Love And Theft

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