Opinion

Bob Dylan, chevalier

This week comes news from Paris that the Legion d’honneur has cleared Bob Dylan for France’s highest decoration.

Dylan is not the first to evolve from a symbol of protest against the establishment to honored membership in the establishment. Over in Britain, we now have Sir Mick Jagger. Here in more plebian America, we have the Medal of Freedom, which Dylan has also won but which carries no honorific unless you include Count Basie.

Surely the times are a-changin’. Back when Dylan’s idea of making it was a gig in bohemian Greenwich Village, singers like him were shocking the pillars of society with their music, their topics and their defiance of convention. But today Wall Street traders lead the drug-fueled lives once associated with rock stars, while Knight Commanders of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire such as Bono step out from their landed estates to issue pieties about poverty or global warming.

Then again, maybe the establishment is having its revenge. Capitalism ensures a lucrative market for protest. And if a musician is as successful as Jagger or Dylan, in addition to his medals and knighthood, society will bestow on him the ultimate accolade: the songs of defiance that made him famous will become known to new generations as . . . elevator music.