Most of the following discussion of accusations of misogyny on Dylan’s
part vis-à-vis ‘Sugar Baby’ was dropped from the
final version of the "Love And Theft" chapter. As that chapter
had at one time reached 40,000 words, serious pruning was required.
This “debate”, I felt, was a distraction to the main points
of the chapter. It is still present in the book but in much reduced
format. Here are my original thoughts:
"Love
And Theft" – Outtake 1
There is another side to Dylan singing
of ageing and his setting an album in a past, agrarian world amidst
musical styles from long ago. All this brings to mind his own age
and his relationship with – or estrangement from – the
modern world. One thing that has never hampered Dylan is an overly
scrupulous attention to the modern concept of ‘political correctness’.
So it is no surprise to find that this album ignores that concept.
That term has come to convey the stultifying deadness of over-conforming
to anything, even things of inherent virtue. What is now a term of
scorn was born out of concepts that were inarguably good, no discrimination
on basis of sex or race, for example. The human ability to create
evil out of good seems never-ending. However, none of it impinges
on the land of “Love And Theft”, a land from
before it was ever heard of, after all. This is part of its charm,
which is not to say that everything about old fashioned attitudes
is charming; the iniquities they inspire are the whole reason ‘political
correctness’ came into being.
Dylan is a man of the past as well as a man singing of the past, his
formative years were in the Fifties, a point he often stresses –
if he doesn’t say the Fifties he says the Forties but never
the Sixties, the second half of which he seems to despise and always
makes a point of distancing himself from. Talking of the ‘summer
of ‘67’ et al in the Rome interview he flatly stated that
he was not ‘part of that culture’. For him, yet
again, it was his formative years that mattered: ‘I think
whatever time you are born and raised in has a tremendous influence
on whatever your personal and private life is…’
Christopher Rollanson, in his review of the album, is engaging on
this topic in its linguistic incarnation, or rather its absence, due
to what he calls Dylan’s ‘sublime lexical disregard’
for ‘the fashionable niceties of… political correctness’.
There are not, as it happens, many offensive terms on “Love
And Theft” but there are some attitudes which upset people
who have taken sixties and post- sixties liberal thinking as their
own and think that Dylan shares those views. This happens on ‘Sugar
Baby’, in particular.
Being the final track, it stands slightly apart from the others. It
is not as big a jump to it as it was to ‘Dark Eyes’ on
Empire Burlesque; more like the half-step to ‘Shooting
Star’ on Oh Mercy.
In true last track Dylan tradition this sparse, but poignantly beautiful,
song sums up the entire album and points the way to further explorations
of his muse. In here you will find lost love, lost youth, some sadness,
some joy, some bitterness, some defiance, some hope, some anger, some
faith.
The rest of the album may be spoken via the mouths of a cast of characters
(notwithstanding that they reveal to us Dylan’s view of life)
but here I feel there is absolutely no authorial distance, this is
Dylan speaking to himself; to thoughts of his loves, his past, his
twin, ‘that enemy within’. Perhaps you hear him
sing to demons that have haunted him, of addictions both female and
chemical, perhaps sometimes also to his muse. Then you listen to the
song again and hear it very differently, it is like a coiled spring
full of impacted meanings. When they are sprung free, the connotations
and references take you down many a different path, led by that unmistakable
voice of Dylan in full prophetic and personal modes. The wonder is
that he lets us listen in to this statement of how he feels now, at
the moment he recorded this.
I know from a number of friends that they feel uncomfortable with
this song because, not for the first time, Dylan’s words upset
their beliefs regarding the place of women. Dylan’s uncompromising:
There ain’t no limit to the amount
of trouble women bring
- as well as the opening chorus lines – have re-opened an old
debate. To me there is no argument, Dylan is not only not a supporter
of the ‘women’s lib’ movement; he doesn’t
even seem to understand it. In the Kurt Loder interview from the Eighties
he revealed that he is simply not on the same wavelength as those
who find his attitudes off-putting:
KL: …there’s
a song on Infidels called ‘Sweetheart Like You,’ in which
you say, ‘A woman like you should be at home
... takin’ care of somebody nice.’
BD: Actually, that
line didn’t come out exactly the way I wanted it to. I could
easily have changed that line to
make it not so overly, uh tender, you know? But I think the concept
still would have been the same. You
see a fine-looking woman walking down the street, you start going,
‘Well, what are you doin’ on the street?
