In my recent takedown of the Beatles and the purported Bob Dylan, I promised to prove the assertions I made, at length. Here’s the refutation by quotation of "Dylan.” I've attacked this person's art for a long time; call it 50 years, since I was arguing with my brothers in 1971. But it never sticks. I say he sucks; you say he doesn't and appeal to the Nobel committee as your authority. It's an aesthetic he said she said, and plus I'm losing. So now I’ll make it stick. Once and for all.
George Harrison said he makes Shakespeare look like Billy Joel. I don't know why we'd ask Cass Sunstein (about anything, really) but Sunstein said that he "soars past Whitman as the great American poet." Sean Wilentz, Princeton historian and author of Bob Dylan in America, has said that "he is a man who writes with a mixture of defiance and vulnerability that comes close to explaining what it means to be human."
I disagree. I have many assertions to make about the work of the person known as "Bob Dylan": voice of a generation, Nobel-prize winning alleged poet, boomer alleged messiah, alleged Timothee-Chalamet look-alike, etc. He’s the worst lyricist who ever kept at it very long. Interpreting the so-called Dylan's material as poetry, or as culturally-transformative art is probably ridiculous. How would one prove a ridiculousness such as that? I can't think of a way, except by quoting and quoting and quoting some more; pointing and laughing (or, like, snarling) at lyric after lyric.
Take "Like a Rolling Stone.” Of "Like a Rolling Stone," Greil Marcus says, "Every note in that song, every word, every inflection is a breakthrough." You might not know this, what with all the generational-talent, he's-our-Picasso, better-than-Milton biopic praise, but the whole lyric is just ragging on an ex. "Break up with me and you'll end up dating homeless guys" is the entirety of the message of "Like a Rolling Stone." When Muddy Waters sang "Rolling Stone," he was talking about himself, the itinerant musician and lover. The Rolling Stones named themselves after Muddy's song. The so-called Bob Dylan just lobbed it at a girl as a threat: you spoiled brat, break up with me? You'll never work in this town again. Move out of my apartment and you'll be homeless.
That sort of misogyny, which persists even in the love songs, is one of Dylan's two lyric themes. The other is writing little scenarios for Western movies of the sort that Robert Zimmerman no doubt saw in his childhood: it's all very Hopalong Cassidy, for decades on end. That doesn’t make him a Whitman; it's merely puzzling.
"The Times They Are A-Changin’": first, what is that "A-" doing there, and everywhere else? Dylan tacks “a-“ onto verbs randomly. Sometimes it might help fill out the line syllabically. Rarely. There are lots of meaningless baroque flourishes like that, non-ornamental ornaments as, for example, adding “did” to verb phrases and as in "then we did go" to mean "then we went." Both these tics are repeated dozens or hundreds of times. They have the effect of some sort of faux Olde English, but they embody a way no one has ever spoken English and that no one ever ought to. They're just little drips of incompetence and pretension, present in line after line.
So this, his most famous song, in its very title, needs a rewrite in the worst way. The time isn't changing, things are; in the words of Steve Miller, time keeps on ticking, ticking into the future. Okay, you may be saying, picky, picky. But it's typical that in order to say, "things are changing" (the sentiment which stunned an entire generation) "Dylan" doubles the wordcount and introduces fake olde-time locutions and gratuitous punctuation. There are, in any given "Dylan" song, more pleonasms, filler words, and gratuitous inversions than meaningful bits. The title itself is an amazingly shitty piece of writing. The song might be a protest lyric or something; it's hard to tell, because it doesn't say anything specific about anything specific. Where's the answer? Blowin' in the wind, I guess. That also doesn’t mean anything, a problem that besets the soi-disant Bob Dylan almost every time out.
Given my assessment of his work, I might need to try to figure out how "Dylan" got the reception he did. Because it’s the very least plausible critical assessment I’ve ever seen of any one or any thing and a devastating reflection on the culture and the generation that performed the apotheosis.
White suburban-type kids in the early-1960s liked the new rock and pop music of the era. They were doing the twist and listening to great black R&B artists, like Little Richard or Chubby Checker or Sam Cooke, and then their white imitators, including the Beatles as they came on. But their parents thought this music was trivial, banal, stupid and simplistic. Maybe it was even nonsense, as in all the "doo-wop," and the like. Anyway, kids, the stuff you like, that rock music, isn’t art. Leonard Bernstein, that's art. Robert Frost, that's art. The stuff you like is debased popular crap.
