Here’s one of the reasons I love Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan is the honey badger of singer-songwriters.  Now, after typing that, I admit that I realize two things:

1. Things move really, really fast on the Internets when it comes to what’s hot and what’s not, and the honey badger?  Not so much hot anymore.  And I think this is shameful.  Sorry, Interwebs, but like the fearless honey badger, I am not even letting go of my scraps.
2. Bob Dylan might have a problem with the term singer-songwriter, as he has written that the term didn’t exist when he started working in a way which kind of implied he thought the term was so much HBS (Honey Badger Sh*t).

All caveats aside, the fact is this: Bob Dylan does not give an EFF.  Bob Dylan is going to do what Bob Dylan wants to do, even if you don’t like it.  Even if it’s plug in his instruments and performing with a rock band at the Newport Folk Festival.  Even if it’s making a song so long it takes up the entire B side of an album and so awesome that you have to sit there and listen to the whole thing, every time.  Even if it’s putting on a Santa hat and recording a Christmas album.  Whatever.  If Bob Dylan wants to do it, Bob Dylan is going to do it.  Bob Dylan does not give an EFF.

A friend let me borrow Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One, and I immediately began tearing through the pages in a flurried fit of excitement.  There were so many questions I wanted the book to answer: who’s the real North Country girl?  Who’s really most important in “Vision of Johanna,” Johanna or Louise, who has the guts to ask you to deny her handful of rain?  What was his process for writing “Desolation Row,” a song so brilliant David Lehman re-printed it in The Oxford Book of American Poetry?

I am now on page ninety-six.  So far, I know that Bob Dylan spent a lot of time looking through his friend’s bookshelves, really liked this one desk in his friend’s apartment, and spent a lot of time reading about the Civil War at the library.  More than anything, I know that Dylan spent a lot of time thinking about how he wanted to write songs before he ever began writing songs.  A lot of time.  Just thinking about it.

I admit it: I’m a child of the 1980′s, of short Sesame Street clips about the letter B and commercials that tell you everything you need to know about a pill’s side effects in a minute and thirty seconds.  Sometimes, I want instant gratification, even in books.  When I realized that Dylan had spent ninety-six pages writing about how he spent a lot of time thinking about writing songs, I was kind of angry.

But then I realized what he was doing, the reason why Dylan does not give an eff, the reason he remained the Santa-hatted honey badger of music: Dylan isn’t giving his readers what they want, but what they need.  He’s not giving them what they want to read, but what they should want to read — not what they think is important, but what is important.  The trivial facts readers want are just that: trivia, good for answering shout-outs and scoring free beers at a bar.  What Dylan’s writing goes far beyond that: he’s showing us his mind, and how his mind became his mind.  He’s showing us how to live a life of the mind, how the most important thing may not be what we produce, but why we produce it:  what we believe and know and think and feel inside.

Maybe it’s true that Bob Dylan doesn’t give an eff, but it certainly isn’t true that he don’t care.