Tangled up in blue-chips
Dylan’s deal with Starbucks is no surprise
The Guardian, 30 June
“One more cup of coffee before I go / To the valley below…” Will Starbucks customers be dwelling on death’s incoming darkness as they sip their mocha frappacinos and listen to Bob Dylan? Clearly, the corporation is confident that its appeal can withstand even the most mordant Dylan lyric. It’s just announced a deal for the exclusive marketing rights to a new Dylan CD, or rather a new release of one of Dylan’s earliest recorded concerts, a historic performance at the Gaslight coffee-house in New York’s Greenwich Village in the autumn of 1962.
The alliance of Dylan and Starbucks will dispirit many of the master’s fans, but it should come as no surprise. Dylan has been at war with his protest image since at least 1964, when he publicly renounced the left and “the movement”. He’s flirted with Christian fundamentalism, played the White House and the Vatican, let a bank use “The Times They Are A-Changin’” as a TV jingle, and starred in a lingerie advert. “I used to care, but things have changed,” he drawled bleakly in one of his later songs. The Starbucks deal seems to confirm that self-assessment.
But Dylan’s long struggle to shed his association with early 60s idealism will not blunt the irony of the Starbucks’ announcement. Coffee houses like the Gaslight were once breeding grounds of dissent and non-conformity, oases of leisurely experiment and self-indulgence. The espresso was cheap, the furnishings improvised, and the music defiantly non-commercial.
With its corporate regimentation and single-minded dedication to profit, Starbucks stands diametrically opposed to the ramshackle ethos of the Gaslight. In fact, its cut-throat policies have pushed independently owned coffee houses out of business. Yet the company likes to present itself as the inheritor of the old coffee house ambience – informal, hip and socially responsible. It calls its low-paid workers “partners”. It wants to be associated with “fair trade” movement, even though the bulk of its raw material is not purchased under “fair trade” guidelines. In other words, it has a huge investment in persuading us all that it is something it’s not. And that is one reason why it’s willing to pay handsomely to be associated with folk-era Dylan.
It’s impossible not to marvel at the apparently limitless capacity of corporate behemoths to appropriate the trappings of their opponents – from images of Che Guevara to G8 protests. Dylan himself was precociously aware that gestures of rebellion could be reduced to fashion statements. Watching president Lyndon Johnson purloin the civil rights slogan “We Shall Overcome” on a television broadcast, he observed: “If you want to defeat a movement, steal its song.”
Long ago, Dylan himself warned us about false prophets and heroes with feet of clay. “Don’t follow leaders, watch your parkin’ meters… ” Regardless of his apparent determination to demean his own artistry, Dylan in his great songs offers an enduring indictment of the tyranny of commodities: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” So when the apocalyptic lyrics of “Hard Rain” ring out at Starbucks later this summer, they may not carry the same charge as they did at the Gaslight in 1962, but they’ll still challenge anyone who really listens to take a step beyond caffeine-hyped consumerism.
