‘Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.’
[Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald (1961)]
Almost 3000 years ago, in Ancient Greece, the blind bard Homer composed two epic poems that have influenced and impacted our culture to this very day. They have inspired countless artworks, throughout the centuries, including literary works, from Virgil, to James Joyce, to Margaret Atwood. Both of Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, begin with little prologues like the one we just heard the beginning of. In these invocations of the Muse, the poet himself asks the goddess of inspiration and the arts to help him relay the story he is about to tell.
Homer lived in a society which did not have writing, so these stories were recited from memory, as songs and poems, and in addressing the Muse, the poet was asking for help to be able to recall all the details and to tell the story truthfully. Homer sought divine help because the stories he was telling were grand and sprawling: of gods and heroic men, of journeys, of battles and sacrifices; of descents into the underworld, and of triumphant returns to the land of the living. Here we are, hundreds, even thousands of years later, and these stories still resonate. So it’s not surprising to me that these songs were once said to have the power to make men… immortal.
On the 19th of June, 2020, Bob Dylan released his 39th studio album, Rough And Rowdy Ways, his first collection of original songs in eight years. And on this album, which I believe to be his most personal in a long time, Dylan engages with these epic songs and their themes through his own experience. What I think stands at the heart of Rough And Rowdy Ways is a celebration of the power of song.
You’re listening to Definitely Dylan, I’m Laura Tenschert, and this is the first chapter of my five-part series on Rough And Rowdy Ways. Today, we’ll talk about the Nobel Prize, the road to Rough And Rowdy Ways, and the shaping of Bob Dylan’s legacy.
Chapter One: Sing In Me, Oh Muse
One thing Bob Dylan and Homer have in common is that they both started out as songwriters, until someone else declared that they were now “literature”. How quickly this happened for Homer I don’t know, but for Bob Dylan, the official verdict came in 2016, 55 years into his career, in the form of the Nobel Prize for literature. Bob Dylan received the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". Many saw this as a validation of the significance of Dylan’s work, that he was indeed a serious artist on par with other greats like William Butler Yeats, William Faulkner, or Toni Morrison. It was a symbolic moment: Dylan, crossing over and maybe even tearing down the walls separating popular culture and entertainment, and serious high art - he’s like the postmodern posterboy! In other words: Dylan’s Nobel win was kind of a big deal.
But what did Bob Dylan think about all this? Back then it raised some eyebrows that it took him two weeks to even acknowledge the announcement. Further eyebrows when he chose not to attend the ceremony in Stockholm. We cannot know what was going through Bob Dylan’s head at the time, but he did say that he was speechless and “beyond words”. Maybe he remembered the lines he spoke in character as ageing rockstar Billy Parker in the 1987 film Hearts Of Fire.
[audio from the film Hearts Of Fire]:
Bob Dylan as Billy Parker: I guess I always knew I was never one of them rock n roll singers who was gonna win any Nobel Prizes. Is that what you call it, Nobel Prize?
Fiona as Molly McGuire: Yeah I guess
The irony here is of course that at the time, this quote was funny because rock n roll singers and Nobel Prizes didn’t even exist in the same universe. Now it’s funny because the guy who says these lines, was in fact the first rock n roll singer to win a Nobel Prize!
I don’t think that Bob Dylan has ever believed in a hierarchy in which highbrow outranks lowbrow, in which literature is “more important” than the kinds of songs that he loves and is inspired by. So when Dylan proclaims, “Never have I asked myself: are my songs literature?”, he wasn’t so much being humble, as that I think Dylan simply meant that he had never felt the need to consider the question because he didn’t really care about the answer. Nonetheless, now that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan couldn’t avoid the question any longer. So he decided to use his Nobel lecture, which all Nobel laureates are required to give, to engage with this exact topic. Bob Dylan submitted his lecture as an audio recording, and I’d like to play you the beginning:
[audio from Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture]
When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.
