While I have been unable to find the actual source of the phrase “nostalgia is death” (generally attributed to Dylan) I did find this interview fragment with Malcolm Jones:
“I’m just rooted back there in the `50s, and what’s got me this far keeps me going,” he says with a grin. “I know people who’ve got that online thing and games and things, but I find it too inhibiting to sit in front of a screen. On any level — I don’t even like to sit and watch TV too much. I feel I’m being manipulated.”
Dylan called his latest, Grammy-winning album “World Gone Wrong,” and meant every word of it.
Two songs are by the late Georgia bluesman Willie McTell, a musician whose passing he mourned in one of his greatest songs, “Blind Willie McTell” (“Power and greed and corruptible seed/ Seem to be all that there is”) and whose work, for Dylan, symbolizes a level of craft fast vanishing.