“Early Dylan and the Aesthetics of Invective”
Truly sharp-tongued verse is rare among songwriters, prevalent as it has always been in poetry. Few twentieth-century song lyrics contain harsh criticism or ad hominem hostility. Dylan, in contrast, seemed to develop an aesthetics of invective from early in his songwriting career.1 As I’ve suggested for other topics, try a Sortes Dylanae: open a volume of, say, Dylan’s Lyrics 1962-1985 to a random page, toss a penny or a heavy flat-pick and you’re likely to land on insult-fueled or accusatory verse on almost every page.
Invective has a long literary history reaching back to Cicero and Sallust, Juvenal, Petrarch (who wrote four Invective [Latin plural]), Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and countless others. Dylan’s scathing lyrics are so unusual among his peers (let alone among Tin Pan Alley lyricists or the Aldon music teams at 1650 Broadway) that it’s tempting to see a line of literary descent. But Dylan doesn’t make an attempt to hitch his wagon to the literary tradition. His use of invective is distinctive, less a literary exercise and more an affect, a composite of insult, accusation, curses, sneering, and just plain nastiness: e.g., “the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeeze / I can’t find my knees”(“Visions of Johanna”). This mocking old fat women sounds pointlessly rude to me (but either I’m too sensitive, or else I’m getting soft).
Dylan doesn’t seem to be playing a literary game. And we can be certain that in some cases he really feels the emotions underlying his lyrics’ mordant anger, even if we can’t positively identify Dylan as the song’s speaker: “Can’t recall a useful thing you ever did for me / ’Cept pat me on the back one time when I was on my knees” (“Dirge’); or, more renowned:
Well, if you, my love, must think that-a-way
I’m sure your mind is roamin’
I’m sure your heart is not with me
But with the country to where you’re goin’
So take heed, take heed of the western wind
Take heed of the stormy weather
And yes, there’s something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather
Undoubtedly, like traditional invective-writers, Dylan also uses songwriting as an assault reflecting the desire to play a certain role. Dylan’s words had a real-life effect, as the protest songs showed in the 60s. But did he—does he—sling sharp-tongued language to escape being “stuck inside a painting / That’s hanging in the Louvre” and to make a difference beyond the aesthetic of the song, as words do when they hurt actual people? Maybe that’s the imperative that always drives invective-writers. Maybe making a difference upon social relationships is the humane side of the snarl of satire and sneer of invective.
Twentieth-century songwriters don’t set up targets for their venom, nor do they attack each other the way poets have done through the centuries. German poetic tradition even has a name for it: das “Schmähgedicht.” Although American poetry doesn’t have a name for it, in early modern England, this kind of venomous writing was known as railing or reviling. And it reached the level of an Olympic sport. Maria Prendergast speaks of an “aesthetics of railing”: she demonstrates the wide-ranging variations and intensity of invective in the literary world, including pamphlet wars, libelous aggression, and ubiquitous ad hominem poetic debates.2 Trading satiric contempt and personal insults peppered the drama and poetry of the period. In 1623, for example, in a “railing” response to Ben Jonson’s play, “An Execration upon Vulcan,” George Chapman composed an “expostulation” in verse.” He pulls no punches in telling Jonson how he feels about him as a playwright:
Thou must be Muzzelde Ringd and lett In Chaines
Lest dames with childe a bide untymely paynes
and Children perrish:
In other words, if Jonson isn’t muzzled and chained up, women who hear his plays will give birth prematurely and children will be born dead. With “splene stupide,” says Chapman, Jonson transforms the most “wrathfull fumes to Jests.” As a result—and treasonously—the foulest common language is served up as humor to the “Royall eare,” thus contaminating the king.
This kind of harsh language had a cousin in the political broadsides of the same period, including the famous marching song “Lilli bolero,” a satirical anti-Irish, anti-Catholic lyric (with a melody by Henry Purcell) said to have spurred the Glorious Revolution. “Lilli bolero” was sung in the streets of London in 1688 and, at the same time, many other broadsides appeared in print from fly-by-night presses. If we were looking for historical antecedents to Dylan’s early songs, this might be a place to begin.
