“Nothing gold can stay.”
— Robert Frost
I’ve often told the story of Bob Dylan “going electric”, or the pivotal point in his career where he decided that he no longer wanted to be a folk musician, who limited himself to writing protest songs and performing acoustic sets.
He decided that he simply wanted to write music, period. He wanted to create and experiment on his own terms, and write about subject matters that genuinely excited him at any given moment. At that point in time, this meant embracing a more rock-oriented sound, and performing with an electric band.
It helps to understand that this was the 1960s. Dylan was hailed as a “Voice of a Generation”, as his folk music played an iconic role in advancing the civil rights movement. So, for his audience that had followed him so ardently, it felt very much like a betrayal when he went electric.
His former fans would pay good money to attend his shows just to boo and heckle him. And at one particular show at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, one audience member loudly called him “Judas” to uproarious applause.
Dylan, completely undeterred, simply turned his back to the audience and told his band to “play it fucking loud!”, before they belted out a ferocious version of “Like a Rolling Stone” — one that was deliberately slowed down, as they drenched every snare hit, organ swell and sneering lyric in bitter contempt directed towards the audience that had once loved him so.
I had always interpreted this story as being a commendable moment in music history, where an artist boldly risks alienating their own hard-won audience, in pursuit of their own creative integrity.
I think this interpretation still largely holds true, though there’s sort of a narrative fallacy at play here.
With Dylan’s story, there’s the benefit of hindsight. The story seems heroic and grandiose because this happened decades before I was even born. Dylan has since reinvented music many times over — though this doesn’t mean he was successful every time — and has even won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
But I had never given much thought as to what it must have been like to be on the receiving end of his artistry. What is it really like, in this moment, to see an artist that you love change into a silhouette that you no longer recognise?
It’s something we don’t talk about enough, because frankly, it is relatively trivial. But there is a strange sense of grief that comes with realising that the artist who meant so much to you no longer makes music that speaks to you.
I’ve recently had a taste of this medicine through the heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold. Avenged has always had a special place in my life, and perhaps they always will in some way.
They were the first-ever band I saw live. I was 14 back then. I listened to their music every single day, and I saved my school lunch money to buy their CDs. The show was a dream come true, and looking back now, it was a huge blessing to have seen them on their Nightmare tour, when they were in their prime. Because little did I know, things were going to be radically different from that point forward.
Their music post-Nightmare just isn’t as good. They tend to be interesting on an intellectual level, but severely lacking in emotional depth.
I’ve written articles commending their newer albums, namely The Stage and Life is But a Dream…, but now that the dust has settled, I realised that I haven’t listened to them at all since. Sure, they have clever and unique concepts and all, but there isn’t a pull that makes me want to listen to them again.
And things have only devolved further from there, as I didn’t find their latest music from the last few months even listenable. Literally, my reaction to their latest releases Magic and Statica was “What the actual fuck am I listening to?” With their overly processed and tempered sound, it felt like I was hearing a bad emulation of Kanye West or Juice WRLD.
I could definitely relate to all the memes about their recent music, like the one about someone getting into a car accident but still having enough energy to turn off the radio when their music comes on, or the one about someone getting out of the barber’s chair halfway through a haircut because their music starts playing.
Contrarily, their older albums, especially City of Evil, Avenged Sevenfold, and Nightmare still move me today just as deeply as when I was in my teens, as it still triggers vivid cinematic images in my head, and evokes latent emotions that I had about the world but didn’t know how to articulate.
Listening to “Victim” still puts a large lump in my throat and makes me want to cry because it’s such a raw expression of grief. Listening to “Betrayed” still makes my hair stand up, as it transports me across different sides of the story in its retelling of musician Dimebag Darrell’s murder. Listening to “M.I.A.” still fills my head with horrific scenes of war and their human costs. (I’m also still touched that “M.I.A.” was written about me, because my name is Muhammad Izzat Aiman. Okay, got the lame joke out of the way.)
But does this give me an excuse to heckle or shame them, just as Dylan experienced from his old fans?
Of course not. I simply decided not to listen to their new music. And even though they’re playing a show here in Malaysia soon, I decided that I’m not going, because I have no interest to go.
I do respect them for having the guts to do what they want to do, though at this point, I personally do feel like they’re experimenting just for the sake of it.
Their new music just isn’t for me, but their old music is always going to be there, frozen in time, for me to cherish.
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