I can very much relate to this statement, because I too am going to try to articulate my thoughts on the new album to you, and I too need to go in a roundabout way, so bear with me here. Bob Dylan’s reflection on this connection between songs and literature takes place on several levels. Let’s start with the meta level: Bob Dylan did not just submit a recording of him reading his lecture; right after these opening words, a piano begins to play that accompanies Dylan’s speech throughout the remaining 27 minutes - that’s Alan Pasqua by the way, who also plays on the new album. So what we’re looking at here is an artist, who has received a Literature Nobel Prize for the songwriting on his records, and who then decided to submit his Nobel lecture in the form of an audio recording that is accompanied by music. It was clearly important to Dylan that the musical side to his art didn’t get lost in the conversation. In the lecture, Bob Dylan likewise makes sure to credit his musical influences first: Buddy Holly, Lead Belly, and songs in the folk tradition. I’m going to skip over most of the books that Dylan talks about in his lecture, because I’m particularly interested what Dylan has to say when he turns his attention to his fellow songwriter-turned-literary-genius Homer. I want to play you the closing paragraphs, where he once more reflects on the relation between songs and literature.
[audio from Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture]
When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory – tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.
That’s what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, “Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story”.
These are the closing remarks which conclude Dylan’s musing on the relationship between songs and literature. Interestingly, Bob Dylan seems to come to a different conclusion than many of his supporters and even the Nobel committee, because he argues for a clear distinction between literature and songs, stating that “songs are unlike literature”. Where they differ is in the way that we encounter them, because as Dylan says, “songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page”. Perhaps he is directly responding to a remark by then-Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, who insisted that Bob Dylan “can be read, and should be read”.
Critics of his singing style have often argued that Bob Dylan is predominantly significant as a writer rather than performer, so it was clearly important for him to highlight that the words cannot be separated from the music. After all we’re talking about an artist who has not only sold millions of records worldwide, but also performed just shy of 4000 concerts in his career. In fact, the announcement of the Nobel Prize came at a time when Dylan was actively focused on showing off his chops as a singer and interpreter of other people’s songs, releasing three consecutive albums with material from the Great American songbook, as sung by Frank Sinatra, and other recording stars of the first half of the twentieth century.
As a little sidebar: although Dylan in his Nobel lecture seems to be disagreeing with Sara Danius’ statement about reading Bob Dylan on the page, you might also remember that in 2018, so a year after he delivered the lecture, Dylan exhibited a selection of his handwritten lyrics accompanied by his own drawings at London’s Halcyon Gallery. In this exhibition Dylan directly invited us to encounter his songs on the page, since the lyrics, often with lines that differed from the album versions, were arguably a bigger draw than the illustrations, a fact which was perhaps even anticipated in the exhibition’s title, Mondo Scripto. If you’re curious to find out more about this exhibition, you can find the episode I did about it in the archive on definitelydylan.com
You might have recognised the closing words of Dylan’s speech, as the invocation of the Muse that stands at the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey (and which I also quoted at the beginning of this episode). I find this such a touching way to end the lecture. On the one hand, through this invocation of the Muse, Dylan aligns himself with Homer, who, like him, has occupied this space somewhere between songs and literature, a parallel that Sara Danius also pointed out. In fact, the title of the first ever PhD thesis on Dylan in the 1970s, Betsy Bowden’s Performed Literature is just as applicable to Homer. On the other hand, Bob Dylan’s calling on the Muse also points to the future, to his own works that are yet to come. As a result, the Nobel lecture becomes yet another beginning. And now we know that presumably the Muse responded and is singing through Bob Dylan on his new album Rough And Rowdy Ways.
I think that we can understand something important about the new album if we see it as a continuation of Dylan’s attempt to explore the relation between songs and literature. Because It’s not just that Dylan argues that songs are more than just words on the page. The invocation of the Muse at the end of his Nobel lecture also shows us yet another connection with Homer: both believe that songs are associated with a certain spiritual power. We can see proof of that all over Rough And Rowdy Ways, and I think it begins in the Nobel lecture, with the curious reference to Odysseus’ encounter with Achilles in the underworld.