When you're 13, you don't care about observations like that and probably can't mount much of a response except eye-rolling. But when you're 17 you could conceivably articulate a defense of your music. And if, with authorization, you can say of the latest folkie phenomenon that he's greater than Whitman and Shostakovich combined, if you can make that stick somehow, you’ve won the generational aesthetic battle. So for people like Greil Marcus (18 in 1963; I was five), the moment of his arrival was the thunderclap moment where (apparently) your very own art and generation exceeded, transcended, and yet realized the artistic ambitions of the previous decades, of your own parents and grandparents. Your generation would be legit; more than legit; the greatest ever.
"Bob Dylan" was supposed to be a high modernist genius: a Van Gogh, a Jackson Pollock, a Dylan Thomas, and he renamed himself after Thomas. He was the rock Leonardo or Einstein. This represents a complete misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of popular music and especially rock, which is to dance and drink and party and love and lose, not to hang on the wall of the museum or be encased between the covers of a book or in a vitrine. So that was a bad mistake that eventually led to a couple of decades of dreck: pretentious pseudo-rock and pseudo-classical music of the sort purveyed by Yes, for example.
More to the present point, modernist genius was a position that "Bob Dylan" couldn’t plausibly occupy. The work is absurdly inadequate when judged by standards appropriate to James Joyce or Sergei Prokofiev. And what it really shows you is how far reception can drift from reality, or how "social contagion" makes absurd assessments seem plausible and can make them seem to stick over decades, to the point where you might never have heard someone disagree. When everyone is nodding along, you can't even hear the material.
As I say, one can't exactly "prove" one's aesthetic assessments. But almost any Dylan lyric shows the problems, and what I’m going to do now is to give many examples. These are drawn from an even longer document where I ran through 12-or-so classic Dylan albums: Bob Dylan; Another Side of Bob Dylan (did he give the album that title?); The Times They are A-Changin'; Bringing it All Back Home; Highway 61 Revisited; Blonde on Blonde; John Wesley Harding; Nashville Skyline; New Morning; Dylan; Planet Waves; Blood on the Tracks; Desire; and Street Legal. These run from 1962 to 1978 and form the core of the oeuvre: the stuff for which he’s best known.
Wading through this much "Dylan" left me pretty exhausted, like forcing one's way through a viscous ooze toward a place of despair. I was going to try to do all 50 albums or whatever it is, but I couldn't go on. Nor do I think it's necessary. Meanwhile, I'll go sort-of thematically rather than strictly chronologically. (Lyrics come from AZlyrics.com with a few corrections.)
(1) Observations about women:
“Don't Think Twice, It's Alright”
I'm a-thinking and a-wonderin', walking down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I am told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right
I ain't a-saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right
[What he means is that it's not alright at all. He's "Dylan", so he's a-thinkin and a-wonderin’ and a-sayin’, and really, no one on God's green earth had ever talked like that before, for very good reasons. We could call that originality, I suppose.]
“Spanish Harlem Incident”
Gypsy gal, you got me swallowed
I have fallen far beneath
Your pearly eyes, so fast an' slashing
An' your flashing diamond teeth
The night is pitch black, come an' make my
Pale face fit into place, ah, please!
[Okay I think this is about cunnilingus with a woman of color, but as usual it's kind of hard to tell.]
“I Shall Be Free #10”
I got a woman, she's so mean
She sticks my boots in the washing machine
Sticks me with buckshot when I'm nude
Puts bubblegum in my food
She's funny, wants my money, calls me honey.
[The singsong nursery-rhyme tone is at least a break from the Tarot-card prophetic horseshit.]
“Restless Farewell”
Oh ev'ry girl that ever I've touched
I did not do it harmfully
And ev'ry girl that ever I've hurt
I did not do it knowin'ly
But to remain as friends we need the time
And make demands and stay behind
And since my feet are now fast
And point away from the past
I'll bid farewell and be down the line.
[Definitely not vernacular English. Also, do these girls agree with the self-exculpation? Are they certain that he only messed up their lives by accident?]