You’re so fine, what do you need all this for?’
KL: A lot of women
might say they’re on the street because they’re on the
way to their jobs.
BD: Well, I wasn’t
talking to that type of woman. I’m not talking to Margaret Thatcher
or anything.
Dylan is not a flower power child of the sixties, he grew up before
the sixties in a Jewish family in a small Midwestern town. He does
not – and never has – shared many of the hippies’
beliefs. Even this year he still felt the need to point out that when
he wrote ‘Masters Of War’ he was not writing as a pacifist;
that he is not and never has been a pacifist. Nor will he ever have
a modern perspective on women’s place in society. If you let
that put you off his work, that’s your loss. I don’t agree
with his attitudes to women, but then I often find his views on other
subjects (religion, for example) also run counter to mine. To take
a non-Dylan example of something similar, I remember being devastated
by Neil Young’s endorsements of Ronald Reagan. I still listen
to Bob and Neil though; why should their beliefs have to match mine
for me to enjoy their songs?
The attempt to make Dylan (or anyone else) think what you want them
to is as silly as booing him off stage for daring to play an electric
guitar. It is an immature reaction to rock music; idolising the star
on stage. ‘I can’t think for you’ sang
Dylan once long ago, and ‘trust yourself’ many
years later. These are worth taking on board at face value.
Dylan is more than just a rock star on stage, as this book has hopefully
made clear he is also an artist of some poetic standing. His poetry
may be in song rather than printed verse but there are enough similarities
to talk of him in the same way as one would John Donne or Robert Browning.
Naturally one likes to think that poetic artists who have moved you
share beliefs and values you hold dear, but it is unrealistic to think
this will always be so.
Dylan’s view of women in his songs and interview comments come
across as patronising, old-fashioned and ill-informed to younger age
groups than his own in western culture. Am I supposed to stop listening
to Dylan albums because of this? (Whatever your answer is, I can assure
you mine is no!)
I do find it off-putting in live concert when the line about women
bringing trouble is met with moronic whooping and cheering from male
voices in the audience. I mentioned this to a friend who pointed out
that you can hear female voices cheer anti-male comments at concerts
by Alanis Morrissette and many others. I don’t think that this
is quite the same thing given the history of male domination in society;
but it did make me pause to consider that in popular music one sex
is praised for directly savaging the other while Dylan is routinely
put down for misogyny for lines that are open to more than one interpretation.
More importantly than all this though is the simple fact that a literal
reading of the lyrics brings a very limited view of the song. Even
if taken at its most literal level you can hear that Dylan is singing
about more than woman troubles, as is suggested by a line like:
Every moment of existence seems like some
dirty trick
The verses are also clearly speaking from more than one perspective;
it seems to me there is a clear shift from the verses to the chorus,
perhaps I’d go as far as to say I most commonly hear them as
call and response (I also see the song in a religious context, but
more of that later). Paul Williams is a Dylan listener who struggles
with this song for two reasons:
My problem is six words in the chorus (repeated four times): ‘You
ain’t got no brains no how.’ I hunger to identify with
this beguiling love song, but I can’t think of a lover, past,
present or imaginary, I’d want to say that to, or have that
said to me by.
Plus, writing of the trouble women bring line:
…I’m reminded unpleasantly of cultures where women
are beaten or murdered for wearing clothing that reveals their
femaleness. And one must also deal with the echoes of this sentiment
throughout “Love And Theft”: ‘Keepin’
away from the women, I’m givin’ them lots of room’
(‘High Water’). ‘Some of these women they just
give me the creeps’ (‘Honest with Me’).[1]
Mr. Williams comforts himself by remembering that Dylan often writes
to himself. Paul’s writing comes from the heart, though, and
his honesty compels him to add that at any given listen: ‘I
could be back hearing ‘Sugar Baby’’s chorus as an
expression of contempt for a life partner’.
I have heard the same kind of disquiet from others and clearly it
is a barrier to their appreciation of the song, and therefore the
album as a whole. Barriers to appreciation were conspicuous by their
absence in the slew of enthusiastic reviews that greeted the release
of “Love And Theft”, with people revelling in
the humour of the album.
