D. B. Ruderman
for Brian McHale’s Dylan Class
“There’s not even room enough to be anywhere”:
Dylan against identity
I begin with a simple thesis, namely, that Bob Dylan’s caginess and canniness, his shape-shifting and multi-personated persona (protest singer, prophet, tin-pan alley song-man, troubadour, recluse, poet, heretic, even chameleon) is more than a mere tactic for aesthetic and professional survival; it also reflects a political perspective, one that aims for hybridity over purity, and collectivity over identity politics. This puts him in John Keats’s camp, who claimed in his letters that a “poet has no identity.” The cost for this porousness can be heavy. As Keats writes later in the same letter,
When I am in a room with People, if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me, so that I am in a very little time annihilated…
Todd Haynes’s brilliant film I’m Not There, captures this annihilated multiplicity perfectly by having several actors (young/old, white/black, male/female) play aspects of Dylan. What I hope to do in our time together is to use two late-career songs (“Not Dark Yet” from Time out of Mind, and “Mississippi” from Love and Theft) to illustrate this argument and test it out. To save time for more discussion and listening to the songs in the classroom, I’m sending you this preliminary text as a kind of jumping-off point. I look forward to meeting you and hearing what you have to say about these songs.
I’m just average, common too
I’m just like him, the same as you
I’m everybody’s brother and son
I ain’t different from anyone
It ain’t no use a-talking to me
It’s just the same as talking to you[1]
There are two anecdotes from Dylan’s public life (not part of his recorded legacy) that I want to bring forward as exhibits A and B in support of Dylan’s distaste for identity. First, there is the incident in 1963 when Dylan was 22 and reluctantly agreed to accept the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. He got extremely drunk and insulted the audience, ultimately saying that he “saw some of [himself] in [Lee Harvey Oswald],” the man who had assassinated JFK only a few weeks earlier. Of course, he was booed and the event ended in shambles.[2] I would argue that this is perhaps the last time that Dylan was ever directly honest with the public or the press. What he seemed to intimate in his speech, albeit incoherently, was that we needed not only to recognize the Oswald in ourselves, but also to take responsibility for our complicity in a system that created him. The incident also demonstrates that Dylan understood himself not as singular but plural.
The second incident happened over 20 years later, when the 43-year old Dylan agreed, again reluctantly, to add his voice to the charity single “We are the World.” He had to sing two simple lines. Dylan, who at this point in his checkerboard career was arguably drifting from project to project without any real passion or commitment, could not seem to sing the phrase in a way that pleased the engineer or producer. Because the song had numerous famous singers contributing one or two lines each, it was essential that Dylan sound like Dylan, so that listeners (and more importantly consumers) could pick out and discern his voice from the voices of Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis, Kenny Rogers, and Hall and Oates. At this point, Stevie Wonder, one of the organizers and songwriters for the production, pulled Dylan over to the piano and coached him. Stevie imitated Dylan singing the lines and Dylan memorized Wonder’s inflections. So, in what must be one of the strangest moments in music-business history, Dylan sings his lines “perfectly” by imitating Stevie’s imitation of him.[3]
“Not Dark Yet”
When I first heard Dylan’s Time out of Mind record (1997), I didn’t like it at all. It seemed to me to merely be a string of blues clichés patched together. Several years later, I was driving alone across the country and had the CD with me. This time it struck me as brilliant and deep and exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. The strange part is that nothing in my critical judgment had changed; it was still a smattering of blues clichés strung together. But now I heard (and felt) the beauty and power of Dylan’s risky aesthetic gambit – attempting to do so much with so little. The late Paul Williams, in my opinion one of the greatest rock journalists of the 20th century, argues that Time out of Mind is “constructed as a conscious song cycle” ( ). If that is so, and I think it is, what then is the controlling metaphor for the work? Many critics commented on its melancholic nature, as though the album reflected Dylan’s sense that, as he sings in “Not Dark Yet,” “time [his time, our time, human time] is slipping away.” Yet I found myself equally drawn to Dylan’s figures of impingement and claustrophobia, images of tight and constricted spaces:
Shadows are fallin’ and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep and time is runnin’ away
Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there.[4]
Daniel Lanois’s swampy and reverberative production seems to reinforce this recursiveness; not only is the thinking in the songs circular, but the very sounds themselves seemed to double-back on each other. The more I’ve listened to this music, the more I feel that these are not only the spaces of late middle age, they also the spaces of late capitalism, in which we are offered a variant of “freedom,” one that seems always redound upon the freedom of minimal choices:
I was born here and I’ll die here against my will
I know it looks like I’m movin’ but I’m standin’ still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer
It’s not dark yet but it’s gettin’ there.
