The enormous cultural pressure on major artists distorts how fans judge ordinary work

Evidence

Perhaps this desultory exercise in what the rock historian Peter Doggett has called “hip easy listening” was intentionally off-putting (although it quickly went gold). Perhaps the well had simply run dry. The album’s most sympathetic review appeared in the New York Times, written by Peter Schjeldahl, himself a poet. Acknowledging the enormous pressure that Dylan was under—“every new album rocks the excitable psyche of popular culture with the force of a historical event”—Schjeldahl chose to defend Self Portrait as something like Dylan’s version of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, an almost scholarly compendium of country-western, folk, blues, bluegrass, and pop styles, “a resume of Dylan’s musical tastes and whims.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1586

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis about artists being produced by conditions — here the pressure of fandom as a distorting condition.