Many of the traditional folk songs and union songs Dylan heard in his Dinkytown and Village days crackled with acrimony and what Stephen Cracolici, describing Petrarch, calls “actual anger.” 3 But even before he began playing in coffeehouses, and years before he began writing, the generation of artists before his had already made a fine art of anger, insult, and invective. The cult of the angry young man produced in movies a mumbling lingo all its own, not a Kunstsprache so much as an attitude, an instant cliché. The brooding young men of Dylan’s adolescence, like Marlon Brando and James Dean, shuffled around rejecting everything: they were anti-authority, anti-convention, positively anti-intellectual. Films propagated this clichéd male figure, if they didn’t in fact create him. In contrast, on the stage, where mere shuffling and brooding don’t quite make it across the footlights, the angry young man species managed a particular brand of linguistic athleticism, especially in the mouths of such protagonists as John Osborne’s and Harold Pinter’s devil-tongued working-class men. For instance, Richard Burton’s immaculate enunciation in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is a far cry from the blurred speeches of Brando in The Wild One or Dean in any of his three famous films. (Brando’s speech in A Streetcar Named Desire [1951] is crystal clear, but he first played that role on the stage.)
As much as Dylan might have absorbed the Hollywood image of the angry young man, it seems plausible that the stage necessity of intelligible dialogue provided him with an alternative to the inarticulate, and inarticulable, anger of the movie idols. I suggest this because Dylan’s personae in his early songs glory in articulateness. His speakers wield the American idiom with impeccable precision, sometimes a cutlass, sometimes a rapier, but always with a razor-sharp cutting edge. And Dylan goes the playwrights one better: his invective is set to music and—to quote John Donne—“fit for verse.”
Prominent among the earlier songs, perhaps, is “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan’s towering achievement of acrimony. Note the hammering of you, often twice in a line:
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say “beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal
How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone
Ahh you’ve gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street
And now you’re gonna have to get used to it
You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?
The speaker’s contempt for the hapless you sets a benchmark for 60s invective. Dripping with blame, the lyrics are unforgiving, vengeful, condescending, and unrelentingly insulting. There’s also something unmistakably Dylanesque here: gloating, a byproduct of his unmitigated assault on Miss Lonely’s past hypocrisy. He rams home her dilemma unsparingly: “Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street / And now you’re gonna have to get used to it” And then comes the bullying chorus: “How does it feel, how does it feel?” But, like “jesting Pilate,” in Francis Bacon’s famous essay “On Truth,” Dylan’s indignant speaker “would not stay for an answer.”
Dylan had a knack for gloating invective earlier than “Like a Rolling Stone.” His speaker in “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” comes across as slightly less confrontational:
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun…
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
The repetition of you builds to a kind of warning, combined with mild gloating about “it” being all over. Is “Baby Blue” an example of invective? It is in the sense that it contains an ad hominem critique of Baby Blue, though the insults are cryptic and metaphorical rather than, e.g.,“Thou must be Muzzelde Ringd and lett In Chaines.,” which is unambiguous. Dylan bases the lyric structure on urgency and imperatives—“You must leave” . . . “you better grab it” . . . “Leave your stepping stones” . . . Forget the dead.” The denotation of the words indicates a need for haste while, at the same time, there is a connotation of superiority in the tone, the speaker incredulous that Baby Blue hasn’t seen the signs.
Less buried than the “railing” in “Baby Blue,” and at least as confrontational as “Rolling Stone,” is “Positively 4th Street.” This song is Dylan’s clinic in the use of invective. The entire lyric is a sneering critique directed at one nameless (and luckless) person, Dylan’s characteristic you-as-target. The second-person pronoun provides the frame for the crescendo of accusatory observations from stanza to stanza. From the uncompromising opening:
You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning
You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning . . .
Through unwavering accusation in the middle stanzas:
You say you lost your faith
But that’s not where it’s at
You had no faith to lose
And you know it . . .