[1] Paul Williams, ‘Stolen Kisses (Sweeter than Wine)’
Crawdaddy, 2001
Most of the following discussion
was dropped from the final version of the "Love And Theft"
chapter. My idea originally had been to include the extended John
Donne commentary as an example of how so referentially rich an album
actively encourages the listener to make connections with other art,
be it popular or “high”. I was interested in the meaningfulness
(or otherwise) of authorial intent and wanted to demonstrate the tenuous
nature of many of the connections listening to the album sparks off
in a listener’s mind. I felt, in the end, that I proved the
tenuous aspect a little too successfully!
Nonetheless, in the hope you find something of
interest here, what follows is a passage from an earlier version of
the "Love And Theft" chapter.
"Love And Theft"
– Outtake 2
All this
makes me wonder to what extent – one could even argue, if any
– the poet, John Donne is being alluded to in the album. This
usually does not really affect my appreciation too greatly. The music,
vocals and large number of clearly intentional references are more
than enough to provide the richest of fares. However, it does impact
to an extent on my appreciation of the opening to ‘Sugar Baby’.
Before looking at that, it is worth noting that Donne is quoted at
least once, though this comes in yet another case of “Love
And Theft” and Dylan could be quoting someone else quoting
Donne! This famous ‘theft’ comes in ‘Moonlight’:
For whom does the bell toll for, love?
It tolls for you and me
You cannot tell if Dylan is citing Ernest Hemingway or John Donne
or both. We know Dylan is familiar with both writers, so that offers
no guide. The ‘double referencing’ makes – like
the ‘Coo Coo’ song allusion – a very pointed statement
about the "Love And Theft" that is Dylan’s
new song form. Again Dylan does so with a quote so well known as to
have become a commonplace.
Perhaps Dylan wants us to go beyond Hemingway to Donne, or perhaps
he wants us to think of both – which you cannot help but do
in any case. We cannot say for sure, and you feel Dylan does not want
you to be sure. Dylan, I suspect, knows full well that he made me
think of Hemingway and Donne and the lines from ‘Standing In
The Doorway’
I can hear the church bells ringin’
in the yard
I wonder who they’re ringin’ for
The original Donne quote is part of one of his most famous passages,
including also, as it does, another of his best known sayings ‘no
man is an island…’ Even a casual reader of Donne
is well familiar with this particular ‘Meditation’, and
we know that Dylan is at least that.
Donne’s writings have always had resonance in Dylan’s
songs. So, when he is deliberately called to your mind in such a direct
way he cannot help but come to the fore at other times. So by the
time I heard the closing track, ‘Sugar Baby’, a poem of
his was recalled immediately upon hearing the extraordinary opening
lines:
I got my back to the sun ‘cause
the light is too intense
I can see what everybody in the world is up
against
These lines already carry religious overtones, and if the Donne they
bring to mind is an intended allusion then it endows the already powerful
opening line with added religious significance. The song then would
have a very powerful religious ‘envelope’ of opening and
closing lines. ‘Sugar Baby’ ends with the lines:
Just as sure as we’re living, just
as sure as you’re born
Look up, look up – seek your Maker –
‘fore Gabriel blows his horn
Every later listen to the song comes with the knowledge of those last
lines. so that the listener is aware of a religious dimension with
or without any allusion to Donne and whether or not he or she picks
up on the other religious musica.l and lyrical overtones in the opening
verse.
The Donne I am proposing may be being alluded to is,
‘Good-Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, part of which
reads:
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward
the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and
fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must
dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
You will note, I am sure, that the penultimate line here is akin to
Dylan’s: ‘no man sees my face and lives’
from 1983’s ‘I And I’.
It is the image of Jesus’s resurrection in the second line above
that I was reminded of on hearing ‘Sugar Baby’. Donne
is using the same ‘Sun’/’Son’ pun I discussed
in the previous chapter with regard to ‘Not Dark Yet’,
‘rising set’ referring to Christ dying on the cross and
then rising.
Michael Gray incidentally, takes issue with that interpretation of
‘Standing In the Doorway’:
I dislike this, there should be a reason within the text to suggest
it is a pun…In ‘Standing In The Doorway’ he refers
to ‘the dark land of the sun’: we are surely not to conjecture
that this may be Dylan’s condemnation of a newly discovered
great wickedness in Jesus and his entire domain.
