to be this way but how we got to be this way.

The second half of the essay is about the (as-yet-unnamed) negative fetish, how the '60s Dylan-Jagger type of self-critique comes later to, in other hands in the late '70s and early to mid '80s, lose its emotional value as truth by becoming generally accepted and played as "Truth," over and over. So the symbol and feeling of truth come to stand in for truth and, paradoxically, to feel false, once lots and lots and lots of people are doing it. This wasn't Lou's fault or Dylan's fault, but it robbed them of some of their artistic power, as they moved beyond their negativity and couldn't find anything else as reliably strong.

By the way, it makes sense that when we stand for a truth that costs us something, this makes the truth feel more valuable and true: that we were willing to pay a price for it, as it were, demonstrates our commitment to it, demonstrates a genuineness and authenticity that going along with the truths that everyone accepts doesn't seem to have. Not that the latter truths are actually false, but that our attachment to them hasn't been tested by opposition.

My post up-top is something of an example, actually, since the couple of well-balanced obituaries I'd just read regarding Lou's artistry and career arc — the sort of obit that people who are paid to write for AP and NY Times are likely to feel they ought to write and that the readers are likely to feel they ought to read — left out the Truth Of Lou that it turned out I I felt the need to post, and its avoidance by the obits fueled my direction as I started typing without my knowing where I was going.