- Pete Birkinshaw
Someday soon some clever cultural studies scholar will write a bangin’ thesis on the late-career music videos of Bob Dylan, who just released another addition to the canon: a video for the song “Duquesne Whistle,” off Dylan’s album Tempest, which will be released September 11. At Vulture—where you can watch the video—Amanda Dobbins imagines Dylan at the pitch meeting:
“You know that movie 500 Days of Summer? With the girl from Elf, and the scene where Joseph Gordon-Levitt dances down the street to Hall and Oates? Yeah, I think we should do that, but turn JGL into a mild stalker, and then what happens is, he pisses off a guy in a gang with his dance, and the gang kidnaps the vaguely-JGL-ish character and beats the holy hell out of him. Like really violent stuff. And then I’m just wandering around the neighborhood with some friends, looking chill.”
This is pretty much exactly what the video is like. There’s maybe a narrative thread here, though who knows what it is: When Dylan released 2009’s Together Through Life, he filmed a video for the song “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'” that depicts a couple just cold beating the crap out of each other in a dingy apartment. (Dude seems to have been holding her hostage; then she runs him over with a car, then she kisses him.) His video for “Must Be Santa”—yes, that “Must Be Santa”—features a total melee too. A guy jumps out a window at a Christmas party; Bob’s wearing a weird wig, and so is Santa Claus. Those videos—which were, like the new one, directed by Nash Edgerton—are after the jump.