You see, when Achilles’ spirit makes a cameo in the Odyssey, it’s like when the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi appears to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. The audiences would have not only recognised him, but they would have been very familiar with his story. In order to fully understand why Dylan brings up this encounter in the underworld, we have to remember what happened to Achilles in the Iliad, because it defines both his life and his death. Achilles is the main character of the Iliad, Homer’s other epic, which takes place during the last year of the Trojan War, before the events described in the Odyssey. Achilles was a Greek warrior, the son of a goddess mother and a mortal father, and in the course of the war with the Trojans he finds himself faced with a big choice. He knows that if he stays and continues his fight he will die. Alternatively he could leave the battlefield and return home. If he leaves, he survives, but he will live out his days in quiet obscurity. If he stays and fights to his death, he will die a hero and his story will be told!
Heroes in Ancient Greece were a big deal, and so were the stories that were being told about them. And this is what all the epic heroes strove for, especially after they died. Because, as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, to have your story told in song meant that you lived on in song after your death: you were immortalised - made immortal - in song. The Greek word for this is kleos, which literally translates to “that which is heard”, and means your renown, your reputation, and in a broader sense, it refers to the fame, the enduring honour or everlasting glory that those epic figures were hoping to gain. In his retelling, Dylan actually uses the words “honour and glory”, as well as “honour and immortality” to describe what Achilles traded his life for. In the Iliad it says that Achilles chooses “unwilting fame”, and this adjective, "imperishable, unwilting" evokes the metaphor of a flower that remains in full bloom forever. Likewise, Achilles’ life is cut short, but his story is told and retold and passed down. What this means is that, while Achilles actual, natural life has ended, it was replaced by a life in art, by the story of his renown. In other words, his kleos becomes his life and lives on in his stead. And, by the way, because the medium of song was such an integral part to this heroic glory, the word kleos not only refers to the message, but also the medium, so the song itself. In other words, the Iliad both tells of Achilles’ kleos and is kleos itself.
What does this encounter in the underworld have to do with Dylan’s exploration of songs vs. literature? When we meet Achilles again in Book 6 of the Odyssey, he reflects on his famous choice that landed him in the underworld, and seems to express regret regarding his sacrifice: ‘There was no honour, no immortality, he would rather still be alive in the land of the living’. Perhaps what Dylan is getting at here is that, while Achilles is regretful, he is also mistaken. Because his story did live on, he is famous in the land of the living, but the problem is that Achilles is now in the underworld and has no part in his kleos. Maybe that’s how Homer feels now that his epics are only read and their original performed versions have disappeared into the ether?
Of course I have no idea whether Dylan was consciously evoking this concept of kleos, and its role in Homer’s Odyssey. Maybe it’s a total coincidence that the story of a hero immortalised in song perfectly sets up the point Dylan is trying to make about what it means for song to be and stay alive. But I would argue that this concept of kleos also helps us understand Rough And Rowdy Ways.
And we’ll get into that, right after this little word from Definitely Dylan’s sponsors… Just kidding, I don’t have any sponsors, so you don’t have to listen to any ads. But if you enjoy this podcast and would like to support my work, then you can now symbolically buy me a coffee (or more than one coffee) at buymeacoffee.com/definitelydylan. You can also find the link in the show notes and on the website. Thank you! Back to our story.
So kleos is this concept that refers to the power of songs to tell, embody, and immortalise heroes and their stories. Heroes play an important role on Rough And Rowdy Ways, which is something we will return to in later chapters. But let’s take a look at three songs on the album, in which Dylan sings the praises of one hero in particular - Dylan himself. In these songs, Dylan is singing in the first person about himself. The three songs I’m talking about are “I Contain Multitudes”, “False Prophet”, and “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”. I’m not necessarily suggesting that these songs are autobiographical or to be taken literally, but I think Dylan is nonetheless putting forward a version of himself that he is committing to song.
[snippet of “I Contain Multitudes” audio]
Rough And Rowdy Ways begins with “I Contain Multitudes”, which is a pretty decisive and bold opening statement. I’ve talked about this song in depth in a past podcast episode, where I’m giving you a close reading of every verse, so I’m going to talk about the song slightly more generally here. The song borrows its title and refrain from a line in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song Of Myself”. And as I was thinking about Dylan’s words on the connection between songs and literature, this jumped out at me. Despite its name, “Song of Myself” is a poem that most people encounter on the page, but its rhythm has a very different impact when read aloud. So again we’re in the space in between songs and literature.
