Don’t think twice, it’s all right

The Guardian, 8 April

Forty years ago, his motto was “Money doesn’t talk, it swears …” Today, it’s “stretch-lined demi-bra with lace”. After four decades in showbusiness, Bob Dylan has made his debut in a television commercial – promoting a new line of lingerie. The advert, screening this week in the US, intercuts close-ups of Dylan’s tight-lipped, grizzled mug with shots of model Adriana Lima wafting through Venice in bra and panties while Dylan’s Love Sick, from the Grammy-winning 1997 album Time Out of Mind, wails on the soundtrack: “I’m sick of love, I wish I’d never met you.”

At this stage in Dylan’s career, accusations of sell-out have lost all meaning. Licensing The Times They Are a Changin’ for use in a bank commercial in 1996 was a more poignant deviation than the current frolic, which seems mainly bizarre. Dylan long ago took flight from the left political culture that had nurtured him and declared his independence from ideologies and causes. He follows his whims and is accountable to no one but himself.

His has been a career full of unexpected twists and multiple self-reinventions. It has also had its share of blunders and embarrassments: the unwatchable cinematic epic, Renaldo and Clara; the dalliance with Christian fundamentalism, California-style; the Live Aid fiasco of 1986 (Dylan chose the moment to make a plea for hard-up American farmers); the endorsement of a book of conservative musings on family values written by a Hassidic rabbi. Dylan’s admirers have forgiven so many aberrations over the years that the lingerie advert is likely to cause few qualms. Most have seen it as merely the latest example of the old master’s perverse refusal to conform to expectations. It’s a very unsurprising surprise. Now, if Dylan spoke out against Bush and the occupation of Iraq, that would be a shock.

None the less, if this latest development in the Dylan saga had been dreamed up by a screenwriter, we’d all call the irony heavy-handed. In his 60s heyday, Dylan sneered and raged at hucksters, salesmen, promoters. In It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), his sweeping indictment of a society ravaged by greed and hypocrisy, he singled out the adverting industry for bitter attack: “Advertising signs that con/ You into thinking you’re the one/ That can do what’s never been done/That can win what’s never been won.”

In All I Really Want to Do, he promises not to: “Analyse you, categorise you,/ Finalise you or advertise you.” For Dylan in his most innovative years, advertising epitomised a society that worshipped “false gods”, where “all is phoney”. It was the intrusive arm of a conspiracy to commodify the human spirit and colonise the mind (”Please don’t put a price on my soul”).

One of Dylan’s complaints about the protest movement – from which he emerged in 1962 and from which he broke in 1964 – was that it was part of the PR industry, full of “corpse evangelists” selling the political equivalent of quack remedies: “Lies that life is black and white.” In 1968, having retreated from the turmoil of public life, he warned the dealers in false promises: “Now you must provide some answers/ For what you sell has not been received,/ And the sooner you come up with them,/ The sooner you can leave.”

In the 1990s, in TV Talking Song, Dylan was still lambasting the culture of the boob tube: “It’s all been designed … to make you lose your mind,/ And when you go back to find it, there’s nothing there to find.” Only last year, his film, Masked and Anonymous, offered an allegorical satire on corporate greed and a weary warning about its capacity to corrupt creative artists.

On the other hand, Dylan has also always been unafraid of pop culture in any guise. “I know there’re some people terrified of the bomb,” he wrote in 1964, “but there are other people terrified t’ be seen carrying a modern screen magazine.” This is, after all, the man who married high modernism to electrified rock’n’roll – widely regarded at the time as a crass medium of teen-exploitation.

While great artists are entitled to their contradictions, it has to be said that Dylan’s appearance in the lingerie advert is just plain tacky. In a song from 1991, he mused: “Sometimes I wonder what it’s gonna take/ To find dignity.” Not a quest likely to be aided by associating yourself with a sales pitch for a “low-rise wide-side bikini”.

Why did Dylan do it? Was it the money, the trip to Venice, the chance to hang with a beautiful young woman dressed only in her underwear, the novelty of the experience, the urge to tweak his more po-faced admirers? We’ll never know. Decades ago, Dylan stopped explaining himself to the media and to his fans: “Don’t ask me nothing about nothing,” he sang in 1965, “I just might tell you the truth.”