Bob Dylan is one of the finest ever writers of protest songs, about the oppression of poor people, young people, black people in the militarist, capitalist hustle of the USA. But what about his portrayal of suffocating or fickle women?
When he sings in The Gates of Eden:
“Of war and peace the truth just twistsIts curfew gull just glidesUpon four-legged forest cloudsThe cowboy angel ridesWith his candle lit into the sunThough its glow is waxed in black…”
he is thinking of the Vietnam War. The carpet bombing of Hanoi and Laos which has now morphed into the taking down of Gaza and Iran. His words convey the imperial motif of terrifying US air power, still being played out in the Middle East. And the cynical propaganda webs spun around it.
He produced a stream of classic protest songs: Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall, Blowin in the Wind, Maggie’s Farm, Hurricane, Subterranean Homesick Blues. All on the side of the downtrodden, laced with a hefty dose of underclass cynicism.
Then something new develops. After the early romanticism of Girl from the North Country, comes Dylan’s breakthrough rock anthem Like A Rolling Stone. This is a pretty vicious attack on someone he sees as an over-privileged woman. She’s prided herself on her progressive views and artistic, bohemian lifestyle. But now she’s got her comeuppance: she’s let all her money be stolen, she’s in the gutter with the other hobos. “How does it feel?” he keeps asking.
“All right Miss Lonely…” he addresses her. We might wonder, if this song is an attack on middle class hypocrisy, why does it matter that she’s a woman? Is Dylan partly dealing with some change in himself from the radical posture of his early work?
Another song of the same year that hits you in the gut is It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
“Your lover who just walked out the doorHas taken all his blankets from the floorThe carpet too is moving under youAnd it’s all over now, Baby Blue”
True there are early songs like It Ain’t Me, Babe, where the singer resists a woman who wants to tie him down and own him. It seems a justifiable assertion of independence, with the wit of
“Go away from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed”
echoing the language of a law officer. And the slight cruelty of
“Go melt back in the night
Everything inside is made of stone
There’s nothing in here moving
And anyway I’m not alone”
Let’s look at another Dylan classic on the male female relationship: All I really Want to Do:
“I ain’t lookin’, to compete with you
Beat, or cheat, or mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you, deny, defy, or crucify you..”
It’s a hell of a list of abuse, and it’s only the beginning of the tirade. What sort of woman expects that treatment from a potential boyfriend?
“I don’t want to meet your kin
Make you spin, or do you in
Or select you, or dissect you, or inspect you, or reject you…”
There’s something here that makes me feel the singer is seriously scared of being asked to show commitment. What do we normally mean when we ask “Can’t we just be friends?” It’s likely to be either a man playing it cool – or a kiss-off to an ex-lover.
There are a string of jagged ballads like Tangled up in Blue that seem to chronicle long, crazy, hopeless love affairs. A lover who is stuck in a dead-end romance, trapped in their younger self.
Then come the powerful lyrics of Just Like a Woman:
“Everybody knows that baby’s got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls…”
So now we get to see the real female:
“She takes just like a woman
Yes, she does, she makes love just like a woman
Yes, she does, and she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl”
In the next verse, there’s another joust at what you could call “female bullshit”:
“Nobody has to guess that baby can’t be blessed
‘Til she finally sees that she’s like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls”
The next verses are shockingly raw, as the singer admits how helpless he is in the face of desire. He is fatally attracted but he can’t stand the closeness that will be required of him:
“It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what’s worse is this pain in here
I can’t stay in here
Ain’t it clear that I just can’t fit
Yes, I believe that it’s time for us to quit
But when we meet again, introduced as friends
Please don’t let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world”
The woman is the all-encompassing Mama and the boy just has to escape. But sometimes he seems to need to give her a kick as he goes! It’s alright Ma – he’s only bleeding.
There’s the Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, with
“your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul…”
Is it her tragedy that she lives
“Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes”?
Or is it possible that this sophisticated woman doesn’t need a man?
These songs carry a powerful emotional kick. They are high art creations, depicting unresolved tensions in a tragi-comic mode. They come from the complex borderlands where men and women haggle over their evolving duties and roles.
Maybe what I am arguing is that Dylan starts as the moral prophet of his generation, on the back of his scathing anti-war and political protest songs. He lacerates that world in the black and white ethical frame of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Perhaps he is nonplussed when her realises that male/female relationships rarely fit into that rigid template. Who is the righteous one in a divorce?
Dylan became an icon for a new kind of masculinity and love songs that were honest and “told it like it was.” He was a sex symbol for a generation of progressive women. But the vast crowds that have turned up at his solo gigs over the years have often failed to witness the rousing event they were hoping for.
His performances often seemed introverted and throwaway, an artist wrestling with his own contradictions. The lovely 1980s song Jokerman shows Dylan revelling in his absurdist view of life:
“Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman”
There’s no hint of how the contradictions and conflicts might be resolved. And maybe Dylan is caught in the sexism of his time, where men are always rivals and women are not human equals – they exist to excite or disappoint the men. A romantic but not very mature world view.
