Acad. Quest. (2015) 28:313–321 DOI 10.1007/s12129-015-9514-z VERDICTS

Eternal Protest: Bob Dylan’s Lasting Rage Peter Wood

Published online: 24 July 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Bob Dylan is a major figure in popular culture. In the opinion of some, however, he is more than that: a creative genius whose songs and lyrics will long outlast his age. In this short essay, I will comment on one small part of Dylan’s very large record of song-writing and performance: his early “protest songs.” But, first, why Dylan? This essay is a contribution to a series in Academic Questions that offers personal assessments of major academic figures. Whatever else Bob Dylan may be, he is not an academic figure of any sort. He dropped out of the University of Minnesota in May 1960, at the end of his second semester, and never again enrolled in a degree program. In 1970, at age thirty, Dylan did receive an honorary doctorate of music from Princeton University. The Princeton ceremony left a strong and very negative impression on the musician. He memorialized it soon after in a song, “The Day of the Locusts”: I put down my robe, picked up my diploma, Took hold of my sweetheart and away we did drive, Straight for the hills, the black hills of Dakota, Sure was glad to get out of there alive. And he was still regretting the event nearly a quarter of a century later in his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, where Dylan remembers wincing when Princeton president Robert Goheen read a citation that referred to him as “the

Peter Wood is editor of Academic Questions and president of the National Association of Scholars, 8 West 38th Street, Suite 503, New York, NY 10018-6229; [email protected]. His most recent book is A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter, 2007). This essay is an updated excerpt from this book.

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authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America.”1 In Chronicles, Dylan complains about this valorization, “The speaker could have said many things. He could have emphasized a few things about my music. When he said to the crowd that I preferred isolation from the world, it was like he told them I preferred being in an iron tomb with my food shoved in on a tray.”2 But the story has a postscript. In 2004 Dylan accepted another honorary doctorate in music, this time from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. St. Andrews thoughtfully avoided the “voice of a generation” trope in favor of praising Dylan’s attention to Scottish border ballads. Judging from many of his lyrics, Dylan was never especially impressed with what colleges do for students or with what students do in college: Aw, you’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely But you know you only used to get juiced in it And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it3 So begins the second verse of one Dylan’s most famous songs, “Like a Rolling Stone.” The subjects of Dylan’s songs are often lowlifes, bandits, ordinary folks, or figures who emerge from or merge into myth. On the other hand, Dylan frequently performs at universities, and he is no stranger to the world of books and ideas. His lyrics testify to a lifetime of attentive reading. The British literary critic Christopher Ricks published a collection of densely interpretive essays, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, in 2003, adding the laurel of New Criticism-style close reading to an altar already heaped with worshipful offerings from many other academics.4 Among the great many books by academics on Dylan, Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America (2010) likewise stands out. 5 The best case for including Dylan in “Verdicts” is the high estimate in which he is held by good scholars, literary critics and historians among them. We live in an age that doesn’t have much patience for a distinction between high art and creative entertainment. Popular song finds its place among movies, television shows, mystery novels, and other mass-produced work as fodder for critical rumination. For the most part, I don’t take these enthusiasms as evidence 1

Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 133.

2

Ibid.

3

All Dylan lyrics quoted from Bob Dylan: Lyrics 1962–1985, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).

4

Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (London: Penguin Group, 2003).

5

Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

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that the works themselves have lasting value. Camille Paglia has for several decades extolled Madonna’s artistry, but it is hard to imagine anything of Madonna’s contributions mattering to people a century hence. It isn’t so hard to imagine that Dylan’s will.