To the coup de grace of the final invective:
I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you
The speaker’s fantasy of bodily exchange—but not personality exchange—animates both viewpoints, with the aim of highlighting the capstone insult of “You’d know what a drag it is / To see you.”
Putting aside the nagging riddle of biographical “facts,” songs lashing out with acrimony and anger are everywhere.4 Some we interpret as transparently personal, as with “Ballad in Plain D”: “For her parasite sister, I had no respect / Bound by her boredom, her pride to protect.” Even without reconstructing the Rotolo family dynamic, “parasite sister” gets its “actual anger” across.
Also personal, evidencing Dylan’s inimitable accusatory you, is “Idiot Wind.” The song contains an invective woven into an extended metaphor that would be fully at home in a Renaissance work of railing and reviling:
I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ‘bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle
Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
The lines leading from “Visions of your chestnut mare” to “flies buzzin’ around your eyes / Blood on your saddle” trace the metaphor from horsewoman to cowpoke. The metaphor is fueled by the shocking anger of the ominous “One day you’ll be in the ditch.” The images conflate the hobbyist horsewoman with a stereotypical villain from a western movie. Is the blood on the saddle the result of being shot off the horse, the logical end to a shootout? Or is it something else, something more sinister? “Blood on your saddle” disturbingly suggests menstrual blood and womanhood-motherhood. And, in that connection, “You hurt the ones that I love best” recalls Dylan’s earlier curse linking children and blood in “Masters of War”:
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins.
It’s impossible to know if Dylan meant to compound the two songs written over a decade apart. But notwithstanding, as invectives go, there’s nothing I know as ruthlessly severe as “Idiot Wind” in American poetry, let alone American song lyrics.5
“Idiot Wind” is unique for its personal, almost embarrassingly private, antipathy. But less personal (very unlucky) uses of you abound in Dylan’s canon. (And here again a Sortes would produce a long list.) The woman in the “Gypsy café” might come to mind, from “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word”:
She sat with a baby heavy on her knee
Yet spoke of life most free from slavery
With eyes that showed no trace of misery
A phrase in connection first with she I heard
That love is just a four letter word
Once again, Dylan invokes a child, in this case an infant, and once again he makes a troubling association: motherhood, misery, and slavery. The invective is embodied in the scene itself, the speaker’s recognition of the young mother’s deluded ideal of love. For him, it would seem, it is ironic that she should speak of freedom from slavery when she’s now enslaved by her “baby heavy on her knee.” I doubt the word “heavy” refers to the baby’s weight in ounces and pounds.
“Love is Just a Four Letter Word” is invective masked as existential self-recognition. Even the opaque criticisms redound in the unforgiving eye of the speaker (“I don’t cheat on myself, I don’t run and hide” as a much later song says). In this song the search for the honest self is just beginning, but at the price of tearing down the deluded people around the speaker:
Though I never knew just what you meant
When you were speaking to your man
I can only think in terms of me
And now I understand
After waking enough times to think I see
The Holy Kiss that’s supposed to last eternity
Blow up in smoke, its destiny
Falls on strangers, travels free
Yes, I know now, traps are only set by me
And I do not really need to be
Assured that love is just a four letter word
Love is a false trail, the Holy Kiss blows up in smoke, traps are only set by “me,” and therefore he knows that love is not love (“which alters when it alteration finds”). The idealistic speaker here disdains the victimized new mother and, apparently, plans to continue looking for “the marriage of true minds.”6
“Love is Just a Four Letter Word” contains a kind of roman à clef invective referring to the new mother and “the one who was the father of your kid.” Compare “Tangled Up in Blue,” which also seems to allude to someone in particular:
I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafés at night
And revolution in the air
Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
The “them” is a mystery given the song’s alternating speakers and tenses. Yet the implication couldn’t be clearer, or more profoundly critical. Whatever “dealing with slaves” refers to precisely, the insinuation is ugly, much more so in this song than in “Love is Just a Four Letter Word.” And to claim “something inside of [someone] died” curses the target of this denunciation, not with the “actual anger” of the speaker in “Seven Curses” but with a survivor’s backward glance. You can almost hear the narrator in “Tangled Up in Blue,” as he escapes from Brooklyn, singing Townes Van Zandt’s lines: “There’s . . . no prettier sight than lookin’ back on a town you’ve left behind” (“I’ll Be Here in the Morning”).
