In a footnote to his essay “The Uncanny”, Sigmund Freud recounted what might today be called a “senior moment”. Sitting one night in a private train compartment, he suddenly sensed the presence of an “elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and a travelling cap”. The intruder wasn’t a ghost – we’re talking Freud here, not Jung – but he was a spooky and unwelcome apparition nonetheless, and the psychoanalyst “thoroughly disliked” his appearance. So he decided to tell this stranger to scram but, when he looked again, he realised that there was no one there. His adversary was nothing more than his “own reflection in the looking glass”. Doh!
Among the indignities of growing old is a feeling of disconnection between the eternal self of the mind and the physical self in decline . . . I think. I wouldn’t know for sure because I’m only 41 – a similar age to when the Jewish-born Bob Dylan recorded the unfocused yet daring Shot of Love, his third largely Christian-themed album, back in 1981. If early middle age is still a time of peering around the bend to see what’s coming next, the slide towards old age is one of self-examination and settling accounts. Or so I gather from Dylan, who spent his forties in the 1980s promiscuously experimenting with world-views and audio production styles that were at odds with those of his first creative peak in the mid-1960s, only to drift back towards familiar ways and influences in the 1990s, then find mastery once again around the turn of the new millennium as a living museum-cum-R&D lab of traditional American musical forms.
Now 81, Dylan is as vital an artist as he ever was – indeed, more so – as listening to his most recent collection of songs, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), and reading his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, a collection of essays about 66 pop, blues and country tunes, should make abundantly clear. He is rock’s world-bending Prospero, in full command of a tempest of his own making, not its rain-soaked Lear.
Yet the everyday tragedy of ageing is inescapable in his work. It’s apparently something that you can’t transcend even if you’re a Grammy-hoarding, Academy Award-winning Nobel laureate with a Pulitzer to boot and a body of work that will outlive us all. “How can a 17-year-old like me suddenly be 81?” the biologist Lewis Wolpert once asked. I wonder if Dylan asks himself this, too. Does he ever catch sight of an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and a travelling cap in the dark windows of his tour bus and thoroughly dislike what he sees?
Not that it matters very much in the end. “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song,” Dylan writes in his new book, and that’s true of a singer’s entire body of work, too. A preoccupation with the dying of the light, however, would explain why Dylan has raved with such exhilarating force at close of day, and why he has taken on a hard-bitten, film-noir-gangster-cum-bluesman persona that sticks two fingers up at those who seek autobiographical authenticity in his work, while offending many of his fans with its luridly macho provocations.
This is the misogynistic Dylan who, in a wild exegesis of the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”, indulges his fascination for “the progressive woman – youthful, whimsical, and grotesque”. He’s the American psycho who fantasises about torturing to death a “hot-blooded sex starved wench”, ventriloquising the protagonist of Elvis Costello’s 1978 song “Pump It Up”. For the Los Angeles Times journalist Jody Rosen, such passages diminish The Philosophy by evoking an image of its author as a reactionary “elderly uncle who bulk-emails links to Fox News segments”. In the New Statesman, Jude Rogers asks whether Dylan “included these rants because he enjoys the idea of staying provocative” – but she understandably finds some of it “gut-churning”.
Upon first reading, I took all this to be of a piece with the folk- and blues-derived ultraviolence of late-period Dylan songs such as “Tin Angel”, a story of an adulterous wife that seems modelled equally on the traditional “Black Jack Davy” and Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads. For more than a decade now, Dylan has revelled in violence that mostly involves women – perpetrated by them, inflicted upon them or at least attributed to them in some way. In “Nettie Moore”, a ballad of regret recorded in 2006, we glimpse Frankie from the folk song “Frankie and Albert” – who murdered her cheating partner in a crime of passion – merrily “raising hell”; in the 2000 barnstormer “Things Have Changed”, a woman with “assassin’s eyes” sits on the protagonist’s lap. The femme fatales in his songs are liable to draw first blood and give as good as they get. It’s a Robert Johnson-inspired world-view, best summed up by the mournfully sung line “There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring,” from 2001’s “Sugar Baby”.
As troubling as such sentiments might be, these are genre trappings whose primary function is to elicit a raw emotional response. We’re not encouraged to take these lines as gospel, to be agreed with and followed, just as Johnny Cash didn’t expect us to go out and shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. The title of Dylan’s new book suggests that his project is to impart a philosophy but it was probably chosen ironically, since anyone familiar with his work knows that its power lies in its irreconcilable contradictions. In his essay on Costello’s “Pump It Up”, he explains, “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.” That’s why, I think, his work has always contained multitudes, why very little of it makes the literal, unified sense that compositions by more conventionally wordy songwriters (such as Leonard Cohen) do.
You can, of course, look at it all biographically. In 1978, Dylan recounted in a Rolling Stone interview how he had spent his 34th birthday at a gypsy festival in France, where he met the “king of the Gypsies”:
“He’d had a heart attack before I’d come home to see him. All his wives and children had left . . . They smell death and they leave. That’s what happens in life. And I was very affected by seeing that.”
So, Dylan has long associated old age with a loss of potency, and his fetishisation of violence might be a cartoonish response to that – much like in all those action movies about elderly ex-secret agents with a particular set of skills and a barely concealed glee at whooping young butts.
Even if that’s true, however, there’s clearly a lot more going on in both his recent songs and The Philosophy. In those lines about the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”, he slips on a Maga hat and bemoans “the progressive woman”, invokes the antisemitic trope of “the woman from the global village of nowhere” – an odd thing to do for a guy who was raised Jewish – and suggests that the only response is to “put on the skin of a lion”, echoing Mussolini’s “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep”. A few lines later, however, he describes people who hold such views in the most withering terms: “Now you’re a self-admiring, unchivalrous fellow with an evil nature.” If you nodded along to the woman-hating paranoia, you’ll realise pretty soon that the joke’s on you.
Here is the trickster who threw fictional characters and even Sharon Stone into Rolling Thunder Revue, his 2019 collaboration with Martin Scorsese that looks like a documentary but is, as its subtitle makes clear, just another “Bob Dylan Story”. Make of all this what you will, because he offers no unequivocal answers. That, I think, is the point: to make listeners and readers witness the unfolding of their own thought, rather than try to analyse him like an amateur Freud in search of second-hand truths. As he once sang, long ago: trust yourself.
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
