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I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan. Even before I went to university I was a fan. I used to write a lot of - mostly sardonic - poetry when I was young, so an attraction to Dylan was unavoidable. Obviously the guy can’t sing, his gravel voice, honed with a mixture of tobacco and bitterness, is an acquired taste, but that was never the point. Dylan stood outside the establishment and peered in, and like the rest of us, he didn’t like what he saw.

I’m only 28. I can’t remember Dylan in his heyday because I wasn’t around. I don’t remember Vietnam or the riots in Paris, because I wasn’t there. But the establishment doesn’t change; we’re still being governed like mushrooms - kept in the dark and fed on bullshit. We’re still fighting wars that nobody can quite understand, and still, when things go wrong, the French youth will still trash Paris. Things don’t change, not really. When we got rid of Nixon, they picked up the pieces and hashed together Bush. They didn’t shoot Clinton, but they still managed to kill him. Even today’s Labour Government is a quasi-Thatcherite experiment in economic neoliberalism, with a dash of authoritarianism thrown in gratis. It’s getting like Stalinism without the free housing. Ok. I’m exaggerating, but take a look at John Reid’s criticisms of civil liberties, and tell me you don’t know what I’m getting at.

Dylan still speaks for us, mostly because he’s never quite been surpassed. There have been sporadic instances of musicians reflecting the modern world. Green Day’s American Idiot, is certainly a product of Bush’s America: disillusioned, bitter, and incensed. During the eighties and early nineties Tracey Chapman would sing about the urban black poor, and today we can hear The Streets define modern urban Britain. But mostly, angst in modern music doesn’t really exist. Politics is not cool. Those who do proselytise about the ills of the world, and I speak of Chris Martin, Bono, and the like, do so with as very much part of the establishment. And they concentrate on a non-offensive agenda; they don’t challenge leaders about the democratic shortcomings in their own backyards, or a misguided and counterproductive foreign policy. They don’t speak for us.

Where is the music (or poetry) that rages against the system? Where is The Clash of the noughties? Or are we too comfortable and decadent to worry about civil liberties and democracy? Even democracy is a dirty word among the left now; the Bush doctrine has even sullied that. So that’s why Dylan is so important, because he, now ravaged by age, is all we have.

It may not be throwing mud in the eye of Bush, but in a recent interview with Rolling Stone magazine (an excerpt of which can be read here) it seems Dylan can still boil up some characteristic venom, as he takes on the chronic overproduction in the music industry.

“Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today. We all like records that are played on record players, but let’s face it, those days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really.

I’m not quite sure I wholly agree. Certainly, modern digitally recorded music isn’t as warm or as fluid as vinyl. And the alchemy of the CD is not as aesthetically pleasing or as tactile as a 12” record. And, you certainly can’t roll a joint on a gatefold CD case. But there is some good music being made, some of which even sounds good. But bands such as The Killers, Queens of the Stone Age, and Muse are few and far between. I genuinely struggle to muster the interest to buy a CD in a record shop now; mostly I just shuffle off home and play some Smiths or early REM. And maybe because of this, music doesn’t really mater anymore. It doesn’t help that so much of it is garbage or so diluted you may as well not bother, but no one, even those making it, seems to give a shit anymore. And that is the real problem with modern music.

It’s nice to see that Dylan is still prepared to be the polemicist, and rally against the established orthodoxy. We certainly need him. And his new album does reflect on a post-9/11 world, which is more that can be said for some of the ‘politically aware’ bands around. But Dylan is not a product of our world; we shouldn’t be relying on a sixty-five-year-old musician to define it. We need the vacuous singer-songwriters who litter the charts to stop looking inwards, reflecting yet again about a lost lover, and look outwards at the shit that’s building up at the door.

Billy Bragg is still raging, but he’s knocking on fifty and very much a product of the seventies and early eighties. We need someone to define us who wasn’t part of the scene that gave us The Young Ones; we need someone to rally against the sheer gormlessness of our over-commercialised, politically vacant reality.

The problem is not Bush and Blair, the problem is we don’t fight back.