This is not to deny that Dylan continues to be a superb artist who also created great, original love songs like Lay Lady Lay, Make You Feel My Love, and Wedding Song. But even in the serenade If Not for You, an ambiguity lingers:
“If not for you, babe, I couldn’t find the door
Couldn’t even see the floor
I’d be sad and blue if not for you…”
Is this seduction or desperation?
Sometimes as in Absolutely Sweet Marie or Boots of Spanish Leather, there’s heartfelt passion coupled with an icy sense of betrayal. When can you trust a fickle chick? The cynicism that Bob Dylan once turned on the American capitalist dream is now directed at the world of desirable women, “faking it” as they struggle to make something of their changing lives.
An encyclopaedic knowledge of Dylan – you must have spent many happy hours with the record player!
But don’t singer-songwriters adopt many personas in generating their work? Their experience and mood must both feed their art, but surely it can’t all be autobiographical or reflective of their true self?
One can see ‘Under My Thumb’ or ‘Sister Morphine’ or ‘Rehab’ reflecting personal views or experience, but Space Oddity not so much.
The true gift for artists like Dylan is to be able to live one’s life through creativity, poetry, philosophy, music, beauty and understanding the human condition. A privilege not granted to many of us!
Interesting stuff. Well, yes and no. I’m not denying anything you’ve suggested here- just that ‘the readings are numberless’ with any great artist and other things are equally true. Firstly- Dylan is within the blues tradition of ‘my woman done me wrong’ [women blues singers sing ‘My man done me wrong]’ -the complaint, and catharsis and overcoming the blues through the complaint is at the heart of it- the object of the complaint, woman or man, is a ‘stand-in’ for this. Secondly, Dylan is a master at knowing instinctively what poetic theorists call the ideas associated with ‘The Lyric I’ – in short: no-one can be finally, completely identified in the ‘I’ or the ‘you’ of a poem or song. So he writes ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You’ , for E.G it can be taken as a love-song to a woman [yes]; but also a pledge to God, his audience, his art, his country, himself —the song knowingly nods to all of these. He said himself that Rolling Stone was really addressed at himself. The convention of the put-down song re-written large but actually fuelled by self-loathing. Look at ‘Dirge’. If taken purely as a song to a lover/a woman it’s vicious but it’s clearly also both addressed to himself ‘I hate myself for loving you’ but that ‘you’ is also probably ‘fame’. ‘Like a slave in orbit’ is a great description of a lover, but also equally of a ‘the grinding tour schedule of a star’.. He’s doing it as we speak-opening his shows with ‘To Be Alone With You’- a Country love-song in its original, as a show-opener it’s a pledge to the crowd—-‘to be alone with you’. We’re going though a [long-lasting] phase where the ‘socio-political’ reading is THE ONLY reading in town and whilst it’s obviously valid as one fraction of any critique, it can also simply ignore more aesthetically-grounded, specific complexities and make everything far too literal. Dylan is being mysogynistic. Cancel him. ‘Just Like A Woman’ has attracted probably the most of these types of readings – reductively- because it can equally be seen as a man regretting a liasion with another man, or a transvestite—it can read exactly like that ‘ but when we meet again, introduced as friends, please don’t let on that you knew me when I was hungry and it was your world’. And other things too. This- what i call ‘mathematical ambiguity’ is what makes Dylan a poet- not so much his ‘ Black madonna two wheel gypsy queen’ Ginsberg-like phrases. Also, there’s good and bad songs- for me ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ is a badly written, badly sung, badly-expressed song, so it muddles its message rather than have an exact, double/treble meaning. Its easier to say its a very male song. ‘Is Your Love In Vain?’ I’d attack as ‘bad lyrics’ which allow for a misogynistic interpretation. At the very least in this song he’s putting on the persona of someone being deliberately cynical about love in the worst possible terms -almost expecting the backlash. But ‘Just Like A Woman’ is a great song’, ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ even more so, ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind….’ too -the ambiguities are deliberately ‘built in’. So: it’s complicated. It’s very rarely just ‘Sexist!’. That might be one take, especially for his weaker work, but not often. Usually a great writer keeps things open. x
I take that critical response from Matthew Caley on the chin. My post is simplistic and I certainly don’t want to get into the sphere of cancelling people for having “bad” views.
And it’s also vital to say that a poem is a vehicle for conveying emotion – not a historical document where the meaning of I and You is set in concrete.
I think maybe my main angle was looking back at my own development in the late 60s and 70s when Dylan was a role model and a kind of God. And thinking that some of the anger at that time and the nihilism was overdone.
We were never promised a world that would be perfectly fair. And we were never promised sexual relationships where men and women would each behave logically according to agreed ethical rules. That was our legacy from the Judaeo Christian monotheist tradition.