Bob Dylan said it was beyond ugliness.
Los Angeles, United States:
Legendary American folk singer Bob Dylan said he was “disgusted” to see unarmed black man George Floyd “tortured to death” by a white police officer in his home country, in a rare interview published on Friday.
Dylan spoke to the New York Times the day after Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, which sparked mass protests against racism across the country. It was the musician’s only interview outside of his own website since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
“It sickened me to see George tortured to death like this,” he said of Floyd, who died after a white policeman knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes during an arrest. .
“It was beyond ugliness. Hopefully justice will be done quickly for the Floyd family and for the nation,” said Dylan, 79, born in Minnesota and a student at the University of Minneapolis.
Several of Dylan’s most beloved songs from the 60s and 70s addressed issues of police brutality and racism, including “Hurricane” and “George Jackson”.
He should release his first album of original songs in eight years next Friday, entitled “Rough and Rowdy Days”.
Speaking of his home in Malibu, California, where he sheltered from the pandemic, Dylan described the coronavirus as an “invasion” and a “precursor to something else to come.”
“Maybe we are on the verge of destruction. There are many ways to think about this virus. I think it is enough to let it run its course,” he said.
In late March, shortly after California imposed home stay orders to contain the pandemic, Dylan surprised fans by releasing “Murder Most Foul”, his first original song since the 2012 album “Tempest”.
Dylan said he himself was surprised when the 17-minute ballad on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the evolution of the counterculture of the 1960s reached the top of the bulletin board.
It was also the first song written and published by Dylan since he reluctantly accepted the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first songwriter to receive this honor.
Dylan maintained an incessant touring schedule until the coronavirus struck, forcing him to cancel a series of dates in Japan and North America this spring and summer.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