Circus Floor Though he had already written a handful of protest songs (“Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” “Hero Blues,” “John Brown”), Bob Dylan’s first great protest song was “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963), which concludes: How many years can a mountain exist Before it’s washed to the sea? Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist Before they’re allowed to be free? Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head, Pretending he just doesn’t see? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, The answer is blowin’ in the wind. The song seems angry at humanity’s willingness to abide injustices in its midst, but the singer’s anger is not directed at a particular, concrete instance of injustice. He seems to rail at a more fundamental condition and to imply an overwhelming but entirely vague consequence. Is the “answer” that’s blowin’ in the wind socialist revolution, as a good many of Dylan’s comrades in the early sixties hoped? Is it racial upheaval? Divine intervention? To name the possibilities seems to limit the song, which is one of those rare instances in which unspecified indignation actually works. After “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Dylan wrote dozens of songs that either express direct contempt for those he judged responsible for social evils or angrily mock individuals whom he faults for pride, hypocrisy, or other personal failings. His 1963 song “Masters of War” intriguingly turned up in 2004 as the top protest song of all time in the British music magazine Mojo, beating out Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” (#2) and James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” (#3)—and N.W.A.’s rap classic “F*** the Police” (#10). 6 It is not on Mark Boudreau, “For What It’s Worth. Mojo Magazine’s Top 100 Protest Songs,” Rock and Roll Report, November 3, 2004, http://rockandrollreport.com/for-what-it%E2%80%99s-worth-mojo-magazine%E2%80% 99s-top-100-protest-songs/, citing “100 Greatest Protest Songs Ever!” Mojo, May 2004.

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WatchMojo’s current list, which is dominated by songs of racial protest, but Dylan’s song wishing death to war profiteers continues to be astonishingly popular.7 A 2014 poll by Rolling Stone rated “Masters of War” the “best protest song of all time.”8 The popularity of “Masters of War” is an instance of what I have called “New Anger” searching the archives for its own precedents. By New Anger I mean anger that congratulates itself. It is a swaggering form of anger that calls attention not so much to the grievance as to the righteousness of the grievant. It is anger with an emphasis on performance, and it is conceived as empowering self-expression. All of this is in contrast to an older ethic of self-control in which too quick a resort to angry expression was widely seen as weakness and a cause for shame. We now live in an era where histrionic expressions of anger are often viewed as admirable in and of themselves, regardless of the provocation. New Anger emerged from the cultural discontents in the United States following World War II. Among its original ingredients were the popularization of Freudian views about the supposed psychic dangers of repressing anger; the beatnik ethos of personal authenticity to be achieved at the expense of violating repressive social convention; the formative stages of the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement, both of which urged passive sufferers of injustice to defy repressive customs and laws; and the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll as a more direct and uninhibited form of emotional expression. Dylan was by no means the first performer to sing New Anger, but he was by far its most creative and powerful. “Masters of War,” by itself, is among the weaker of his angry rants. It opens, “Come you master of war/You that build all the guns,” and proceeds through sixty-four lines of simplistic accusations, ending: And I hope that you die And your death’ll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I’ll watch while you’re lowered Down to your deathbed And I’ll stand o’er your grave ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead. “Top 10 Protest Songs” WatchMojo.com, http://www.watchmojo.com/video/id/12387/.

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Andy Greene, “Readers’ Poll: The 10 Best Protest Songs of All Time,” Rolling Stone, December 10, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/readers-poll-the-10-best-protest-songs-of-all-time-20141203.

