Bob Dylan and President Obama at the White House in 2012. AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Bob Dylan is Thinking About the Government
It’s not a job creator, the legendary troubador says.
“I’m on the pavement, thinking about the government,” Bob Dylan sang in Subterranean Homesick Blues in 1965. Apparently he’s been thinking about it again lately.
Specifically, the folk and rock legend doesn’t think much of government as a job creator, and would prefer that wealthy business leaders pick up the slack.
In an interview with AARP The Magazine in connection with the upcoming release of Shadows in the Night, an album of American standards previously recorded by Frank Sinatra, Dylan offered his opinion on the state of the American economy and government’s role in it:
The government’s not going to create jobs. It doesn’t have to. People have to create jobs, and these big billionaires are the ones who can do it. We don’t see that happening. We see crime and inner cities exploding with people who have nothing to do, turning to drink and drugs. They could all have work created for them by all these hotshot billionaires. For sure that would create lot of happiness.
Dylan went on to say that billionaires ought to keep their focus on helping out at home, “because there are a lot of things that are wrong in America, and especially in the inner cities, that they could solve. … But no one can tell them what to do. God’s got to lead them.”
Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues - HQ from Noisefield on Vimeo.