Critics and scholars—not to mention the Nobel Prize Committee—have duly acknowledged Dylan as a pioneer in the lyrical transformation of traditional American music. But few have focused specifically on Dylan’s approach to the violence of the blues and traditional folk songs. He refashions those traditions by creating a new persona who instrumentalizes invective to channel the violence, vigilantism, and weird sequences of the folk and country traditions. He repeatedly demonstrates a displaced violence in accusatory and contemptuous lyrics, coining a language unlike any among contemporary poets. His lyrical innovations translate the horrors and bizarre violence of traditional American music into searing invective. This is an aesthetic peculiar to Dylan.
Before Dylan, cleverness, irony, and humor tended to mask the angriest protests, as in the Depression-era “Rock Candy Mountain.” Even Woody Guthrie rarely writes invective-laced lyrics, though his most pointed songs have clear targets. For example, his justification for the predations of the thief and murderer Pretty Boy Floyd concludes with only a ruminative contrast of legal profiteers and crooks:
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
Woody’s critique accuses bankers of evicting families when they can’t pay their mortgage, a common Dust Bowl complaint (viz. The Grapes of Wrath). But the critique seems unconvincing against Floyd’s thuggery. And in the end, it is mild by literary standards of invective.
Mild by Dylan’s standards too. “Masters of War” is an early example of his skill in weaving invective into social critique. The song ups the ante from stanza to stanza:
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
As with many of Dylan’s best (or worst) invectives, the you here again recurs like a finger poking harder as the verses reach a crescendo. From “I can see through your brain,” “Masters of War” continues with the chilling assessment that “Even Jesus would never forgive / What you do”—a crime (or sin) so unimaginable that it transcends even the foundation of Christianity: mercy. The song concludes with lines that strive by means of invective to enforce political conscience, hammering home the second person pronouns:
And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead
As generations of listeners have attested, the “actual anger” in these verses is palpable. Donald Beecher points out “how closely invective is related to honour combat and physical assault even to the death.”7 “Masters of War” is the equivalent of the angry speaker’s “honour combat [with arms manufacturers] and physical assault even to the death” and beyond, straight into the grave. There’s a shadow of Allen Ginsberg’s Moloch from Howl in the image of the arms manufacturers, though Dylan’s target is more demotic than supernatural. On The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan’s driving, yet nuanced, acoustic performance enforces the accusatory invective of the lyrics. Eddie Vedder delivered a fine if less ruthless version at the Dylan tribute in 1992, and other rockers like Joan Osborne and Lucinda Williams have also covered the song. Dylan himself performed the song at the Grammy Awards in 1991, when the country was in the throes of the first Iraq war.
Although Freewheelin’ was released in 1963, in a distant political galaxy, the combativeness and anger unleashed in “Masters of War” seem to reinvent themselves with every new generation, for every new and unpopular military crisis. This is rare: invective per se tends to be topical, tied to its moment and interlocutors. The portability of “Masters of War” seems to reveal not only cross-cultural antiestablishment anger, but also a ready-made expression of it.
“Seven Curses” also contains a list of angry condemnations leading to the grave, though the song has not had the ongoing topical force of “Masters of War.” The third-person speaker reels off a string of embittered curses “to the death”: “These be seven curses on a judge so cruel . . . That six diggers will not bury him / And that seven deaths shall never kill him.” The penultimate line probably alludes to “See That My Grave is Kept Clean” which includes the verse “See that my diggers are well paid”: Dylan’s curse in “Seven Curses” implies that the judge’s diggers will not be well paid and his grave will not be kept clean. The finality of the curses, like the end of “Masters of War,” leads beyond death, irreversibly beyond redemption.
