While our hero is being damned and doubted for masqueradin’ with words, and arousing suspicion and then hilarity for hiding in plain sight in New Jersey, I wanted to take a break and look at a song about evil and unmasking.
Some sweet day I’ll stand beside my king.
No, not that song. Man of Peace. (But a brief moment of hello and envy to the good people of Tahoe who got to hear “desk clerks dressed in black” out of our hero’s own mouth last night.)
Come over here baby, there’s a scene you’ll like to catch. Listen to Man of Peace. The artist-as-a-young-man whose revelatory and vast vision looked boldly out at desolation row and recreated history until he exhausted himself, Lady beside him, this young seer has become a matter-of-fact middle-aged man who seems to want only to share some grownup disillusionment with his companion, through an ordinary window at the ordinary world.
Is it news that the beggars and buskers, and holy men, and the man who can slip and slide unnoticed through the crowd, might not be what they seem, might not want what they seem to want or be offering what you think they’re offering? Is it news that the devil can be a needy tramp playing on your pity, or a sweet-talking and sweeter-singing minstrel reeling you in with every song of love that ever has been sung? Not news. Look out of any window, any day, and see if you can tell the one true story of what you’re seeing. The song begins and the not-so-young singer is only telling the girl what she’d come to know herself about the tricky and treacherous world outside safe, maybe even loving, rooms.
But the singer starts getting closer, pulling in from the scene outside the window. Satan is right there when you need light, that glimpse of the sun, and he’s right there when your burden’s more than you can stand. His timing is excellent and he is a subtle beast, doesn’t have to call attention to himself. If he promises exactly what I want, and I can’t spot him for anything but what I think he is– someone I notice least, when certainly we would like Satan to be exactly what we notice most--what are my odds of beating him?
The poor girl still at the window, captured by the song, and now things take an awful turn, don’t they. Ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull. There’s something quite horribly wrong with this line of the song. This is too…particular a nightmare. It’s conventional and even a little pedantic to point out all the possibilities of deception and malice in our day-to-day world. It’s a little uncomfortable to be reminded that evil tempts us when we’re hungriest for consolation, and oppressing to be reminded that we’re often too weak to spot it. But now the singer knows something not at all conventional, or pedantic, and now there’s no more subtlety to Satan’s deceptions. We’re a little spooked by imagining a demon careening over the falls in our very own skull. This is out of a one-of-a-kind nightmare, and now I am looking at it. Next line, the singer unmasks himself pretty much completely. He smells something cooking. This does not sound, well, healthy, or appetizing, does it. There’s going to be a feast, and we’re reminded of the feast whose preparations are observed from desolation row, a feast that somehow requires curtains to be nailed. Sometimes Satan comes as the man with the harmonious tongue, who, after all, tried to warn you.
Too late apparently–Satan has humanity’s best interests at heart, a great lover of mankind in fact, if we dig into the root of philanthropist, whose awkward syllables roll effortlessly into the rhythm of the song. It’s a very old story: Satan seducing one single creature through the language of doing all of mankind a favor. A single creature forewarned and hapless, like the girl who’s gone with the man in the long black coat.
And on we ride through prophecies of annihilation and the end of days–anything you thought would last forever, trees or love, they’re all coming down and coming to a stop. No doubting now that what the singer knows and sees is coming from some place far beyond that window. Until.
The last verse is a different kind of window. We’re back in the very human world. A world more realistically doomed than the one in the next-to-last-verse. It’s just the regular world where innocence has to end and mothers have to weep. and there are dreams of redemption and sacrifice to be followed to whatever end they lead you, and then we’re back at the window, listening to a song about that same old lost world, sung by an old artificer.
