It’s easy to make the mistake that a key scene in A Complete Unknown, the new biopic about Bob Dylan’s early career, involved a mere disagreement about style and instrumentation. The scene depicts the famous moment at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan “went electric,” outraging the acoustic folk music crowd and prompting folk icon Pete Seeger, the composer of “If I Had a Hammer,” to try to turn off the power, saying later that if he had had an axe, he would have cut the cables. Years later, Seeger claimed that he was concerned only because the sound was “distorted,” but there’s good reason to be skeptical about that claim. When Dylan launched into “Maggie’s Farm,” he had turned his back not just on acoustic-only music but on Seeger’s idea of music as agitprop. Dylan had chosen art over politics.
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