“Love Minus Zero/No Limit”
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all
The cloak and dagger dangles
Madams light the candles
In ceremonies of the horsemen
Even a pawn must hold a grudge
Statues made of match-sticks
Crumble into one another
My love winks, she does not bother
She knows too much to argue or to judge
[Do I have to do this? Two ways of speaking: (a) softly, or (b) of the future. The cloak and dagger dangles? "Dylan" gears up to write straight out of the Tarot deck or the chess board for the next 40 years in primitive simulations of profundity and astounding loads of symbolic hooey. Women in the know didn’t argue with "Bob Dylan," or else they got kicked to the curb. "The wind howls like a hammer" he adds. It's a metaphor! It's art! But do hammers really howl?]
“On the Road Again”
Well, I asked for something to eat
I'm hungry as a hog
So I get brown rice, seaweed
And a dirty hot dog
I've got a hole
Where my stomach disappeared
Then you ask why I don't live here
Honey, I gotta think you're really weird
[If you want the so-called Bob Dylan to stick around, you'll have to cook better than that, you weirdo. The right reply: if you want me to cook for you, you'll have to write a lot better than that, you fool.]
“Visions of Johanna”
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower frieze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees."
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel.
The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Saying, "Name me someone that's not a parasite, and I'll go and say a prayer for him."
[Fat women disgust him, is the sentiment, insofar as anything can be decoded here. "The peddler" and "the countess" are typical non-people representing nothing in Dylan's authorship.]
“One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)”
I didn't mean to treat you so bad
You shouldn't take it so personal
I didn't mean to make you so sad
You just happened to be there, that's all
When I saw you say goodbye to your friends and smile
I thought that it was well understood
That you'd be comin' back in a little while
I didn't know that you were sayin' goodbye for good.
And I told you, as you clawed out my eyes
That I never really meant to do you any harm.
[I treated you incredibly badly, for I'm "Bob Dylan." But you shouldn't claw my eyes out, bitch, because I never meant to harm you. You must’ve harmed yourself!]
“Temporary Like Achilles”
Like a poor fool in his prime
Yes, I know you can hear me walk
But is your heart made out of stone, or is it lime
Or is it just solid rock ?
Well, I rush into your hallway
Lean against your velvet door
I watch upon your scorpion
Who crawls across your circus floor
Just what do you think you have to guard ?
You know I want your lovin'
Honey, but you're so hard.
[Her heart is made of lime, if "BD"s still wondering. "I watch upon your scorpion who crawls across your circus floor" is "Bob Dylan" in a nutshell.]
“4th Time Around”
Her Jamaican rum
And when she did come, I asked her for some
She said, "No dear"
I said, "Your words aren't clear
You'd better spit out your gum"
She screamed till her face got so red
Then she fell on the floor
And I covered her up and then
Thought I'd go look through her drawer.
And when I was through
I filled up my shoe
And brought it to you
[What is it with "Dylan" and gum? Well, it does rhyme with “come.”]
“Winterlude”
You're the one I adore come over here and give me more
If dogs run free, then why not we?
If dogs run free, then what must be
Must be
[He was never more lucid or more profound.]
“Hazel”
Hazel, dirty blonde hair
I wouldn't be ashamed to be seen with you anywhere
You got something I want plenty of
Ooh, a little touch of your love.
Hazel, you called and I came
Now don't make me play this waiting game
You've got something I want plenty of
Ooh, a little touch of your love.
[This is a relatively straightforward love song. So thank god for that. But "you got something I want plenty of” isn’t what they give Nobel prizes in literature for. Or, is it?]
“Something There Is About You”
Something there is about you that moves with style and grace
I was in a whirlwind, now I am in some better place
My hand's on the saber and you've picked up on the baton
Something there is about you that I can't quite put my finger on.
[What is this perverse word order for?]
“Dirge”
So sing your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine
The naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen
Lady Luck who shines on me, will tell you where I'm at
I hate myself for loving you but I should get over that.
[Cf. Joan Jett's far superior song I Hate Myself for Loving You.]
“Never Say Goodbye”
Oh baby, baby, baby blue
You'll change your last name too
You turned your hair to brown
Love to see it hanging down.
[One message is consistent throughout the oeuvre: Bob wants your hair long, girl. He'll break up with you if you cut it.]