There is some mischief in the way he puts this, as it is patently
absurd to suggest that proposing the pun in one song (or line) means
one necessarily proposes it in another song (or line). Nor would we
say so with every trope in Mr. Gray’s book or we would end up
with even more humorous misreading than the one he posits in this
example.
His point re ‘reason within the text’ is the
crucial one. Ironically, Mr. Gray himself gives good reason from the
text of Time Out Of Mind as a whole in a deft reading of
the songs. Perhaps we define ‘the text’ differently. Given
the way Dylan ceaselessly quotes others and refers to his back catalogue,
I think we can say the text is more than the song in isolation. Dylan’s
work has always been strong on allusion and referential meaning but
by now this has become the very core of his material. The text is
all of this as well as the music that accompanies the lyrics, a crucial
point in appreciating ‘Sugar Baby’ in particular.
Before returning there, a final point on the Sun/Son pun in ‘Not
Dark Yet’. If the pun occurred to so many people hearing the
line then it is inconceivable that it never crossed the mind of a
master wordsmith like Dylan that it both could and would be taken
that way, whether it was his initial intention or not. This is especially
so as he had employed the same pun previously.
Does it matter if Dylan is alluding to Donne here? Perhaps not, the
ascending chord that introduces the song and the prophetic tone and
content all make their point anyway. Without their being a divine
presence or at least influence, the ‘I can see better than any
of you lot’ and other comments would come across as galling
rather than enlightening.
Which is not to deny that Dylan’s lines are working on more
than one level – with or without Donne foreshadowing them. The
opening lines work as physical description too, Obviously if you look
into the sun you won’t see anything because the light literally
will be ‘too intense’. If you turn around its
light will illuminate what you now gaze on. It is not the first time
in Dylan’s career the he has been adept at combining the spiritual
and the material (nor at aligning his own voice with Christ’s).
‘Sugar Baby’ takes the implicit journey of ‘Highlands’
further down the road, the speaker perhaps turning at the end of his
journey, or perhaps having a vision like the one in Donne’s
poem.
Exactly how I would take the religious implication is down to Donne’s
connection, though overall the song’s position is clear, the
allseeing prophet viewing the same world of under the red sky
and World Gone Wrong and his own history, a summation of
“Love And Theft” and Time Out Of Mind,
taking ‘Highlands’ further down the road with no room
now for the light-hearted touches, and returning to his lexicon to
complete the ‘religious’ teaching. There is a school of
criticism that would tell me that it is of no relevance what Dylan
intended, if the Donne poem is what it brings to my mind then so be
it, that is what it ‘means’ for me. Whilst having an enormous
respect for what this approach has brought to modern studies of literature
and my own appreciation, I cannot, in all honesty, report back to
you that this is how I feel.
Whether or not Donne’s poem was in Dylan’s mind, consciously
or otherwise, does affect how I hear the first verse. ‘Can’t
come back’ takes on a wholly different hue, for example, becoming
an even more resonant phrase to be uttered at that precise moment.
I prefer the song with the Donne allusion, even it is just a subconscious
link that allows divine light to be the source of the all-seeing singer.
For a mere mortal with no divine aid to claim: ‘I can see
what everybody in the world is up against’ and state ‘One
day you’ll open up your eyes and you’ll see where we are’
does not ring true to me. It sounds like divine inspiration is
involved, with or without any link to ‘Good-Friday, 1613.
Riding Westward’.
The reason I have spent this time discussing one potential allusion
is twofold. Firstly, I believe ‘Sugar Baby’ to be a major
song, rich in compacted meaning and ‘difficult’ in the
way modern verse is. The song is openly a ‘big statement’
and yet its modernist difficulties come not from traditional post-Victorian
poetic techniques but from Dylan’s new style of song-writing,
a style so rich in referential content that it takes you down such
paths. I have highlighted only one here, albeit a crucially important
one, of numerous examples. This is the risk Dylan is taking as a writer
of such songs, we as listeners are not inventing problems; any art
form that continually puts quotes, allusions and links in its body
invites us to keep finding more.
The danger is of going too far and losing touch with the original
work of art itself. If becomes train-spotting it is not art appreciation
nor entertaining. Undoubtedly things like the Huckleberry Finn,
Great Gatsby, Minstrelsy and folk references do add to both our
pleasure and understanding. The question is where does this stop?
Text copyright Andrew Muir © 2003
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