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His next song was Lay Lady Lay – it was as if Kafka had not happened. In All along the watch tower there is no watch tower, and ultimately The Wicked Messenger is wicked because messages are supposed (in our world) to make sense by now don’t.Īnd then, just to show us all how bizarre the world actually is, Dylan stopped. The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest is in essence a Kafkaesque tale, as is Drifter’s Escape in which very clearly the whole of cause and effect breaks down totally. #You ain t going nowhere the byrds skinLooking back it seems to me that Dylan was interested initially in surrealism (Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again) and randomness (Leopard skin pill-box hat) before reaching out to Kafka with the John Wesley Harding collection. #You ain t going nowhere the byrds seriesMixed in with these were a whole series of songs about being trapped which I deal with elsewhere. So in analysing Dylan’s songs and their meanings I have perceived a move from surrealism to with songs such as these below – although it has taken me a while to get there. As was Roy Harper’s album “Come out fighting Ghengis Smith”, which I feel pretty sure Dylan must have heard, just like he certainly did hear the Incredible String Band as we have noted before. “Genghis Khan and his brother Don Couldn’t keep on keepin’ on” is however a pretty big clue. And it is a perfectly reasonable question to say, “Does it have to make it sense?” Unfortunately in my struggles to understand Dylan and write reviews of all his songs, for a while I stopped at that point and didn’t ask the question strongly enough. Just from that opening, you know its nonsense. #You ain t going nowhere the byrds movieAnd I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.” And this is the essence of Dylan’s Kafkaesque songs which first emerged in the Basement Tapes with lines such asĬloud so swift the rain fallin’ in, Gonna see a movie called Gunga Din I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. In his Nobel Prize acceptance piece Dylan said, “ I don’t have to know what a song means. The cleaning lady, who we might expect to have taken a personal affront to there being an insect of this magnitude in a room that she is expected to keep clean (his existence being a reflection on his capability as a cleaner), in fact doesn’t seem to mind, and instead has a natter with Gregor, who by this time is quite happy as to his new lot. And the point I kept coming back to was that when Gregor Samsa wakes up as a gigantic insect, he is not utterly freaked out by the situation but instead just experiences “slight annoyance.” That the rest of the world is horrified by him is neither here nor there. What it took me a while to understand was that in this period Dylan was taking the absurdism further and further, taking us on a journey that no one else had ever attempted before in popular music, a journey into the realms of “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka. If, as Roy Harper said, a little while before the writing of this song “Everything’s just everything because everything just is” then indeed there is nowhere to go. The title itself of course is the give away. It was only later when I took on what was itself an utterly absurdist task of trying to summarise the meaning or essence of each Dylan song in one word for the series on how the subject matter of Dylan’s lyrics had changed year by year, that I began to realise just how many songs from this period are like “You ain’t going nowhere”. How does one review a song in which the piece is suggesting that because nothing much matters or indeed is real, nothing much means anything? I knew there had to be a way, but I just couldn’t see it. What I found particularly hard to analyse at the time in a meaningful way, was the fact that the lyrics changed all the time. “Why? What’s the point?” was how I opened my first attempt at a review of “You ain’t going nowhere” as I tried to deal with the difficulty of writing a review relating to notion of absurdism in popular music. #You ain t going nowhere the byrds updateThis review has been updated several times, the last on 13 April 2020, and some of the comments were written before this update was written. ![]()
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