"Like A Rolling Stone": A prime example of Dylan's mental wandering
Each critic has an argument to make, but one of the most persistent truths about "Like A Rolling Stone" is that its truth, its "message," never becomes completely clear. No one is completely sure what it means, and that's part of what keeps it interesting. "Confused—and justified, exultant, free from history with a world to win—is exactly where the song means to leave you," writes Marcus. In a way, it's an anti-message anthem with an anti-message message. Confused? Try studying Taoism (it would probably help you understand Dylan).
What would it be like to be "free from history with a world to win"? Or to be "on your own/With no direction home/Like a complete unknown"? What does it feel like to lose everything you believed in, and to wander the streets wondering what will come next without feeling attached to any particular outcome? It sounds like a question for the religious-minded—which might be why so many have tagged Dylan as a sort of prophet.
Few can describe this feeling of mental wandering quite as well as Bob Dylan himself: "It wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick…I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was (…) If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that. As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little bit about history, too—the history of a few nations and states—and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point, and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart. I had no idea which one of these stages America was in. There was nobody to check in with. A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though. It was pointless to think about it. Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong" (Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. I, p. 35).
In the mid-1960s, many people thought society was on a tipping point it might never come back from. It was a nuclear world, a revolutionary world, a world of hippies and resistance fighters and the Black Panther Party and the death of John Kennedy and the beginnings of a miserably long war. Bob Dylan was also on a ledge, looking for songwriting he could hold onto, that would penetrate his growing sense that "whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong." With an outlook underscored by such intrepid doubt, how could you say anything at all?
"Like A Rolling Stone" was what Bob Dylan found to say. Where did he find it?
"It's like a ghost is writing a song like that," he said in 2004. "It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don't know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song" (Polizzotti 33).
"Like A Rolling Stone": A prime example of Dylan's mental wanderingEach critic has an argument to make, but one of the most persistent truths about "Like A Rolling Stone" is that its truth, its "message," never becomes completely clear. No one is completely sure what it means, and that's part of what keeps it interesting. "Confused—and justified, exultant, free from history with a world to win—is exactly where the song means to leave you," writes Marcus. In a way, it's an anti-message anthem with an anti-message message. Confused? Try studying Taoism (it would probably help you understand Dylan).What would it be like to be "free from history with a world to win"? Or to be "on your own/With no direction home/Like a complete unknown"? What does it feel like to lose everything you believed in, and to wander the streets wondering what will come next without feeling attached to any particular outcome? It sounds like a question for the religious-minded—which might be why so many have tagged Dylan as a sort of prophet. Few can describe this feeling of mental wandering quite as well as Bob Dylan himself: "It wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick…I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was (…) If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that. As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little bit about history, too—the history of a few nations and states—and it was always the same pattern. Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point, and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart. I had no idea which one of these stages America was in. There was nobody to check in with. A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though. It was pointless to think about it. Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong" (Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. I, p. 35).In the mid-1960s, many people thought society was on a tipping point it might never come back from. It was a nuclear world, a revolutionary world, a world of hippies and resistance fighters and the Black Panther Party and the death of John Kennedy and the beginnings of a miserably long war. Bob Dylan was also on a ledge, looking for songwriting he could hold onto, that would penetrate his growing sense that "whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong." With an outlook underscored by such intrepid doubt, how could you say anything at all? "Like A Rolling Stone" was what Bob Dylan found to say. Where did he find it?"It's like a ghost is writing a song like that," he said in 2004. "It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don't know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song" (Polizzotti 33).
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