Questions about music and Dylan and Guitar Drag for Greil Marcus

1. What was the response to the Self Portrait review when it was published, and have the responses changed over the years?

2. From Self Portrait and Guitar Drag I get the sense that for you the meaning in a song is referential or relational. In Guitar Drag we see that the song is meaningful in relation to the story of John Henry and its relationship to history. For Dylan, you make sense of "Self Portrait" by relating it to Dylan's other work, the auteur approach, and American history. First, is this a fair interpretation? Second, is this just one approach or do you think that context ( at minimum some kind of cultural referent outside the song itself) is necessary to find meaning in a song or album?

3. Along the same vein as my last question, is music more valuable if it reflects the cultural context of its creation? Does music always reflect the conditions of its production, or does it take a certain type of songwriter to bring the real world in to a song?

4. On page 26 you discuss Dylan's "As I Went Out One Morning" and relate it to Tom Paine saying how "we have perverted our own myth." I was struck by the use of "myth" because you refer to Dylan as mythic so often. I wonder if you could speak on to what extent consumers, fans, maybe even critics pervert the history of musicians like Dylan? Does elevating Dylan to such a mythic level pervert his artistry? Or have there been events in the history of Bob Dylan's art and its subsequent discourse that you think pervert his work?

5. Have you listened to Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" ? When you wrote about the auteur approach and said "we went out and bought Self Portrait not because we knew it was great music--it might have been but thats not the first question we'd ask--but because it was a Dylan album," I thought immediately of TLOP. How might you compare the albums or artists? After all, Kanye too live on in one name approaching mythic status.