How Bob Dylan Can Bring Us Back to Life
The timeless song “Like A Rolling Stone” breaking the lethargy of lockdown.
What do books do to the human spirit? By nature, a book is an astounding exchange between human beings: they are vessels of an author’s knowledge optimized into several hours for our digestion. But what’s more, they tend to hold pieces of the human experience we rarely can grasp on our own.
Kafka believed we ought to only read the kind of books that “wound and stab us.” He questioned if a book doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for? Truly, we need a kind of literature that inflicts so much disaster, grief, and love that it becomes “the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Something that burst us from our sleep. Upon relistening to “Like a Rolling Stone’’, I was reminded of the deep sleep we’ve been under this year — a type of haze we’ve been acclimated to during lockdown. And Bob Dylan’s voice happens to be the ideal pairing to the present.
A Timeless Song
In this particular song, Dylan addresses an individual who takes a fall from grace that reveals her previous state of ignorance. Once in a position with “the finest schools” and diplomats, she experiences a dramatic reversal after an unexpected turn of events, putting her in the shoes of those she once looked down on.
A cliche narrative, but Dylan is quick to confirm this within the first minute. Because what truly makes the song charming is the verses that come after this revelation, for our anti-hero doesn’t only go through this once. In fact, the song replays her enlightenment from multiple facets, over and over. And of which we find the real axe of the song.
Dylan takes us through various moments in the individual’s life where she was warned by others of her ultimate demise, but instead she remained in denial, thinking “they were all kidding.” She ignored the feelings of the “jugglers and the clowns” whom she mistreated. Then it moves on to her social life, where “the finest schools” perpetuated her tunnel vision until the diplomats she surrounded herself with “took [everything] he could steal.”
It comes to a climax when Bob finally proclaims that our precious protagonist has “got nothing to lose” anymore: that every superficial thing she once cherished has been gradually ripped away. Every social standard she once perpetuated no longer welcomed her. All of a sudden, she is forced out of her tunnel, blinded by the exposure of what life really is: a complete unknown.
This is when Dylan sings most loudly, etching every word in sharp relief to the ensemble of tambourines and harmonicas. And we come to a turning point in the song where his chorus of “no direction” and being “a rolling stone” no longer sounds like a jab, but it turns into an achievement of sorts. We realize, Bob Dylan is actually speaking directly to us. Questioning if we would have the same courage as Dylan’s anti-hero to take the fall from grace. If we would have the same courage to force ourselves out of our tunnels.
This process of empathy is built in so effortlessly by Dylan. To a point when he sings “how does it feel?”, it seems so incredibly fervent that we really stop to wonder, how does it really feel? And he accomplishes this by being unwilling to let the initial stab go, by deepening the wound.
The Artist
Like a great book, Dylan’s work demands beforehand our courage, which is something that isn’t easy to come by.
He may walk through terrible lands to see what we might not want to see. But ultimately, it is up to us to listen: to let Dylan show us where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be headed.
His language alone pushes us to confront our own frozen seas, an act that could one day save us from something we don’t know is oppressive. “Like a Rolling Stone” is purely an anthem for why anyone would or should listen to his songs: to burst us from our sleep.
And he does this all while being incredibly intimate. His voice can jump from urgent to chastising, fearful to comical, angry to lonely, all while remaining direct. We don’t have to use headphones to experience this type of emotional complexity in Dylan’s voice. In fact, we barely have to know anything about his subjects to understand his stories. Because no matter what song, Bob Dylan embodies the artist’s inquiry that turns its attention to life itself for meaning rather than the outside life.
It is very rare to find a musician with the same dedication to his arts. For it takes tremendous concentration just to begin seeing what’s actually in front of us, let alone getting it down on paper. But, like the great novelists before him, Dylan can break down the human experience and report it in its rawest form. And it remains prevalent: his truth continues to permeate listeners everywhere, any time.
Finding our Axe
“Like a Rolling Stone” is purely an anthem for why anyone would or should listen to his songs: to burst us from our sleep.
It is not uncommon to hear about someone’s passion for Bob Dylan, yet it is also not uncommon to hear about someone’s indifference. It’s easy to glance over Dylan as a folk-rock singer who rode the wave of social justice engagement like many of his peers. But at a closer look, Bob Dylan’s songs achieve a sense of empathy that truly cuts deep.
So what does music do for the human spirit?
Bob Dylan’s songs are living proof of how music can disarm us in the same way books do. As listeners, we must be brave enough to receive this “blow to the head.”
Kafka would agree that a real reader creates her own canon, and it consists precisely of those axes that she uses to create herself.
[1] Deresiewicz, William. Excellent Sheep. Free Press, 2014.
[2] Ultimate Reality and Meaning, www.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/uram.37.1-2.87.
