Dylan’s rightful place
A slightly edited version of the piece below was published in The Guardian, 8 September 2007
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He used to tease critics by claiming he was only “a song and dance man”, but whether he likes it or not, Bob Dylan has entered the canon. To mark next month’s National Poetry Day a “Dylan Education Pack” will be issued and pupils in key stages three and four will be invited to study a selection of the master’s songs and to compose a Dylan-inspired ballad on the theme of dreams.
In a sense, there’s nothing new about secondary school kids burrowing into and imitating Dylan. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I was doing just what Britain’s current crop of teenagers are now being officially encouraged to do – trying to make sense of Dylan’s lyrics. But I came to Dylan outside school, through a network of contemporaries. We wrestled with him on our own terms and the only evaluation we were subject to was from our peers – an experience linked to a major theme of Dylan’s music of the period: the need to speak the truth (however inchoate) to power, regardless of expert opinion.
At this stage in his career, Dylan hardly needs exposure or an academic seal of approval. He’s been ubiquitous in recent years: films, CDs, books, exhibitions of his drawings, his extraordinary radio show (confirming both the breadth and idiosyncrasy of his knowledge of American popular music). Indeed, in some quarters the suspicion will be that teachers and curriculum managers are making a cheap bid for popularity. But some of the works students will be reading were written 45 years ago – this is hardly contemporary poetry – and a more plausible concession to adolescent fashion (or in some eyes dumbing down) would have been to study Dizzee Rascal.
But Dylan is – or should be – in the curriculum on merit. Whether or not his lyrics work as poetry, in the narrower sense of the term, on the printed page (an old and arid discussion), he remains a great writer. His range puts most modern poets to shame: from minimalist eloquence to delirious verbal and sensuous richness, from the comic to the tender via petty resentments and transcendental longings, all often within the compass of a single song. He could write with the snap of an ad man (“You just kinda wasted my precious time”) or the lushness of a strung-out aesthete (“The cracked bells and washed out horns / Blow into my face with scorn…”).
One of the songs British students will be looking at next month is a A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall, which contains the wonderfully concise, ominous, arresting line: “the executioner’s face is always well hidden”. Most of us could easily spend a lifetime writing and not come up with a gem as bold as this (written when Dylan was 21), invoking some of the ghastlier truths of our age: the ease with which great and lethal powers destroy human life from a safe distance, the need to see through the masks of power, the absence of accountability. You could fill a classroom session just drawing out the implications of that one sentence.
Or look at the simple insertion of the epithet “hard” before the word “rain”. It’s usually claimed that Dylan wrote the song in response to the Cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear armaggeddon. In fact, he debuted it some weeks before the Soviet build-up in Cuba was known to the public. Nonetheless, the song was instantly recognised as a reflection on the crisis of the nuclear age. Today, its reads like a prophecy of environmental catastrophe: “I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests, / I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans”. The song is a case study in how art can be located in its particular moment of origin and at the same time outlive that moment.
It’s sometimes forgotten that Dylan coupled his populist turn to electric rock n roll with demanding lyrics, unfamiliar to his audience in vocabulary, structure and tone. From the beginning, he was waging a battle against boundaries. Both musically and lyrically he was a genre-buster. In particular, he championed the claims of popular culture against high culture: “Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers.” His work is full of warnings against over-interpretation (“I ain’t lookin’ to … Analyze you, categorize you, finalize you or advertise you”) and institutional “lifelessness”. So, yes, it is ironic that he has entered the canon, that students are prescribed what they once had to seek out for themselves, but it’s an irony to which Dylan’s work long ago alerted us.