“Mississippi”
Arguably the centerpiece of Dylan’s next record Love and Theft (2001), “Mississippi” repeats several of the themes of the songs on Time out of Mind: displacement, estrangement, feeling hemmed in, etc. The repeated chorus (“Only one thing I did wrong/ Stayed in Mississippi a day too long”) is lifted from a folk song called “Rosie” recorded in the field and transcribed in a book by Alan Lomax” ( ).[5] Dylan takes the basic format of the prison work song and turns it into a song about the existential impossibility of fulfillment:
Every step of the way, we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is piling up, we struggle and we stray
We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape
Beyond whatever spiritual truths these kinds of statements hold (and they hold many), I take this impossibility (“not even room enough to be anywhere,” “nowhere to escape”) as a kind of figure for our current social, cultural, and political moment, and perhaps even offers us some ideas about moving forward.
What do I mean by this? How can songs, especially one so seemingly innocuous as a-political as this, offer feasible solutions for the mind- and spirit-numbing realities of global warming, increased levels of poverty, and hate? My first answer would be that they can’t (full stop). But my second answer would be to suggest that Dylan’s predicament, namely how to remain spiritually and aesthetically alive in late capitalism, is a predicament for all of us. In other words, while most of us don’t have the kind of public profile that Dylan has, we all find ourselves being asked to identify in increasingly narrower ways. One manifestation of this pressure might be the need to professionalize as a college student, to choose a major often before you even taken classes in the subject. Likewise, your professors are urged to specialize, to focus on romanticism (me) or post-modernism (Professor McHale). But on an even more basic level, and returning to the song “Mississippi” for a moment, recall that Dylan is really playing folk music here. This is more evident if you listen to the bootleg alternative studio version of the song, which features a finger-picked acoustic blues riff and lacks the U2 bassline and keyboard wash of the album version (note — for weird reasons having to do with iTunes, I was unable to share the slicker, album version with you). If these are folk songs—and I would argue they are (although so are songs by Kendrick Lamar and The National, etc.)—then they speak to a universal truth, too large to be contained within the narrow confines of identity or party politics.
I am not suggesting a retreat from either politics or identity—we desperately need community and we need to organize for change. But it strikes me that more and more we are all called on to respond to our crises by doubling down on certain of our identities (not just black, white, male, female, gay, lesbian, transgender, Muslim, American, Jew, etc. but also Democrat, Green, or Republican). To get locked in to any one of these identities without recognizing its limits is to “stay in Mississippi a day too long.” Folk music, people’s music (i.e. rock, jazz, hip-hop, country, and pop) asks us to break out of the tight constraints of identity, and to resist. We are called on, along with Keats, to empathize with and identify with others, especially those with whom you might share not only common interests, but also common struggles. What I find so moving about these songs of Dylan’s late career is that they offer hope along with their wisdom and sober insights:
My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in
I know that fortune is waiting to be kind
So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine
Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long.
Here Dylan is as uncompromising as he is hopeful: “you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.” It is not, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, that you “can’t go home again.” You can. It is rather the case that the home you return to and the you who has returned have changed. If there is a revolutionary aspect to Dylan’s refusal to be commodified (and I believe there is), it resides here, in this staunch commitment to our future and collective selves.
[1] “I Shall Be Free No. 10” from Another Side of Bob Dylan
[2] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-political-bob-dylan
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2015/01/27/we-are-the-world-30th-anniversary/22395455/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZgBhyU4IvQ
[5] https://books.google.com/books?id=Dn0cSe2ecuoC&q=rosie#v=snippet&q=rosie&f=false