Our excellent and tireless archaeologist, Mr. Scott Warmuth, has once again discovered shards of English in Mr. Bob Dylan’s output that can be traced to other material. His muse having abandoned him mid-sentence sporadically throughout Chronicles, Dylan paged frantically through a 1961 Time magazine for phrases that could help him describe the cultural and political context of the 1960s. Then, either snickering with a shoplifter’s cheap sense of victory, or showing the mild and unreadable mien of the habitual liar , he dropped them into the holes in the sentences he’d left hanging. The purloined passages were skillfully sutured into the body of of nimble, vivid, and engaging prose that surrounded them, and lay there undetectable to the reader’s ear, and unattributed to their original author. The devil is in the details, is he not.
This seems like a lot of work, but we know that Bob Dylan is practiced at his crimes. Stymied by the task he set himself to write a song that muses restlessly about the frustration and torpor of age, and the burden of memory, he paged through the memoirs of a dying Japanese gangster and luckily found just the phrases to round out lyrics that had left him stuck. Once again, another convenient, unattributed and unthanked writer saved our lazy and duplicitous hero the trouble of inspiration.
We can relieve the anger and disappointment at Bob Dylan’s dereliction of originality, and we can give in and join him. The possibility can’t exist that Bob Dylan can scan text, store, retrieve, and synthesize language more quickly and unconsciously than we can. Nor that as the years go by, his reliance on facile memory and synthesis has grown. He’s a charlatan, picking and purloining and pretending, consciously, and betraying the sacred myth of the pure original artist. Let’s prove we can do it too. Give yourself a challenging writing assignment, something that demands a high degree of expressive and descriptive language, and that demonstrates a compelling and distinctive voice. Pull something off the shelf–maybe Montaigne’s essays, or last month’s Harper’s, or Mickey Mantle’s biography, or Bob Dylan’s memoirs. Flip through, pick out some phrases that appeal to you. Insert them into your piece of writing, disguising any seams in the tone, and voila. No irony here. If he can do it, you can too.
I give up. What is the great pleasure people have in accusing Bob Dylan of fraudulent artistry? Scott Warmuth merely does the hard work of research, it’s the rapturous dismay of Dylan’s audience that I wonder about. What is the standard for originality in art? John Heartfield puts his name to collage pieces that are no more than jigsaws of found materials. Duchamp signs this fountain, or scrawls a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa, and these objects end up in museums and textbooks. Christopher Logue’s War Music rewrites the Iliad from English translations, and if you think this is an adolescent exercise in postmodern playfulness, I urge you to read some of it. It’s fascinating and moving and extremely strange. Anne Carson has done similar work with classical literature. We don’t condemn Logue because Homer can’t be financially or personally harmed by Logue’s theft? But that still leaves the problem of being impressed and captivated by Logue’s unoriginal work. What are exactly the standards of originality and ethics in creation that Bob Dylan is violating? Who gets to get away with these violations, and who doesn’t?
If news came down the line that, say, Taylor Swift, or Tracy Chapman, or Bruce Springsteen, or Eminem were releasing an album of Christmas music this winter, their fans would enjoy little flurries of speculation, and the media would make the announcement with different degrees of curiosity. But poor Bob Dylan’s decision to follow in the tradition of The Partridge Family and Mariah Carey will provoke urgent and contentious palaver about the state of the man’s soul. Is he walking with Jesus again? And if so, how far are they going this time? Is this the very last straw in his cynical mercenary commercialism? What the hell is he up to now?
True enough, Christmas music is a special case. It’s more assimilated than gospel music, and it blurs the lines between spiritual and secular like no other type of music. It’s hypocritical and vacuous: the Christmas carol in the shopping center. It’s sentimental and vacuous: the Christmas carol playing behind the tearful climactic scene of a melodrama. It’s an affected reminder of the power of spirituality and community: picture the same climactic scene in a more pretentious and middlebrow melodrama. It’s an essential and unambiguous pleasure in one of the most sacred days in the Christian calendar.
A good singer has to negotiate their relationship to this music, to its ubiquity, its connotations, and to the peculiar range of cynicism, curiosity or attachment their audience will bring.
