False Prophet (2020) part 13: You’ve been rickrolled

by Jochen Markhorst

A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the end

XIII       You’ve been rickrolled

Hello stranger - Hello and goodbye
You rule the land but so do I
You lusty old mule - you got a poisoned brain
I’m gonna marry you to a ball and chain

The time traveller who goes back to 1990 and there predicts that Morrissey in the twenty-first century will be dismissed as a racist nationalist while Rick Astley will be Glastonbury’s hippest hero, wins the Comedy Award. But he will still be right; when Astley takes his seat behind the drum kit in 2023, professionally counts in AC/DC’s “Highway To Hell” and then drums and sings an immaculate rendition, including nonchalantly twirling the drumstick in his right hand – then at that moment in time the somewhat corny crooner of ’80s confection songs is undeniably the coolest fifty-seven-year-old on the planet.

The road to surprising coolness was paved five years earlier by Dave Grohl, the frontman of Foo Fighters, who halfway through a concert addresses his audience: “Let me tell you something. Every once in a while you meet a badass motherfucker who has the balls to come up and do something in front of 30,000 people what he’d never done before. I would like to introduce that badass motherfucker right now. Would you please welcome the most badass motherfucker: RICK ASTLEY!” And while the pleasantly surprised audience is still cheering, Grohl and his men set in a devastating mash-up of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Never Gonna Give You Up”, with Astley initially a bit awkward but gradually growing into his role as frontman.

Both on the first occasion, at an impromptu in Japan, and the second time, at London’s O2 Arena, irony prevails, and that has a lot to do with the song of choice, Astley’s signature song. Beyond Astley’s influence the 1987 schlager “Never Gonna Give You Up” has developed into a cultural phenomenon, as it became an universal, globally popular prank in the twenty-first century: starting in 2007, internet users try to trick each other into clicking on a link that unexpectedly leads to YouTube, to the music video of Rick’s hit – so-called “rickrolling”. The billion-views line has long since been crossed, and in the aftermath Astley’s renewed popularity, twenty years after his global hit, is reaching astronomical heights.

Who handles that much better than Morrissey, by the way. Where the uncompromising Morrissey gets bogged down in petulant indignation over his being misunderstood, Astley excellently understands the art of simultaneously moving with and controlling the waves; he adopts the irony, the tongue-in-cheek, and meanwhile perpetuates the hype with surprises like a home video in which he plays an excellent cover of Foo Fighters’ “Everlong”.

One highlight is the surprise combining the two 1980s icons Morrissey and Astley: in September 2021, Astley presents a full The Smiths tribute concert, the first of a series of performances in which Astley, with The Blossoms as his backing band, delivers very fine, loving performances of “The Boy With The Thorn In His Side”, “How Soon Is Now?”, “This Charming Man”, of some 20 The Smiths classics. Johnny Marr initially reacts a little cranky (“This is both funny and horrible at the same time,” tweets @Johnny_Marr 14 September 2021), but Morrissey appears to have had media training by now (or, more likely, he’s older and wiser): he responds charmingly and gratefully, giving his blessing to Astley – Morrissey realises earlier than Marr that Rick is opening up a whole new generation of The Smiths fans.

And into the peerage Astley is then elevated in 2020 by a Nobel laureate, when Dylan incorporates a subtle rickroll into “False Prophet”. At least: the opening lines of the ninth verse really do seem to wink at the opening lines of that cultural phenomenon, at

We're no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I

“Stranger”, “rules”, “so do I”, and an exact copy of the iambic tetrameter with “You rule the land but so do I”… in any case, it does look very much like Dylan is trying to rickroll us in this stanza, which seems to be packed with one song reference after another.

Possibly also because this ninth verse is a bit out of tune – it almost looks like a filler couplet, a cobbled-together collection of fragments of lyrics that were still at the bottom of Dylan’s very ornate box, the box in which Dylan, according to Larry Charles, keeps dozens of loose ideas. Whereas the other eight stanzas at least still have some kind of inner coherence, here each line of verse seems completely disconnected from the other three. The antagonist is still addressed with “stranger” in line 1, but turns out not to be a stranger at all in line 2, as he is the “ruler of the land”. In line 3, the Prophet knows the ruling stranger well enough to declassify him as a “lusty old mule”, and in the final line his social status is so low that the Prophet can throw him in jail. Well, take away his freedom anyway: “I’m gonna marry you to a ball and chain.”

All in all, it is not too likely that the Prophet has the same interlocutor for four lines. But rather that Dylan bridges the bars to the final couplet with some scraps where he en passant drops subtle references to his record cabinet. “Hello stranger” by itself is too generic to count as a reference, of course. We are familiar with the word combination from dozens of songs (“Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home”, Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Mattie Mae Blues”, “Strangers In The Night”, Marianne Faithfull’s “Hello Stranger”, to name but a few), but surely the consensus among Dylanologists leans towards it being a friendly nod to “Hello Stranger” by The Carter Family from 1937. After all, there is a picture of The Carter Family on the cover of Rough And Rowdy Ways, and Dylan himself did record the song, back when (during the World Gone Wrong sessions in Dylan’s garage, 1993).

Even thinner are the lines to “Hello, Goodbye” and to Big Mama Thornton’s 1968 “Ball And Chain”, the indestructible song catapulted into the stratosphere by Janis Joplin. With some tolerance we could still fit “Hello, Goodbye” into the song’s sub-theme, duality, but that already becomes more difficult with ball and chain. That over-used word combination is itself schizophrenic; after all, it can be understood both literally, as an actual metal ball on a chain like prisoners had to drag along, and as a metaphor for “being chained” – to a terrible wife, or to an addiction, or to an image, or whatever. In Dylan’s oeuvre alone, both variants can be found: literally in “House Of The Rising Sun”, metaphorically in “Abandoned Love”. Ditto in Dylan’s record collection; literally, for instance, in Charley Patton’s “Hammer Blues” (They’ve got me shackled, I’m wearin’ my ball and chain) and in Bo Diddley’s “Cops And Robbers”, metaphorically in the Big Mama Thornton song and in Ella Fitzgerald’s “I’ll Be Hard To Handle”. And in dozens more songs.

In “False Prophet”, in this ninth stanza, a metaphorical meaning seems obvious. I’m gonna marry you to a ball and chain, after all. Or, expressed slightly more romantically: She’s never gonna give you up.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 14: I discern the fruit from the poison

Previous articles in this series…

• Part 1: “The beam that is in thine own eye”
• Part 2: The Dead are from a different world
• Part 3: Right up there in the stratosphere
• Part 4: Sing to me, O Muse, of that man of many troubles
• Part 5: Cut off the head of the owl, it’ll look like a chicken
• Part 6: The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll
• Part 7:  A minstrel collecting words
• Part 8: They call me the Gris-Gris man
• Part 9: Just a closer walk with Thee
• Part 10: I found the sound that was my holy grail
• Part 11: Say my name
• Part 12: A manic depression is a frustrating mess

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971