If you ask a section of the public what the greatest song of the 20th century is, Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind might come in as a middle favorite. It’s one of those originals that sounds like a cover, like it’s been passed down for generations from cornfield to schoolroom to cafeteria. Its perfection lies in the way the meaning is written into the melody itself: the verse of each verse turns sadly upward to suggest that the search for wisdom and peace may not be fruitless, but the sad way the melody turns downward again to the title line, leaves the impression that we will never succeed. The curse of mankind is to know how cursed it is. Blowin’ in the Wind is brutal.
The specific lyrics need to be heeded now more than ever: “How many times do bullets have to fly / before they’re banned forever?” hit hard after a series of mass shootings in the US. Even more so the lines about the legislature’s willful ignorance in the face of these murders: “How many ears must a man have / Before he can hear the people cry? / Yes, and how many deaths will it take before he realizes / that too many people have died?
The fact that Blowin’ in the Wind is so powerful and versatile, its power so regenerative, makes it all the more grotesque that a copy of it was minted and sold for £1.5 million. For this sale at Christie’s auction house, Dylan re-recorded the song in a studio for the first time since it was originally recorded in 1962. The recording was then engraved into a lacquered aluminum disc – only one would ever be made – and housed in a walnut and white oak cabinet custom engraved titanium plate.
This new format, Ionic Original, is the lobotomized brainchild of producer T Bone Burnett, Dylan’s backing guitarist in the 1970s and later the man who helmed O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack among many other commendable projects. He hailed the format as “the pinnacle of recorded sound” in terms of sonic fidelity.
On the one hand, it’s a complete scam, like the hi-fi shop owner trying to foist gold-plated cables on you, even though they offer no sonic improvement over copper wire. Part of me thinks that if Burnett can swindle millionaires out of their wealth, more power to him. There will no doubt be new releases in the series, and perhaps this will help fund some musical projects that would otherwise not have happened. But at a time when so many musicians are struggling to make ends meet, and when wealth is increasingly unevenly distributed, it’s insulting.
It’s also the absurd height of vinyl fetishism. The vinyl market has exploded again in the last 20 years as the intangibility of digital music makes people yearn for something to hold onto. Labels like Jack White’s Third Man Records and reissue specialists Numero Group have made increasingly lavish box sets and attention-grabbing releases – and I covet them as much as any record-loving fool. (My velvet-covered reissue of First Step Beyond by 1970s satanic rockers Medusa? I literally stroked it across the face.)
This market has helped support artists, labels and record stores, but skyrocketing prices (good luck finding a new release for less than £20) mean it’s now largely the preserve of the wealthiest or most determined fans : me no I can’t afford vinyl anymore and I stopped buying it. The format of the Ionic Original is the grotesque end of this malaise, and one that in its high financial success deepens it.
More seriously, the elitist effort goes against the very spirit of popular music. The cheapness and playability of pop—which, ignoring its own financial inequities for the time being, streaming has reached a frankly glorious scale—is what makes it such a defining cultural medium. To re-record one of the greatest songs in history and let only one person hear it is a terrible inversion of the very concept of “popular”.
Burnett may be trying to show respect for an important cultural artifact by framing it as a fine art object, but by selling it through Christie’s, he is exploiting the corrupt value system of the art market, where the monetary value of an object is often what gives it meaning to its buyer. And the song is not an artifact: it is carried by the wind. To trap it in a single white oak box—the same hoarding instinct that has destabilized so much culture over the years—disgraces the music itself.
Wu-Tang Clan did something similar with their 2015 album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a single copy of which was sold to pharmaceutical boss Martin Shkreli for $2 million and later sold for $4 million to an NFT group, after as Shkreli was convicted of fraud and required to pay off his debts. It was a terrible spectacle in its own way, but the crucial difference was that no one had heard the album before. The concept of an album feels like part of a band’s lore with its own mythology.
Blowin’ in the Wind, however, is a song about humanity itself: its cruelty, its potential, its terrifyingly short life. Yes, we can all keep listening to the original whenever we want. But for this new show to be packaged as a millionaire’s fetish object is disgraceful – or, in the most magnanimous interpretation, reinforces the song’s point about how unequal we really are.
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