“Idiot Wind”
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the back-roads heading south
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot, babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzing around your eyes
[Even the insults and threats are completely incompetent.]
“Isis”
Isis oh Isis you're a mystical child
What drives me to you is what drives me insane
“Sara”
Whatever made you want to change your mind
Sara, Sara
So easy to look at, so hard to define
Sara, Sara
Sweet virgin angel, sweet love of my life
Sara, Sara
Radiant jewel, mystical wife
Sara, Sara
Scorpio Sphinx in a calico dress
Sara, Sara
You must forgive me my unworthiness
Sara, Sara
Glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow
Sara, Sara
Don't ever leave me, don't ever go
[Kinda makes you feel for Sara, the virgin angel, mystical wife, scorpio sphinx, glamorous nymph, etc. Aging out of your teens can be hard on a muse.]
“New Pony”
Everybody say you're using voodoo, your feet walk by themselves
Well, everybody say you're using voodoo, I seen your feet walk by themselves
Oh baby, that god you been praying to
Is gonna give ya back what you're wishing on someone else.
Come over here pony, I wanna climb up one time on you
Well, come over here pony, I wanna climb up one time on you
Well, you're so nasty and you're so bad
But I swear I love you, yes I do.
[More romantic words were never uttered than "I wanna climb up one time on you." It's a double entendre! Get it, pony?]
“Is Your Love in Vain?”
Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow
Do you understand my pain?
Are you willing to risk it all
Or is you love in vain?
[Looking for a woman to cook for me and fix my clothes. Otherwise women are useless. Believe me, though: she'll end up feeling "my" pain.]
(2) Generally or miscellaneously ridiculous lyrics
“A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”
And what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
And what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
[For real, it's a-gonna a-fall. Pellets of poison are flooding, are they?]
“Bob Dylan's Dream”
With haunted hearts through the heat and cold
We never thought we could ever get very old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one
“Oxford Town”
Oxford Town in the afternoon
Ev'rybody singin' a sorrowful tune
Two men died 'neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon
[Lynching really got the purported Dylan's goat, as it did the whole generation. Somebody better investigate, eventually! Chant it in the streets.]
“Chimes of Freedom”
Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An' the poet an' the painter far behind his rightful time
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for granted situations
[This is a comprehensive lesson in how not to write. Empty and impossible, yet so overwrought. As is the next, and many others. Sub-Ginsberg pseudo-Beat.]
“Ballad in Plain D”
With unseen consciousness, I possessed in my grip
A magnificent mantelpiece, though its heart being chipped
Noticing not that I'd already slipped
To a sin of love's false security.
From silhouetted anger to manufactured peace
Answers of emptiness, voice vacancies
Till the tombstones of damage read me no question but, "Please
What's wrong and what's exactly the matter?"
[Though its heart being chipped?]
“Mr. Tambourine Man”
And but for the...
I'm ready for to fade
[Any time you're ready for to, man, go right ahead.]
“Subterranean Homesick Blues”
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don't wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don't wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
[It sort of rhymes! But it definitely doesn't scan. Important advice on how not to be a bum, though.]
“Mr. Tambourine Man”
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship
My senses have been stripped
My hands can't feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Waitin' only for my boot heels to be wanderin'
I'm ready to go anywhere
I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade
Cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it
[I wonder what it's like to have your senses stripped. One of the most interesting incidents in “Dylan''s bio is that one time in 1967 his heels wandered off without his boots, then his boots wandered off without his legs, then his legs wandered off without his torso, then his torso wandered off without his head, and then his head rolled down into a sort of puddle, where it remains today.]
[The whole of the miserable song "Gates of Eden" is a decisive and permanent refutation of “Dylan” the writer. Here are a couple verses. It's some kind of symbolist poem?]
The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains
Unto the shoeless hunter who's gone deaf
But still remains
Upon the beach where hound dogs bay
At ships with tattered sails
Heading for the Gates of Eden
With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the Golden Calf
And on their promises of paradise
You will not hear a laugh
All except inside the Gates of Eden
The motorcycle black Madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom 'cause
The gray flannel dwarf to scream
As he weeps to wicked birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden
[Bro. Begging you to stop shoveling out this horseshit unto us. Remember Chuck Berry or something! What are you doing?]