But these endings “to the death” are rare for songs, even Dylan songs. Most of Dylan’s invective sublimates combat in scalding criticism. But not every song can conceal the anger. Think for example of “When the Ship Comes In”:
Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered
The song’s much-analyzed Biblical idiom invokes not only revolutionary triumph and portentous threat (“your days are numbered”) but also mass murder and honor combat. The latter is particularly significant because there’s a vein of honor combat—chivalry—that runs through all Dylan’s invective, sometimes as social outrage, sometimes as career rivalry, sometimes as (self-righteous) personal outrage. The story of the hotel desk clerk comes to mind here: Dylan supposedly wrote “When the Ship Comes In” in an indignant huff after being snubbed at check-in. Pettiness that plays so rough.
Dylan once said in an interview, “All my songs are protest songs.” But it might be more accurate to say that all his songs are honor-combat songs, even some of the love-and-loss songs and romantic ballads. Listen for the muted sounds of combat here:
I’m a-thinkin’ and a-wond’rin’ all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I’m told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don’t think twice, it’s all right . . .
I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don’t think twice, it’s all right
(“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”)
As much as “Don’t Think Twice” sounds like an authentic old folk song, the lyric is completely modern, utterly incommensurate with blues (or bluegrass) breakups—in which, inter alia, Frankie guns down Johnny, or, as Robert Johnson says about his mistress, “If she gets unruly. . . Take my 32-20 now / and cut her half in two” (“32-20 Blues”). In complete contrast, Dylan’s speaker is mildly bitter but resigned, an attitude much more realistic to his Village milieu where none of the men (or women) carried handguns, and probably didn’t consider murder the appropriate response to infidelity. Yet they all performed songs in which these appalling acts were committed—and performed them well, assuming these alien personae during their moments on stage. Dylan revised all that. His critique in “Don’t Think Twice,” for example, is hardly stinging and certainly doesn’t threaten violence. It boils down to “I once loved a woman, a child I am told”—obviously insulting the woman’s maturity—and “You just kinda wasted my precious time.” As well as filling out the meter, that “kinda” is probably Dylan’s best known expression of shrugging indifference, which, in a love affair, comes across as degrading. But the musical setting of the song, and Dylan’s performance, align it with a folk (and blues) tradition in which there’s very little shrugging indifference in love affairs. Usually, in fact, somebody gets shot or drowned or ends up serving ninety-nine years in jail.
While medieval and especially early modern invective are often so hyperbolic that they’re too silly to be effective—e.g., Chapman’s assertion that listening to Jonson’s plays will cause premature births—the writers’ revulsion that generated them is never in doubt. Comparably, Dylan too sometimes clutters his contempt with absurd and even amusing imagery. But the underlying force of his invective never wavers. “Like a Rolling Stone” is a consummate example:
Ah you never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it hard when you discovered that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal
Clearly meant to offend, the language convinces despite its obscurity: “chrome horse with your diplomat”?; with a “Siamese cat” on his shoulder? There’s nothing puzzling about the speaker’s scornful attitude here, even if the piled-up absurdity almost (but not quite) dulls the critique. That’s not always the case, however, in “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”:
With your childhood flames on your midnight rug
And your Spanish manners and your mother’s drugs
And your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs
Who among them do you think could resist you?
Is this sentiment negative or positive? What are “childhood flames,” not to mention “curfew plugs”? The whole passage seems to be an invective—that is, if Spanish manners, mother’s drugs, and a cowboy mouth are criticisms of the sad-eyed lady. Still, the question in the last line seems to imply that, warts and all, she’s desirable.
The same kind of reversion is found in Shakespeare’s famous “sonnet of false compare”:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
Sonnet 130
As in the stanza from “Sad-Eyed Lady,” insult topples over insult, but for a good cause. The speaker neutralizes twelve lines of negativity and enhances the “mistress”—also cementing their bond—with a final couplet: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.” Shakespeare’s line is even more of a redemption than Dylan’s “Who among them do you think could resist you?”
