Bob Dylan

Walk into any bookstore or conduct an internet search looking for "Bob Dylan" and you're likely to find at least a dozen books written about Dylan's lyrics. I sort of don't even need to make the argument that he's a poet - he's been regarded as such for decades so it's basically a fact. In my last post I talked about Pichaske's point that in order for a rock lyric to be true poetry, to be true literature, the words need to express some greater human truth whether it's emotional, societal, or both. On his record The Times They Are A-Changin', Dylan personalizes the sociopolitcal climate of the time - including the religious climate - through stories about himself or other individuals.

One of the many books published on Dylan's lyrics Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan by Aidan Day. Day explains that his "study" focuses on "the semantic properties of the words of the lyrics"; however, he is not claiming "priority for the printed text over the performance, nor to undervalue the profound expressive possibilities of Dylan's voice." And furthermore he states, "A Dylan lyric on the page is one text of that lyric while a performance of it constitutes another. Nor is there necessarily one dominant performed version" (5). In other words, according to Day, no performance or presentation is the same and each must be considered separately of all others.

All that said, I completely agree with Day when he states that "[Dylan's] words alone stand as significant texts" (5), and one of the reasons for this is because of their emotionally charged sociopolitical statements, and The Times They Are A-Changin' is riddled with these.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

This initial reaction to the album's title track, and its principle interpretation has been that it was an anthem of change for the 1960s. But in a 1964 interview with Cameron Crowe, Dylan said, "I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The Civil Rights Movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time." A year later he continued to explain in yet another interview saying, "I didn't mean 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' as a statement... It's a feeling." Despite the tone of command in the song - "Come writers and critics" or "Come senators, congressmen" etc. - Dylan was not seeking to cause change, but to lyrically express and record the change he could already feel and see happening.

The Ballad of Hollis Brown

Later in the record Dylan's songs become more focused and he uses them to tell stories and create illustrations of the reasons we need to keep supporting the change already beginning. "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is Dylan's exercise in empathy, and is written in response to the national poverty rate in the late 1950s, early 1960s (about 19%) through the lens of Hollis Brown and his life. The song itself harkens back to the murder ballads of the 19th century, and here Hollis Brown, after losing his crops and his horse and dealing with his inability to feed his children, commits a murder suicide ending the lives of his wife and five children, then turning the gun on himself ("There's seven people dead / On a South Dakota farm"). Eventually in response to the poverty level, and incidentally not long after the release of Dylan's record, then president Lindon B. Johnson would announce The War of Poverty during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. Though the popularity of the War on Poverty would eventually wane, it seemed the government was beginning to take heed in trying to prevent the type of scenario which Dylan's ballad presented.

With God on Our Side

"With God on Our Side" strays from empathizing with those living below the poverty line and turns its focus to the fear of impending war. The song begins, "Oh my name it is nothin' / My age it means less" voicing the sentiment of many soldiers who enlisted to serve their country and may have lied about their ages to do so. The speaker goes on to express a fear of the Russian threat, which is most definitely a reference to the Bay of Pigs, singing, "I've learned to hate Russians / All through my whole life / If another war starts /It's them we must fight / to hate them and fear them / To run and to hide / And accept it all bravely / With God on my side." In many of Dylan's songs he sings about this sense of the "impending end of individual life. And the time that is so short is above all short for the master [and] the speaker's own identity. Time and again it is a conviction of his own depravity which traumatizes the speaker of these lyrics" (99-100), which is also seen here when he sings "So now as I'm leavin' / I'm weary as hell / the confusion I'm feelin' / Ain't no tongue can tell." Dylan ends the song in the same stanza but not before he makes the statement that whoever is fighting a war, whoever is on either side, will justify their actions by thinking that whoever their god is will be in support of their side of the fight. Where the song takes a turn is in that final stanza when Dylan says the final lines: "If God's on our side / He'll stop the next war." And there is his main social statement: for those of you who are so religious, if God was really on anyone's side, we wouldn't have war at all.

There is a lot more I have to write on Bob Dylan - let's face it, in the conversation of Song v. Poem, Dylan might be the only artist that matters. But more on that later.