Introductory comments by Tony Attwood, publisher.
If you are a regular visitor to Untold Dylan, you will know that primarily the thoughts and comments you read here are very positive about Bob Dylan’s work as a lyricist and musician.
However, that does not mean that we don’t recognise that there can be alternative views; rather, it means we (perhaps for obvious reasons) simply don’t receive many articles which express a view different from that taken by most of the articles we publish.
But this week I have received one such article, and I am happy to include it here, as it does, perhaps for the first time on Untold Dylan, put forward a very different perspective on Dylan’s work which I hope you may find informative – even if you don’t agree. It follows, below.
Tony Attwood; editor.
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The Hollow Horn: Why Bob Dylan’s Songs May Not Stand the Test of Time.
by Pete Higginson
Bob Dylan’s reputation does not, despite his recent claims, rest purely on his skills as a song-writer.
There are much better melodic song-writers than Dylan- Paul Simon, Cole Porter, Bruce Springsteen, to name just a few. Dylan’s reputation rests actually on the way he brought esoteric literacy to rock music, and without the philosophical insight of his work, it would all be a lot less impressive.
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for example, is a piece of esoteric wisdom: for Dylan, all the fundamental questions of existence are blowing like fragments in the wind or, as he says elsewhere, ‘the meaning of life has been lost in the wind’. His work represents an attempt to recover the meaning of life in a popular form. Without this effort, he would not have the reputation of a Man of Mystery, a genius, even at its worst, a kind of Messiah.
But though the effort has been spectacular and always interesting, at the end of the story we have to look back and say that it’s also been completely incoherent, baffling and sometimes plain wrong in its conceptions. There is no consistency or commitment in Dylan’s work in the end: it’s 50 albums representing a long series of ‘flashing images’ which, finally, when you push it, add up to Nothing.
Let’s take as an example a song that established his reputation as a lyrical genius: ‘It’s Alright Ma’. The original recording was stark and esoteric in sound, the guitar riff was fantastic. But the real reputation of the song was that it seemed to come from a place outside history, written as it were near ‘The Gates of Eden’. Dylan positions himself here (‘I live in another world’) and seems to have a special insight into history. He may claim not to be a prophet, but his vision appears to be higher than ours- it’s a semi-divine talent:
“Disillusioned words like a bullet bark As the human gods aim for their mark, They make everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark.”
This isn’t just good song-writing, it’s a spiritual and political epiphany. It’s very impressive-sounding compared with any other songwriter’s insight. It established him as a man to follow and even to worship. But when you actually press the lyrics, what you find is that there’s nothing there. Why should ‘human gods’ produce ‘flesh-coloured Christs’? The latter are in fact produced by Roman Catholicism at its shrines. They are not the product of disillusion but a different kind of faith from Dylan’s Protestant Judaism.
They’re not actually commercial in conception (or at least not as commercial as Dylan’s records), but concrete figurines of Faith. So the target is not capitalism but Catholicism. This is a huge error in Dylan’s thinking. And when you’re really honest and try to think the verse through, its meaning cannot be established: in what way does a bullet ‘bark’? If it’s a metaphor, then what has it got to do with toy guns that ‘spark’? And what is the ‘mark’ the human gods are aiming for? In fact, what has happened is that the rhymes have over-ridden the argument. The whole verse is senseless, actually. There is nothing really there.
If ‘Advertising signs con’ whilst ‘life goes on all around you’ then where are the adverts in the life that goes on? Dylan is saying that there is something called ‘Life’ which does not contain advertising- but can you find it? We actually experience adverts everywhere in ‘life’. Capitalism is a way of life. And if life is better than adverts then why does he conclude the song with ‘it’s life and life only’? That suggests life is nothing and that there is no refuge there from adverts. So the song in the end says nothing. You can try this with any Dylan verse. If you push it, it crumbles to dust. Who is ‘the Man in the Long Black Coat’?, Jokerman? The Mystery Tramp? Who are Claudette, Mavis, Queen Jane, Louise and Johanna? It all sounds very meaningful, but in the end it’s so obscure that I’m convinced not even Dylan knows what any of it means.
In 1979 he became a ‘Christian’. Actually, a Southern Baptist Protestant. We seemed to finally know where he was coming from: ‘God don’t make promises that he don’t keep/He’s the Property of Jesus/You Gotta Serve Somebody’. But by 1983 we had Jokerman and ‘I and I’- the latter an idea lifted from Rastafarianism, the former a complete confusion of sources. ‘A woman just gave birth to a Prince today and dressed him in scarlet.’ Is this the Scarlet Woman? Is the Prince the anti-Christ? We will never know because Dylan doesn’t know. It sounds like he knows and is just giving us a glimpse of his real vision, but then he turns round and says ‘they’re just songs-forget it.’ He keeps trying to establish Alpha Male status in philosophy and spirit, but then disowns it as soon as we respond to it.
By 2006 ‘the gardener is gone’. Does he mean Christ is dead or that his faith is dead? We can’t tell. If he only believes in the music, not any religion, then why did he tell us to get baptised in 1979 or burn? If he believes in ‘God,’ is this The Holy Trinity and its sacred Mysteries, God the Father, Yahweh or Jehovah? If he doesn’t want us to know then why is he telling us in the first place? There’s nothing there when you push it.
On his latest album- an incredible nasty set of violent proposals are offered: ‘I’ll drag your corpse through the mud’ sums up the tone of much of it. But if Dylan ‘is sworn to uphold the laws of God’ then this stance is murderous (a breach of the Ten Commandments), undignified, and full of the sin of Anger. So what kind of spiritual vision is it? It’s actually incoherent, distasteful and unpleasant. Try to follow through the thinking in ‘Pay in Blood’ and you find it leaps from one context to another with no sense being established. How can you pay in blood that is not your own? That is just murder without any personal sacrifice- an utter desecration of the message of ‘God’, which is that we should bear our suffering in imitatio Christi as the price of our own sins. When Dylan says his ‘plagiarism’ accusers can ‘rot in hell,’ he commits the sin of Presumption, which is that he thinks he will not be rotting in hell. The first law of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. This wisdom says we are all sinners- you cannot condemn others (this is contrary to the law of Christ) without being condemned yourself. We all deserve hell in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. So if Bob doesn’t believe this any more, then why does he go on about ‘those who condemned Our Lord’ and ‘the voice of the mother of Our Lord’? (‘Duquesne Whistle’).
The reason is because he is confused. The verses of his songs have always been confused. There is barely a line or a song which is not completely confused. Press the genius of the lines and they all fall apart as philosophy, politics and spiritual vision. And give Bob a month and he will be saying the opposite of everything he said on the last album. In 1997 he said “I feel like I’ve come to the end of my road. My eyes are falling off my face’. In concert a month later he announced from the stage: ‘I’m all right’. This is impossible to follow as a story. It doesn’t add up. It makes no sense. There’s nothing there. I have always liked him enormously as a fantasy figure. He really does have a great talent. But his philosophy (the foundation of his reputation), and indeed much of his lyrical thought, is plain poor. His songs may not last for a hundred years. Nor do we need to wait a hundred years to understand them. I think that quite shortly we will see that he is a very confused and aggressive man at times with a recording history that may well fall away into obscurity as times change and we come to look back on this long half-century of very confused and phantasmagoric recorded music as something of a chimaera.