In truth, Dylan rarely if ever fully redeems the target of his invective.
I couldn’t see what you could show me
Your scarf had kept your mouth well hid
I couldn’t see how you could know me
But you said you knew me and I believed you did
When you whispered in my ear
And asked me if I was leavin’ with you or her
I didn’t realize just what I did hear
I didn’t realize how young you were
But, sooner or later, one of us must know
You just did what you’re supposed to do
Sooner or later, one of us must know
That I really did try to get close to you
(“One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”)
Again Dylan’s speaker dwells on immaturity as an insult, as in “Don’t Think Twice.” It might be that “sooner or later” they’d agree they each behaved as they had to. But there’s an underhand, acrimonious suggestion that the speaker “really did try to get close to you,” even if “you” were too immature or blind to see it.
*
The prevalence and the steely edge of Dylan’s invective become less audible after Blood on the Tracks. But his tendency to hurl invective never really disappears, even if it becomes more covert. My favorite example from Dylan’s middle period is “What Was It You Wanted?” Despite the absence of direct attacks, the song strikes me as an extended tour de force of invective-inspired interrogatives:
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again so I’ll know . . .
Could you say it again?
I’ll be back in a minute
You can get it together by then
What was it you wanted
I ain’t keeping score
Are you the same person
That was here before?
Is it something important?
Maybe not
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again I forgot
Whatever you wanted
What could it be
Did somebody tell you
That you could get it from me
Is it something that comes natural
Is it easy to say
Why do you want it
Who are you anyway?
The speaker’s contempt for the you increases incrementally from stanza to stanza, with the final “Who are you anyway?” topping off the song’s not-quite-articulated insults. On Oh Mercy, Dylan all but chants the lyrics, as if refusing to vouchsafe a melody to this persistent suitor. The barebones musical setting brings the barrage of dismissive verses into sharper relief. Without being explicit, the speaker manages a kind of scathing impatience—How does it feel?
Raphael Falco
1 The most prominent present-day practitioners of invective tradition are probably Rap lyricists: their coarse and profane insults (often against other rappers), their insistent topicality, their boasting self-aggrandizement, recall the postures of many invective-slingers of the Renaissance and early modern period. Perhaps Dylan provided a model for rap artists, though this is debatable. Ultimately, in any case, Dylan’s invective is very different from hip-hop or rap: Dylan tends to eschew topical reference and never uses profanity (except occasionally in unreleased recordings). Further, though opinions on this could certainly differ, I’d add that Dylan’s dexterity with meter, rhyme, and especially melody will continue to preserve his invective-laced songs from generation to generation.
2 Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Railing, Reviling, and Invective in English Literary Culture, 1588-1617: The Anti-Poetics of Theater and Print (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 9 and passim.
3 Stefano Cracolici, “The Art of Invective: Invective contra medicum,” in Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, edited by Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2009): 257.
4 On a related topic, see Paul Haney, “‘Blood on Your Saddle’: Bob Dylan’s Homicidal Voices,” Dylan Review vol 5.1 (Spring/Summer 2023): https://thedylanreview.org/2023/08/26/world-of-bob-dylan-blood-on-your-saddle-bob-dylans-homicidal-voices/
5 For example, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” seems almost bathetic set against Dylan’s many accusatory lyrics. An example from an older song lyric of an accusatory second-person you is Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” But even with the sexual innuendo of “blow on some other guy’s dice,” there’s little evidence of “actual anger”:
They call you Lady Luck
But there is room for doubt
At times, you’ve had a very unlady-like way of running out
You’re on this date with me
The pickin’s have been lush
And yet before this evening is over
You might give me the brush . . .
You might forget your manners You might refuse to stay . . .
A lady doesn’t leave her escort It isn’t fair, it isn’t nice
A lady doesn’t wander all over the room
And blow on some other guy’s dice
6 See Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.
7 Donald Beecher, “The Limits of Invective: Ben Jonson’s Poetaster and the Temper of the Times,” in Savage Words: Invectives as a Literary Genre, 46-47.
