When Bob Dylan made some allegedly racist remarks in a Rolling Stone interview last year, the iconic singer-songwriter faced some very vocal criticism in Croatia. Now, a group called the Council of Croats in France is suing both Dylan and Rolling Stone.
The September 2012 interview saw Dylan tell Rolling Stone, "People at each other's throats just because they are of a different color. It's the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood."
The final remark refers to the decades-long tension that has existed between Catholic Croats and Christian Orthodox Serbs: tensions which violently came to the fore during the Croatian War of Independence between 1991 and 1995. According to International Business Times, the Council of Croats' Vlatko Maric has said the remark was, "an incitement to hatred. You cannot compare Croatian criminals to all Croats. But we have nothing against Rolling Stone magazine or Bob Dylan as a singer".
The comments and comparisons provoked some Croatian radio stations to remove Dylan's songs from their playlist entirely. The French legal investigation is likely to take three to four months.
Dylan, who was awarded the French Legion of Honour just last month, is no stranger to international controversy. In 2011, he responded to allegations that his setpiece had been censored during a concert in China. Dylan denied the claims and explained on his website that "the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play."
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Alberto Cabello
