| Bob Dylan – Ain't Talkin' Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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man, even dylan's apocalyptic songs have barrells of humour in them these days!! whatever character is narrating this is one messed up, confused fella - torn between a life of sin and a life of purity - sounds like a soul singer to me!!! fascinating, beautiful stuff i used to listen to it as i wandered into the city, buildings weeping themselves into being all around me - the mystic garden, truly overgrown!!! dylan knocks me all over the place with this one!! aint talkin'?? the guy can't STOP talking!! he's like Hamlet - endlessly procrastinating, his every word gives him away 'cos every second he's TALKING to us he isn't DOING!!! he's one siiick puppy!! eight minutes in the company of a very talented chap... |
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| Bob Dylan – Desolation Row Lyrics | 19 years ago |
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what always struck me about the song was how delicate the whole thing is... it not only defies interpretation but crumbles under close scrutiny. this of course doesn't make it in any way 'bad'. in fact, it's a testament to dylan's achievements at this time, the succession of his goals. there is practically an entire discourse on this one song - interpretations of all kinds, ranging from blunt allegory to symbolist nonsense. well, and this is true of a lot of the songs from blonde on blonde and highway 61, there's room in the song for just about EVERY critical interpretation to be 'true' - in some sense dylan talked publicly at the time about the lack of any objective 'truth' in the world - instead he said he was only after 'blinks of an eye' in his songs - brief moments that seem to capture some intangible, irrational and inexplicable 'sense' of humanity - and desolation row is full of these moments, refusing to ever settle into a single discourse or meaning yet while there is room in the song for interpretation, subjectivity is not, as dylan well knew, the beginning and end of his art. there is implicit meaning here - lots of it - just as there is a meaning to the 'waste land' that we can't quite pin down, or box up neatly so the idea behind it is probably - as everyone has pretty much guessed - a place, solid or transient, physical or metaphysical, a 'destination point', perhaps the end of highway 61, or even perhaps a kind of purgatory - a place of suffering, where man nonetheless finds himself most alive - a kind of perverse vision of rousseau's state of nature in which everyone is prey to their instincts both carnal (everyone "making love or expecting rain") and artistic, a carnival of debauchery and prophesy, in which death is always near at hand. there are positives and negatives about desolation row (the place), just like there are positives and negatives about everyone you meet - like all cunning postmodernists (well, let's call him that for argument's sake) dylan was not prone to defining anyone as 'entirely this or entirely that' - nothing is rendered in simple, two-dimensional terms - the key progression in his songwriting between the protest and electric days. the important thing to note is his evocation of this fantasy place, removed completely from our own sense of contemporary 'reality' yet with unmistakable parallels. the characters - i won't go into each of them - are outcasts, yes, but they are full of life and vitality - this is dylan's empathy for the underclass, the eternal struggle of the underdog, pushing through. those who seek to oppress these characters - the insurance men etc. - those who seek to imprison and even slaughter them(the genocidal heart attack machine) are depicted as lifeless, out of touch with the human soul - symbolic of everything dylan sees as bad and, perhaps contentiously, 'modern'. can we see einstein as dylan? maybe. he's on record as calling most of his characters some reflection of himself. but dylan doesn't 'put' himself in his songs - he IS his songs and they are him - so, yeah, einstein is dylan but only as much as cassanova and dr filth are reflections of dylan - or what dylan sees as the multi-faceted human character, both good and bad sides. by '65 dylan had pushed himself out of the protest circle cos he was finding it stunted his upward growth - the which side are you on? bit is a neat little reference to the folk song of the same name and also what he saw as the pettiness of party politics. dylan saw himself as above all that - a minstrel of the people, an underdog like many of the characters in his songs, beyond democratic - he was humanist, though even that 'definition' would do him an injustice. one thing that always perplexed him - then and now, i guess - was everyone's insistence that he 'define' himself clearly. dylan can't define himself any more than you or me. he's just dylan - that's what no one seemed to be getting in the sixties. the last verse is the most intense of the lot and probably gives the song a whole bunch of emphasis it might have lacked if he'd have left us in the literary plain of a sinking mr.eliot and mr.pound, scrapping over who's captain of the dying carcass of Modernism. here our narrator - the guy who watched it all with his 'lady' from one balmy desolation row evening - having received an inconsequential letter from a friend (its subject matter being the broken door knob, i'm guessng) which angers him. how can someone be so concerned with the inconsequential, the dangerously flippant, at a time of such crisis?? the character feels alienated from the social circle mentioned in the letter - "all these people that you mention/yes, i know them they're quite lame" - and is even perplexed that his well-being could be asked after ("when you asked me how i was doing/was that some kind of joke?"). who knows what dylan is really getting at, but it's a neat little sign off, one that makes us question the role of the narrator, his stability, his character, his subjectivity and his paranoia - which might well be necessitated by his circumstances. it's oblique for sure, but brilliant nonetheless - intensely 'personal' and yet more evasive than the rest of the piece combined!! the way the song mirrors american and global politics in the mid-60s probably aint a coincidence. dylan was and is a history obsessive - he has recounted hours spent scouring old papers from the 19th century. he is perhaps only seeking to emphasize the obviously circular nature of human history - history repeating, human nature turning in on itself perpetually, from era to era. politicians were always corrupt, wars always killed, elections were always rigged, lies always told, atrocities always committed against those who appeared different. apply desolation row to today's political climate and you'll get some funny results. that DOESN'T make it allegorical. Desolation Row, the place, does not - can not - exist - it is a place in dylan's imagination. that so many people relate to it as a metaphor for their world, their reality, their own state of mind, is only testament to dylan's achievement - his ability to make his own deeply subjective, quite esoteric impressions available to a broad core of people. personally, i just dig the song, but i don't ever try to fuck with it... it's a tower of cards, man. breathe on it from the wrong direction and it'll topple on you or float away - remember mr. jones, right? having a questioning mind is all good, but just don't jive the man!!!! lol |
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