In “I Contain Multitudes”, Dylan also name checks another poet who called his written poems songs: ‘I sing the songs of experience like William Blake’. Again, Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” are poems, but they have been set to music by various artists, including Dylan’s friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg. So you see, there are a lot of layers to this. Blake’s songs even exist in a third dimension, beyond the page and in music, because Blake himself also illustrated them. Who knows, maybe Dylan was also channelling William Blake when he illustrated his own songs for the Mondo Scripto exhibition.
This song is essentially a catalogue of the things the singer is or does or encompasses, no matter how at odds these things may seem. This is no coincidence, in fact the juxtaposition of all these disparate activities and identities perfectly make sense when we consider the passage in “Song Of Myself” from which the song’s title and refrain are taken: Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)’. The song is full of cultural references, from the Rolling Stones to Beethoven, and from Anne Frank to Edgar Allen Poe, but what always stands at the centre is the “I”. This is quite literally Bob Dylan’s song of myself, he’s singing of himself, in all his contradictions, telling us that no narrow pigeonhole will suffice. As anyone familiar with Dylan’s career can attest, if there’s anything we can say for sure about Bob Dylan, it’s that he is hard to pin down. Perhaps this list of descriptions, this slithering in and out of identities, is Dylan’s way of acknowledging this reputation of his as a multifaceted and variable artist. I’ve always liked the old saying that there’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round.
[snippet of “False Prophet” audio]
The next song on the album is “False Prophet”, which continues in the first person, but is notably different in tone. The singer here is boasting about his achievements. The list includes that he rules the land, that he’s climbed the mountain of swords on his bare feet. He also declares, “I’m first among equals - second to none / I’m last of the best - you can bury the rest”. Like “I Contain Multitudes”, I see this song as a comment on the public persona of Bob Dylan. I think that on “False Prophet”, Bob Dylan is engaging with fame and the larger than life image that comes with it. As the singer is telling tall tales about his own person, I’ve kind of lost track of whether he is bragging, or whether he is repeating what others have said about him. When Dylan sings, ‘You don't know me darlin' / You never would guess / I'm nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest’, maybe it’s a friendly reminder that the fans and all those of us talking about Bob Dylan, really can only ever know only the public persona, and not the private man behind it?
All this culminates in the refrain, ‘I ain’t no false prophet’, which is a really interesting statement considering how ever since the the beginning of his career people have wanted to see in him a voice of his generation, a public spokesman, leader, guru, or prophet. Dylan has always firmly rejected that role, but in “False Prophet”, he seems to face these expectations head on, maybe even admitting that they are the consequence of being an artist in the public eye. He sings, ‘I know how it happened, I saw it begin, I opened my heart to the world and the world came in’. A few people have also noted that the former pope Benedict XVI called Dylan a “false prophet” when he was invited to perform for pope John Paul II back in the 90s.
What’s also interesting about the phrase ‘I ain’t no false prophet’ is the double negative, because while it tells us what the singer isn’t, it doesn’t tell us in turn what he is. ‘I just said what I said’, Bob Dylan sings, as if whatever he said was explanation enough and impossible to misunderstand. The double negative leaves the actual meaning of the refrain wide open: is he a true prophet? Or is he no prophet at all? With this statement, Dylan is essentially doing the inverse of the previous song, since this negative definition stands in direct contrast to the list of identifications in “I Contain Multitudes”. In other words, in “False Prophet”, Dylan is elusive, while in “I Contain Multitudes”, Dylan floods us with meaning - the result is that both are ambiguous and unstable in their signification.