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Most of the song is of a piece with this death-wish, although the switch from the attack on the plural masters of war to the singular master in a casket is jarring. “Masters of War” is really about the “I” who hopes the anonymous “masters” will die. The body in the coffin is less the point than the engorged ego of the man who is singing and who plans to stand around in the cemetery just to be sure. The song seems less about taking umbrage at gun builders and war profiteers than it is about Dylan asserting his own very large moral superiority to them. The indictments that the song makes against the “masters of war” are of stock villain sort, You play with my world Like it’s your little toy and do nothing for Dylan’s reputation as a lyricist. The song registers a lot more self-satisfaction than it does revelation about the motives of Halliburton, Raytheon, or their 1963 counterparts. Another of Dylan’s protest songs that continues to attract attention is his 1964 anti-war screed, “With God on Our Side.” It is a collection of shallow anti-American ironies about the nation’s wars (“you never ask questions/When God’s on your side”) culminating in the question whether “Judas Iscariot/Had God on his side.” The answer? “If God’s on our side/He’ll stop the next war.” Dylan’s song “Only a Pawn in Their Game” opens with the assassination of Medgar Evers, and moves through a series of dismissals. The assassin was “only a pawn in their game;” likewise the politicians who incited racial hatred, the cops who failed to enforce the law, and the poor whites who joined the Ku Klux Klan. “Only a Pawn in Their Game” is lyrically more telling than “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side,” but suffers from a similar strain of ideology. Whose game is Dylan talking about? Who exactly benefits from the murderous racism of the Jim Crow South? The implication is that the evil capitalists are once again pulling the strings (or pushing the pawns) but as soon as that idea is thrust into plain view, the song loses much of its force. Dylan’s most famous protest anthem, “The Times They Are a Changin’ ” (1964), is every bit as angry and arrogant as “Masters of War.” In it Dylan consigns all who stand in the way of the revolution to grim fates (“you’ll sink like a stone”); orders politicians out of the way (“Don’t stand in the doorway / Don’t block up the hall”); silences dissenting opinion (“And don’t criticize / What you can’t understand”); and rejects parental authority (“Your sons and your daughters / Are beyond your command”). The totalitarian impulse in the song is astonishing. All of Dylan’s early sixties protest songs now seem to be a cross-generational memo to the present: divide the world in two, between weak good guys and

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powerful creeps, but don’t be too specific. The creeps are creepier if you assail them as shadowy exploiters. Implication is often better than accusation. This generic vagueness describes the Dylan protest songs that make the “ten best” lists and that have something like continuing currency. But there are other Dylan protest songs that are the exact opposite of vague: they are ballads that recount specific stories of injustice. Among these is The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, which is a masterpiece of narrative that accounts for the 1963 murder of a black servant by a twenty-four-year-old Maryland tobacco farmer, William Zantsinger: William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’ Zantzinger (actual spelling) served only a six-month sentence for the crime and paid a $625 fine, but Dylan’s song followed him to the end. When he died in 2009, the national press, including the New York Times and the LA Times, remembered him as the heartless socialite of Dylan’s lyrics, who had spent his subsequent years descending ever more deeply into disgrace. Concerning Dylan, Zantzinger told a writer, “I should have sued him and put him in jail.”9 The real Zantzinger deserved his opprobrium but his complaint about Dylan’s depiction of him as a heartless killer was legitimate. The cane with which he struck Hattie Carroll was a toy, and immediately afterwards she served him a bourbon and walked away. She had had a history of heart trouble and it was hours later that she suffered a fatal stroke. Zantzinger’s obnoxious behavior may have precipitated her stroke, but Dylan’s lyric that she “got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane” is, at best, poetic compression. And Dylan’s depiction of Zantzinger as “determined to destroy all the gentle” turns the impulsive behavior of a drunken lout into premeditated murder. For all that, the song is a masterpiece. It also points to a distinction between Dylan’s New Anger-style protest songs and his songs about racial injustice, which are rooted in an older, selfless kind of indignation. The New Anger protest songs are vague about the object of protest and instead emphasize the dudgeon of the singer. The songs about racial injustice, by contrast, are ballads about real events that emphasize narrative details. The singer’s distress about the injustices is plain, but it isn’t the focus. 9 Adam Bernstein, “William Zantzinger, Convicted of Killing Hattie Carroll and Denounced in Bob Dylan Song, Dies at 69,” LA Times, December 10, 2009, http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/ la-me-zantzinger10-2009jan10-story.html.

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In 1965, Dylan appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which used electrified instruments—an offense against the purist tastes of the folk revivalists who famously booed their former favorite. Dylan replied to the catcalls by playing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and left the folk movement and propagandistic protest songs behind. But not anger. In the decades that followed, he wrote and performed many masterpieces of angry music: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Positively 4th Street,” You got a lotta nerve To say you are my friend When I was down You just stood there grinning among others, as well as songs about anger, such as “Too Much of Nothing” and “Tears of Rage,” Tears of rage, tears of grief, Why must I always be the thief? Come to me now, you know We’re so alone And life is brief. Such songs certainly helped to shape the emotional sensibilities of the generation that reached adulthood in the sixties and seventies. In some cases, we can point to actual artifacts of Dylan’s influence—such as the title of Rolling Stone magazine and the name the radical Weathermen adopted from “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: You don’t need a weatherman To know which way the wind blows But he also taught that generation an angry acuteness about falsities in human life. In “Temporary like Achilles,” he addresses a disdainful lover who ignores him: I watch upon your scorpion Who crawls across your circus floor.

