I wouldn't have thought the article was very good, and the title is neither an accurate representation of what Dylan said, nor really what the article is about. But this thread is surprisingly pretty good!
As a gloss on what Dylan is saying about race and the music business, this clip where David Bowie turns the tables on an MTV interviewer in 1983 is worth watching, in a high-tension sort of way. He's pretty impressive as an investigative journalist: cool as steel, conceding nothing, and charming even as he drives the knife in deeper:
(Edit: As a performer, at least,) the man ages well. (If you watch to the very end, he makes the same point as Dylan: "yeah but let's face it, somebody laid the ground rules down in the beginning".)
If that's true, you're right—that has not aged well. I meant that he has aged well as a performer, which is what that interview was. I've added that qualifier to my comment above.
Generally though, I don't think it's that hard to separate. Everyone is a combo of good and bad–that's how humans are. It's childish to expect otherwise. The fashion of denouncing historical figures by anachronistic standards is especially lame. No one who ever lived would pass such a test.
The related internet habit of saving the worst thing one can say about anybody in a big hash table [1] and then looking it up and repeating it every time the name is mentioned, is also a bit silly. What are we doing when we do that? certainly nothing interesting. But I rant. I take your point that "ages well" needs a qualifier!
Edit: I noticed something else that's mildly interesting—calling this "woke" is also an anachronism. The word that Bowie uses in the interview is "integration". That places him ideologically as a civil rights moderate, and of course wokeness (whatever it may mean) didn't exist yet.
Could you please stop taking HN threads into flamewar? You've been doing it a lot, and it even looks like your account has been using HN primarily (though fortunately not exclusively) for political and ideological battle. We ban that sort of account on HN [1] because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Also, definitely please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
As a gloss on what Dylan is saying about race and the music business, this clip where David Bowie turns the tables on an MTV interviewer in 1983 is worth watching, in a high-tension sort of way. He's pretty impressive as an investigative journalist: cool as steel, conceding nothing, and charming even as he drives the knife in deeper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3i53rjh-PA#t=11m3s
(Edit: As a performer, at least,) the man ages well. (If you watch to the very end, he makes the same point as Dylan: "yeah but let's face it, somebody laid the ground rules down in the beginning".)