How did Bob Dylan know better than all these TV, radio and newspaper journalists and commentators? During a concert in Wisconsin on Monday night, the eve of election day, Bob Dylan predicted that Obama would win by a landslide! In the middle of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ (for those who recognized it), Dylan told the crowd, while making allusion to an earlier Obama rally in Madison:
‘We tried to play good tonight since the president was here today. Don’t believe the media. I think it’s going to be a landslide.’
How did he know? If you have opened your TV in the days preceding the elections, you’ve probably heard the same thing everywhere, i.e. it’s gonna be very close, there’s gonna be recounts and recounts, and we may not even know who has been elected on Tuesday night! How could they have been so wrong and Dylan so right? It’s a mystery. Especially because Dylan has been so detached from the whole thing in his last interview with Rolling Stone. The journalist was desperately trying to make him endorse Obama, but he only got ‘You should be asking his wife what she thinks of him’ […] ‘He loves music. He’s personable. He dresses good. What the [expletive] do you want me to say?’… Later in the interview, he even showed less involvement in Obama’s fate, declaring, ‘I’ve lived through a lot of presidents! And you have too! Some are re-elected and some aren’t. Being re-elected isn’t the mark of a great president.’
But Dylan being Dylan, he gave this sort of last minute endorsement and I bet it didn’t hurt at all.
Obama has been very talkative about his musical tastes, he has praised Dylan when he gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May, and I wonder how much his perfect music tastes have helped him in this campaign. But isn’t it obvious? A day before, Jay Z came to support the president, and Obama almost became inseparable from Bruce Springsteen in the last days. Can you get any cooler than that? This is a large musical spectrum, touching suburban-inspiring-rapper kids (with Beyonce's enormous public in bonus) and middle age guys. I don’t think a president has been so involved with music and rock-pop-rap stars and this was obviously a part of his re-election. What was left for Romney? Meat Loaf and Ted Nugent? Those were such turn-offs! He couldn’t even get the Killers despite confessing his love for them.
And then there were the iPods’ revelations, with Obama’s list including Stevie Wonder, James Brown, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jay-Z, Eminem, the Fugees, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Gil Scott-Heron, whereas Romney’s was bogged in old-fashioned country music or classic rock, with the likes of Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Alabama, The Eagles and Aerosmith.
Obama’s music endorsement was as diverse as his electorate, he got the gays with Adam Lambert, the street gangsters with Ice Cube whereas Romney only got old white people with has-been senile rockers like Dave Mustaine and Ted Nugent or tacky Vegas-stars like Donny Osmond… it was a done deal.