Wicked Messenger by Mike Marqusee

Author:Mike Marqusee
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-08-05T04:30:00+00:00

In “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” he tells a former lover, “I really did try to get close to you.” But much of the song explains how he really always meant to keep her at a distance. And all of it is about disclaiming responsibility for the failure of the relationship: “I didn’t realize how young you were . . . I couldn’t see where we were goin’ / but you said you knew an’ I took your word.” He harps on about his own good intentions (“I didn’t mean to treat you so bad . . . I never meant to do you any harm”) but the song is a study in mutual immaturity. In his self-exculpation, what’s clear is that Dylan is not and never has been what he’s pretending to be: in command of his emotions and purposes.

The women cannot win in Dylan’s songs. In the exquisite “Love Minus Zero / No Limit” Dylan describes his ideal lover, who “speaks like silence,” is “true, like ice, like fire” and, crucially, “knows too much to argue or to judge.” This was the ethic of innocence embraced by the post-protest, “younger than that now” Dylan. Strikingly, many of his accusations against women echo his criticisms of the movement; in the personal as well as the political, the great enemy is the impulse to categorize or control or appropriate others. But silence itself does seem to be what the Dylan of these songs prefers from his women. The graveyard woman, soulful mama, junkyard angel who takes care of the singer in “From a Buick 6,” who can be relied on to keep his bed warm in a cold, chaotic universe, is praised because:She don’t make me nervous, she don’t talk too much

She walks like Bo Diddley and she don’t need no crutchag

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