Highway 61 Revisited, visited

[satan_s_onion]

Yes, this is that article I said I'd write weeks ago. Only...in the interim I've gotten several new Bob Dylan albums. I tried to hold off on listening to them until I'd gotten done with this article, because part of the fun is sharing my reactions with the big wide Internet (and both the people who actually read this), but a couple of weeks ago...I

Comments

[chickenbrutus]

I don't personally believe that Ballad of a Thin Man is INTENTIONALLY about a repressed homosexual, but, if you listen to it, it's hard to find a single metaphor that doesn't work on that level as well. I think it's just one of Poetry's Great Coincidences, to be honest. It's certainly fun to think of that way, but you're exactly right when you mention that saying any Dylan song is "about this" you are limiting your enjoyment thousandfold. One of the best things about Dylan is that any song (well, any of the good ones) can mean anything to anybody...and it means them all SINCERELY.

That said, I do want to toss in my interpretation of Desolation Row. The final verse...I see it as a pulling back, sort of. The camera zooming out, and all of the images we've seen being reduced to words on a page, a page beneath a pencil, a pencil in the hand of a tormented artist writing a letter.

And it's a letter in response to somebody he no longer has the same feelings for. Perhaps they maintain the charade of civility. After all, she just wrote to him about "the time the doorknob broke," but Dylan's character here is so fed up with the mundanity of what their communication has been reduced to (presumably her letters were much more romantic than this before they had their falling out) that she can't even ask him how he's doing without him spitting back "Was that some kind of joke?"

The line "All these people that you mentioned...yes, I know them. They're quite lame. I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name." is, I think, referring to the characters we met in the previous verses...all of whom share names we recognize from a variety of sources, but aren't matched with appropriate situations. I see "Desolation Row" as his intentional daydream, or perhaps hallucination, of a world in which everybody is forced into more misery than he himself feels.

To paraphrase a moment from It's Alright Ma, Dylan here would rather drag you down into the hole that he's in than climb out of it himself. It's a bitter, twisted, human wreck who responds a polite letter about domestic silliness and pleasantries with a sarcastic re-imagining of her friends as "Einstein disguised as Robin Hood" and "Doctor Filth."

That's just the way I see it. One grand, expansive fictional Hell that the singer has created so that he can slot everyone he's ever met into it, rearranging their faces and rechristening them, and, most importantly, assigning them the punishments he sees most fit.

Like a Rolling Stone features a lot of, "You're finally down...and that makes me happy." The singer of Desolation Row can't be satisfied until EVERYBODY is down...and won't be getting back up again.

[satan_s_onion]

Y'know, I can see where you're coming from about "Desolation Row"; the level of detail he supplies could just as easily be gleefully malicious as an attempt to inspire sympathy. Maybe I've been seeing this song through the prism of his earlier protest work--or at least the semi-social-justice-commentary stuff like on Bringing It All Back Home--like "he was writing with a social-justice bent before, this is probably how he's approached it now". It's a hell of a song that can produce two equally valid interpretations so substantially different from each other.