Enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain't no false prophet
I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go
At heart, he's Zimmerman, not Zarathustra, although, when you think about it, he's Zarathustra, too. Enemy of the unlived meaningless life, Socrates and Dylan in a nutshell, but the latter sans hemlock. Maybe Socrates should have taken up the lyre or mouth harp.
In "My Own Version of You," continuing the slow blues beat, Dylan goes from a consideration of the passive aggressive social milieu he's been forced to live amongst, masked and alias-ly, to mad scientist, a Dr. Frankenstein who sings,
I've been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts
I'll bring someone to life, is what I wanna do
Seems like a comment on both the Age we live in, moving toward the Singularity, and a personal reflection on the Feminine Ideal; if he can't find what he's looking for in nature, he'll make do with a composite, a jigsaw of all the women who have ever puzzled him.
The mad poet thinks that if he uses his creative energies he will "be saved by the creature that I create." But it's a dicey proposition. He says he'll take "the Scarface Pacino and The Godfather Brando," as if he were at a CRISPR machine splicing some roles. It's an evil place he's in, where "the enemies of mankind," Freud and Marx, are engulfed in flames, and he imagines "the raw hide lash rip the skin from their backs." It's a nasty place: "Shimmy your ribs, I'll stick in the knife / Gonna jumpstart my creation to life." The music plods on and on, and he wonders, "Is there light at the end of the tunnel, can you tell me, please?" Dark sh*t, man.
Beginning with the sixth song, "Goodbye Jimmy Reed," the tone and rhythm starts to change, and things lighten up. Jimmy Reed was an old time guitar and harmonica bluesman from Mississippi known for his accessibility, who spent time as a busker, and ended up on shift work at a meat packing facility, while white men, like Dylan, got rich off his Black-and-blues. You can hear Reed in a lot of early Dylan, and here, in Rough and Rowdy Ways, one can hear the beat of "Bright Lights, Big City" and the now-taboo humor of "I'm Going Upside Your Head." Dylan's paying homage; shedding off 'one more layer of skin,' striving and shriving on his way to 'Beatrice'.
In "Mother of Muses," an appropriate follow-on, he's almost there. About to cross the last line into the last realm. Echoing sentiments expressed in previous albums, such as "I can't believe it / I can't believe I'm alive" from the song "Where Are You Tonight?" off Street Legal, Dylan begins with the final realization many critics have been waiting for: "I've already outlived my life by far." In his youth, he was just Watching the River Flow through his mind, Heraclitean, a river of multitudes, where, the poet sings, "I keep seeing this stuff and it just comes a-rolling in." He's ready to lie down next to the river now, and have himself a final dream, a door he'll conjure up, to the other side, the final set of 9 plus 1 circles of paradise (so, maybe he's got another album in him). Here he comes, Mama: "I'm travelin' light and I'm a-slow coming home," leaving behind the material world, like the good Tibetan Book of the Dead says we must.
Then it's on to the album's Paradise, the 'nostalgic' "Key West," book now. Artist colony, citywide museum, purveyor of fast foods (you know the ones, you know exactly the ones), and home of the Hemingway Code: grace under pressure. (Except for a couple of albums I needn't mention.) That's Dylan, too. And Caribbean Wind. And some Sara's probably down there, too, in her late stage bikini, waiting to draw him into another disillusion, much to our delight. If you lose your mind, you will find it there, the poet sings. Well, maybe, but I can't afford the rates there, so I'll have to take his word for it. In fact, Bob, it's because I can't afford the rates that I lost my mind (oops, TMI).
Except for "Murder Most Foul," Dylan's voice hasn't sounded so smooth, polished and uncroakin' in a long time, maybe the result of precision engineering, or restraint, or both. And, incidentally, when I reconsidered "Murder Most Foul" (briefly), the song evoked, for me, American Graffitti, a film that features DJ Wolfman Jack, and the platters he spun, and recalling an era of contradictions and lies about the American Dream, and serving to remind us all that Dylan has been around since Ike warned us to beware the Military Industrial Complex. My whole life Dylan has been hoarsely whispering in my ear, beware, beware. Except when he was cashing in.
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