The third song I want to mention here is “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”
[snippet of “Goodbye Jimmy Reed audio”]
This is an interesting song, full of intriguing and unexpected religious imagery. While the whole song is sung in the first person, the tone shifts at the beginning of the third verse to something that sounds more personal. Here the singer sings about the adversity he faced as an artist: ‘You won't amount to much, the people all said / 'Cause I didn't play guitar behind my head / Never pandered, never acted proud / Never took off my shoes, throw 'em into the crowd [...] They threw everything at me, everything in the book / I had nothing to fight with but a butcher's hook / They had no pity, they never lend a hand / I can't sing a song that I don't understand’. I like these lines for their sense of humour - that taking off your shoes and throwing them in the crowd is considered as entertaining a move on stage as playing guitar behind your head. Or the way we’re meant to imagine him fighting off his adversaries with a butcher’s hook. Without this sort of comic relief, these lines might sound more like self pity, rather than defiance. In this song the singer seems to be an exaggerated version of Dylan, who has faced a lot of criticism himself over the years. I’m sure that to Dylan, it must really feel like he’s had “everything in the book” thrown at him. A line that immediately rang true for me in regards to Bob Dylan is “Never pandered, never acted proud”, because that is something that definitely applies to Dylan in real life. The last line, “I can't sing a song that I don't understand” reminds me of A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall and the line ‘But I'll know my song well before I start singin'’, - also a defiant sentiment, in both variants
It’s worth noting that death is a powerful presence in these three songs and on the album in general, and the singer seems to be occupying a space in between life and death - or, as he puts it in “I Contain Multitudes”, ‘What more can I tell you, I sleep with life and death in the same bed’. Moreover, soon after the release of “False Prophet”, the Dylan sleuths identified that several of the song’s lines were lifted from the Egyptian Book Of The Dead. And on “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, the singer is juxtaposing the hurdles he’s faced in his own career with his repeated appeal to a dead blues musician. The opening lines of “I Contain Multitudes”, ‘today and tomorrow and yesterday too, the flowers are dying like all things do’, while being very Whitman-esque, also bring to mind Achilles, and how he was cut down prematurely like a flower. And by the way, in “False Prophet”, the singer might not meet Achilles himself down in the underworld, but cheerfully greets Mary-Lou and Miss Pearl, whom he described as his ‘fleet-footed guides from the underworld’. The phrase “fleet-footed” itself is connected to Achilles, as it’s the epithet that’s associated with him in some translations of the Iliad. I’m also reminded of Achilles and his sacrifice in the line from “False Prophet”, where Dylan sings, ‘I am the enemy of the unlived meaningless life’. Because this begs the question what makes a life lived and meaningful? Is a long boring life more or less meaningful than a short life with purpose? Either way, an ‘unlived, meaningless life’ will probably not gain you the kind of heroic glory that will immortalise you in song, in other words, it will not gain you kleos.
In these three songs on Rough And Rowdy Ways, the hero that’s being sung about is Dylan himself. He is the hero of these songs, it just so happens that he also fulfils the role of Homer as well. In these songs, the singer is addressing not just his own identity, but also how he is perceived in the world. In other words, Dylan is engaging with his own image, talking about his reputation, perhaps even actively seeking to shape his legacy. And after decades in the public eye, it is powerful to hear Bob Dylan, as he is nearing his 80th birthday, contemplating how he will be remembered, and perhaps even insisting on defining himself.
We don’t know whether Dylan had ever planned on making another album of original songs after 2012’s Tempest. But it’s at least possible that Bob Dylan didn’t want his Nobel win to be seen as a kind of lifetime achievement award, given to an artist at the end of his career. Maybe he felt the need to demonstrate that he is still capable of producing important and relevant work. And that is something that can definitely be said about Rough And Rowdy Ways. I’m not saying that the album is about the Nobel Prize, but I think it’s helpful to see it as the album that followed his Nobel win. The interplay between songs and literature which he positioned at the centre of his Nobel lecture, was clearly still on his mind as he was writing this album. The only difference is that now, he was working in his own medium, song.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the first chapter in my mini-series on the new Bob Dylan album, Rough And Rowdy Ways. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss out on the next episodes. Definitely Dylan is written, produced, and hosted by me, Laura Tenschert, and if you like the show, please don’t forget to leave a rating and review. If you want to support my work, you can head over to buymeacoffee.com/definitelydylan, and supply me with fuel in the form of a symbolic caffeinated beverage. For more info, go to Definitely Dylan dot com, where you can also hear 80 episodes of the radio show, featuring rare and special Bob Dylan performances and lots of commentary and chat. You can also follow the show on Twitter and Instagram @DEFDYLAN, and if you want to get your own “This is what a Bob Dylan fan looks like” t-shirt, or an “I Contain Multitudes” tote bag, you can get those at definitelydylan.com/shop. Thank you very much for listening!