“It's Alright, Ma”
While some on principles baptize
To strict party platforms ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And say "God Bless him."
“Ballad of a Thin Man”
Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word "NOW"
And you say, "For what reason?"
And he says, "How?"
And you say, "What does this mean?"
And he screams back, "You're a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home"
[If “midgets” aren't deep symbols of something, "Dylan" and David Lynch are in trouble.]
“Desolation Row”
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They are spoon-feeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get outta here if you don't know"
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.
[Praise be to Nero's Neptune!]
“I Want You”
Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit
He spoke to me, I took his flute
No, I wasn't very cute to him - Was I ?
[Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, was he?]
“All Along the Watchtower”
"There must be some kind of way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."
"No reason to get excited", the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke"
[Hendrix's cover was a lot better, but the lyrics were never going to make any sense, said the Jester to the Ladies in Waiting and Midget Monks of Ithaca, or whathefuckever.]
“I Am a Lonesome Hobo”
I am a lonesome hobo.
[Are you, though?]
“The Wicked Messenger”
Oh, the leaves began to fallin'
And the seas began to part
And the people that confronted him were many
And he was told but these few words
Which opened up his heart
"If ye cannot bring good news, then don't bring any".
[It seems like if the leaves began to falling, then the seas should begin to parting. If the seas begin to part, however, it seems like the leaves should just begin to fall. The faux-Biblical, merely-senseless clip clop is very typical, however, as is the final arrival at a mere cliché.]
“Country Pie”
Give to me my country pie
I won't throw it up in anybody's face.
[He definitely will, though.]
(3) The Western
Many, many Dylan songs are kind of sketches or scenarios for, or from, Western movies and television shows; it's all gunfighters and gamblers, sheriffs and hanging judges and drifters and whores. He was writing as the Western was dying as a dominant strand in American and world entertainment. Why did he keep returning? What did any of it mean? I'll just "throw up" a couple of examples.
“Lily of the West” (Traditional folk song)
I courted lovely Flora some pleasure for to find
But she turned unto another man who sore distressed my mind
She robbed me of my liberty, deprived me of my rest
Then go, my lovely Flora, the lily of the west.
Away down in yonder shady grove, a man of high degree
Conversin' with my Flora there, it seemed so strange to me
And the answer that she gave to him it sore did me oppress
I was betrayed by Flora, the lily of the west.
[The guy sore distressed his mind; the gal sore did him oppress. Badly translated from the Malay, perhaps? Remember when he was ready "for to" fade? "For to" is his go-to. No it adds nothing. That's why he's sore.]
“Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”
Well, Frankie Lee he panicked
He dropped ev'rythimg and ran
Until he came up to the spot
Where Judas Priest did stand
"What kind of a house is this", he said
"Where I have come to roam?"
"It's not a house", said Judas Priest
"It's not a house, it's a home."
“Jack of Hearts”
The backstage manager was pacing all around by his chair
"There's something funny going on" he said " I can just feel it in the air"
He went to get the hanging judge but the hanging judge was drunk
As the leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk
There was no actor anywhere better than the Jack of Hearts.
“Shelter From the Storm”
I was burned out from exhaustion buried in the hail
Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail
Hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn
Well the deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker he blows a futile horn
"Come in," she said
"I'll give you shelter from the storm"
[As usual, he's throwing around sub-Jungian archetypes and dream images. But really, "hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn"? The one-eyed undertaker blows a futile horn?]
“Tombstone Blues”
Gypsy Davey with a blowtorch he burns out their camps
With his faithful slave Pedro behind him he tramps
With a fantastic collection of stamps
To win friends and influence his uncle
The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone
Causes Galileo's math book to get thrown
At Delilah who's sitting worthlessly alone
But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter.
["Win friends and influence his uncle" is what passes for a joke in this body of work. Galileo throwing a book at Delilah! It's symbolic! It's not really anything, though. Let's add us some random pronouns.]
I intend this to amount to a decisive, irrefutable demonstration that the alleged Bob Dylan can’t write worth a damn. I don't care if everyone in the world and the Nobel prize committee disagree. How can they? The man wrote all of this and so, so much more.
I intend to leave Dylan alone now, forevermore, having destroyed him once and for all beyond hope of resuscitation. But in a month or two, I swear, I'll do the same thing to the Beatles.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