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Dylan’s anger in such lyrics reaches a phantasmagoric clarity. The anger of the early social protest songs in only a few years transformed into a far more complicated inner landscape involving the play between attraction and hostility. In “My Back Pages,” he repudiated his earlier protest songs as simple-minded: “‘Rip down all hate’ I screamed / Lies that life is black and white.” Dylan’s emotional range continued to expand, but always with a deep edge of anger—at others or himself. The case for Dylan as the kind of artist who may long outlast the tastes and enthusiasms of his own time rests on the work that came after his few years of writing and performing protest songs. But those are the songs, of course, that first brought him to broad public attention and they are also among the songs that five decades later best define him for new listeners. Dylan himself never embraced the view that he was “the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America.” Dylan did not want to be the patented representation of anyone other than himself, and even that was an uncertain destination. His career became a matter of trying on and discarding one persona after another, and a continued migration from musical genre to genre, including folk, rock, country, gospel, and most recently American songbook standards such as “Autumn Leaves” and “The Night We Called It a Day.” This last disconcerting turn into the world of Frank Sinatra, Jonny Mercer, and Rodgers and Hammerstein seems to have taken Dylan very far indeed from New Anger and social protest. As with many of his previous plunges into a new genre, Dylan’s homages to the mid-century song catalog in his album Shadows in the Night strikes some listeners as a dramatic falling off and others as high irony. But his ruined voice and world-weariness actually bring out the pathos in these songs. The anger is banked, although he has picked songs (“I’m a Fool to Want You,” “Why Try to Change Me Now,” “Where Are You?”) that thread back to his youthful lyrics (“Temporary Like Achilles,” “Just Like a Woman,” “One of Us Must Know,” “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine”) of disdain for shallow and unfaithful lovers. Of course, his elusive identity and musical homelessness is part of what made Dylan such a good candidate for the role into which he has been repeatedly conscripted: the embodiment of generation that had tossed aside the culture’s old ways in search of a truer, deeper, more authentic self. That self-searching almost always proved to touch bottom with profound discontents and to take the outward form of ostentatious anger—New Anger. And Dylan, while occasionally finding joyous moments, has remained beginning to end a lyricist whose dominant mode is anger, or more recently anger subsiding into regret and melancholy. His protest songs were the first full expression of an effort to define himself

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against the world. As poetry or literature, they don’t amount to very much, though clearly as song and as performance they remain powerful: they stick in the memory and they summon resentments that demand to be heard. In a 2012 interview in Rolling Stone, Dylan drew an important distinction between the power of his performances to stir other people and his own detachment from the emotions his songs stir up: “The thing you have to do is make people feel their own emotions. A performer, if he is doing what he is supposed to do, doesn’t feel any emotion at all. It is a certain kind of alchemy that a performer has.” 10 Many performers describe the detachment from the roles they inhabit, but Dylan has struck observers as especially and rather mysteriously remote. Which is to say, it would be a mistake to conflate the artfully crafted anger of his lyrics and his performances as a direct expression of his authentic self. The catch here is that his musical expressions seem so authentic, perhaps in direct proportion to his impenetrable reserve. So why Dylan? Perhaps because to understand all that has happened to the university since the 1960s, but especially the deep changes in the humanities, we need to account for the spirit of disenchantment, the uprooted search for an uncertain self, the unrequited religious yearning, and the never-ending tour of angry possibilities that Dylan helped to crystalize. He was never the conscience of Young America, but the shifting “self” he has borne witness to over his long career is a lot like us—broken, resentful, and by turns arrogant in the same way we all are.

“Bob Dylan Unleashed,” interview by Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone, September 27, 2012, http://rol.st/ SRFjlW.

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