September 28, 2024 Tony Attwood Uncategorized
by Wouter van Oorschot; translated by Brent Annable
I. Hors d’oeuvre
1. Who this book is (not) for – part 1
Look out kid, it’s something you did (‘Subterranean homesick blues’ – 1965)
There are at least three types of Bob Dylan admirers who are likely to take umbrage at this book (despite it not even being written for them). I would have liked to rake them over the coals here, but alas, the scintillae of my pen are not what they used to be, and I was born with too serious a disposition. These groups are: the Christian evangelists, some of Dylan’s countrymen, and the Dylanologists.
I can reassure the evangelicals at the outset: to them, this book is simply irrelevant. For seventeen years after debuting internationally with his first album Bob Dylan (1962), to a man the evangelicals gave him the cold shoulder. They would have no truck with his early songs such as ‘With God on our side’ and ‘Who killed Davey More?’ (1963), in which he brought to light how the Christian deity is routinely subjected to harassment and abuse by its own adherents.
He also often used God’s name ‘in vain’. Only when the words ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ suddenly started to appear with greater frequency in his work between 1979 and 1981 (and even ‘Redeemer’ for the first time), and Dylan, to the surprise of many, himself began displaying evangelical traits, did they promptly and unapologetically adopt him into their respective congregations, exactly as other groups had done previously.
But their enthusiasm faded again – predictably – as soon as the first two of the above Words returned to their previous frequency and quotidian usage in his work, with ‘Redeemer’ even disappearing almost entirely. Nevertheless, the evangelists were overjoyed with the two dozen or so ‘gospel’ songs that he produced during the 1979-1981 period, since their belief system – being a static phenomenon – is beyond all reproach, and so they simply and unabashedly cast him aside once more.
A slightly better formulation might therefore be: it is not this book that is irrelevant to them, but rather their belief system is irrelevant to my thesis. They will find nothing in it that proclaims the Glory of their Lord or His earthly representative. The only courtesy I am willing to extend to them is the inclusion of some odd capitalisations where necessary, as in the previous sentence. My view, incidentally, is that all faiths, regardless of the god in question, are a private matter, and one that I would like to see stay that way (to me, the public proclamation of one’s faith itself constitutes a form of harassment). And while I do respect Dylan’s own religious awareness, I do not consider it to be essential to the appreciation of his work.
The second lot of potential irritants is made up of some US-American admirers. They accept the whole Dylan – doubtless with some reservations, as I myself have – and not just the man who in his younger years, fell into religion in the ultra-religious country of their birth, and who occasionally used the terms ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ in his work.
While he does address God personally, (as in ‘Lord protect my child’, 1983) and ascribes omniscience to him (as in ‘God knows’, 1990), these speech habits are quite common to many. One particularly poignant such evocation is: ‘O God, there is no God!’ by the well-known nineteenth-century Dutch author Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887), who published his work under the pseudonym Multatuli, which in Latin can be interpreted as ‘I have suffered much’.
And while the latter undoubtedly also applies to Dylan, the difference is that he packages up this invocative habit in song form. And what of it? The US-Americans to whom I refer will most likely echo my interpretation of ‘Lord protect my child’ as an entirely personal prayer that is worthy of artistic appreciation, for while the artist involves us in the concern for his child (due evidently to his own inability to provide adequate protection), he refrains from imposing his prayer onto us.
‘God knows’, on the other hand, is to be taken on notice. The tenacity of the phrase, so typical of those claiming not only the ability to fathom their God but also the authority to harass others publicly with their findings, will cause them, too, to shake their heads with pity. It is a text open to interpretation that adds nothing either to our appreciation of the artist or an improved understanding of the subject matter. What more to say? For now, no more than this.
Even a cursory examination of Dylan’s work will reveal that he is no stranger to a certain religious understanding. This attitude likely stems from around 1954 when he completed his Bar Mitzvah, and from a worldview perspective at least, we can consider him to be of Jewish heritage. But the sole relevance of his religious awareness for his non-religious admirers is the fact that his view of humanity became demonstrably more sombre after ‘coming out’ as a born-again Christian in the period between 1979 and 1981.
From the Infidels album onwards (which dates from 1983, perhaps not coincidentally the same year as ‘Lord Protect My Child’), all of his songs dealing with society bear witness, without exception, to an apocalyptic view of humanity that was all but absent in his work until that time. ‘My own version of you’, the incontrovertible highlight of the 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, is the most recent, poignant, and – thankfully – the darkest imaginable humoristic example of the same. We can therefore posit without exaggeration that Dylan, who was hardly a ray of sunshine to begin with, became considerably more pessimistic since his view of the Apocalypse became more concrete after having ventured more deeply into the Christian school of thought. Discussions of this topic are perfectly possible without resorting to theological treatments – the decline of the human species is, alas, not the exclusive purview of the faithful: oh, if only the non- and anti-religious would understand!
No, the annoyance of some US-American Dylan admirers will relate to their designation as ‘US-Americans’, as opposed to other American admirers from places such as Argentina, Canada or Ecuador. They find the term irritating, or at least cumbersome.
And although I can affirm the latter, still the distinction must be made, as Dylan’s art will be considered here to the exclusion of all the ‘(US-)Americana’ that it contains. Whoever is responsible for introducing the term ‘Americana’ into the music world: I have no idea, nor is it in any way relevant.
The term did not become fashionable in exegeses on pop music until the advent of the predominantly Canadian group The Band, who made a big splash worldwide with albums full of songs about a North America that was disappearing – or had already disappeared – beyond the horizon. They released seven albums, but their biggest influence came from the first and best two, Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969).
Because they also played a crucial role in Dylan’s career, we will encounter The Band again at a later stage. Now this is all well and good, but if their music had not been so exceptional and unheard-of before that time or since, they would not have reached the same level of fame with their song lyrics alone, however serviceable they may have been. The term ‘Americana’ would then not have appeared in pop music until much later, possibly as a direct result of Dylan’s work, in which it features prominently.
(to be continued)
Wouter’s book is only available in Dutch for now:
Dylan en wij zonder Amerika, Wouter van Oorschot | 9789044655179 | Boeken | bol
Previously, we published two chapters:
What you really don’t want: reconsidering “It ain’t me babe” and All I really want to do: What you really want., and the Introduction, the “Amuse”, as Wouter named it:
Dylan & Us: Beyond America. Amuse bouche – Untold Dylan (bob-dylan.org.uk)
We will publish more chapters from it in English on Untold Dylan in the coming weeks