The times they are a-changing'. Bob Dylan is in trouble in France over an interview that was published in Rolling Stone on his 70th birthday.
In the interview, the Guardian reports, he said racism is holding America back:
"If you got a slave master or [Ku Klux] Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that," he was quoted as saying. "That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood."
While authorities are investigating the interview on charges of "incitement to racial hatred", the matter may not appear in court, and the group that made a complaint says a piblic apology might be better.
Earlier this year, Dylan recieved France's legion of honour. Rolling Stone reports the country's culture minister Aurelie Filippetti praised Dylan's decades of work and his ability to inspire youth culture, citing his influence on the 1968 student protests in Paris. He has a long history of being active in the civil rights movement, including the 1975 song Hurricane, about about the imprisonment of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.
