The Lyrics of Bob Dylan's Classic Song Like a Rolling Stone - Research Paper Example

?Topic: Explore how Bob Dylan portrays transient figures in “Like a Rolling Stone,” and discuss how these portrayals contribute to the central message of the song. The lyrics of Bob Dylan's classic song "Like a Rolling Stone" are based in the philosophy of the Beat movement in the 1950's and 1960's in America, which were heavily influenced by the tenets of Eastern mysticism and European romanticism. The year 1965 represented a turning point and evolution in the American counter-culture movement, changing from being a minority, underground experience to becoming a mainstream, commercial event with the advent of rock’n’roll. The Beat Movement as represented by Kerouac, Ginsburg, Burroughs, and many other poets, musicians, mystics, artists, and free-thinkers was conceived in the 1950’s, existing in avant garde centers like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco or Greenwich Village in New York. Bob Dylan was growing up personally and evolving his music in the context of the early Beat movement at this time. However, what was an underground movement in the early 60’s rapidly became mainstream with the Beatles and other rock groups gaining mass popularity in 1965. This transition can be seen on Bob Dylan’s album “Bringing it Back Home” (1965), which included one side of folk songs in the style he had popularized and come to be known by, and the other side featuring Dylan’s first electric guitar based rock songs. (Kemp, 2001) Thus, in the classic song “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan composed a morality tale in the style of an anthem addressed particularly to this division within the movement, discussing the different aspects involved with the mystical and revolutionary path of the underground when it meets the mainstream acceptance and propagation. Eastern Mysticism rooted in Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Yoga, and Sufism was highly influential on the Beat Poets of the 1950’s and forms the metaphysical basis for many of their works of literature. Bob Dylan can be considered highly influenced by the Beats, and also widely read in their literature at the time. This influence can be seen in the counter-culture lifestyle promoted by Dylan in his music. As Dylan biographer Sean Wilentz wrote in a New Yorker article on the Beats titled “Penetrating Aether: The Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America,” “Dylan knew the poems, Ginsberg later claimed. ‘Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul in 1959,’ Dylan told him. ‘It blew my mind.’ It was the first poetry he’d read that spoke his own American language, Dylan said—or so Ginsberg said he said. Maybe, maybe not. Without question, though, Dylan read Mexico City Blues and was deeply interested in Beat writing before he left Minneapolis for New York. (Like other Beats and hipsters, his friend Tony Glover ordered a paperback copy of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch from France, where it had been published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1959 as The Naked Lunch— uncertain whether the book, deemed obscene by American authorities, would clear customs. The book indeed arrived, and Glover lent it to Dylan, who returned it after a couple of weeks.) And Dylan’s involvement with the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beat generation is nearly as essential to Dylan’s biography as his immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and then Woody Guthrie. ‘I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,’ Dylan said in 1985. ‘It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.’” (Wilentz, 2010) Rolling Stone magazine states that Bob Dylan was the first musician of the modern era to have his lyrics considered by critics and the public to be works of literature. (Kemp, 2001) In this regard, Bob Dylan can be considered a Beat Poet, and his music concerts were played in venues with audiences made up of small groups of counter-culture artists, writers, and mystics. Dylan himself denied being a poet, saying “I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word... I’m a trapeze artist.” (RockHall, 2011) Yet, he was undoubtedly a Beat and his music expresses the philosophy of that movement perfectly. “I read ‘On the Road’ in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's,” Dylan states. (Kerouac, 2007) This is important because Dylan’s classic song “Like a Rolling Stone” can be seen as an expression of the Beat ideal in a similar manner to Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Dylan reads “On the Road” at age 19 and, it can be argued, leaves everything to live the path of the wandering mystic and poet idealized by Kerouac in the novel. For six years he tours the most avant garde coffeehouses and small venues on the Beat circuit, making himself one of the best known and most-highly respected poet-musicians on the underground scene. In 1965, the entire underground seems to be exploding into the mainstream through the advent of rock music. It is in this context that one should view the lyrics of the song “Like a Rolling Stone.” “You said you'd never compromise With the mystery tramp, but know you realize He's not selling any alibis As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes And say do you want to make a deal?” (Dylan, 1965) Outside of the biographical and historical links of Dylan to the Beats, the passage above illustrates how Dylan espouses the Beat ideal of “the mystery tramp.” In the song, Dylan contrasts a number of different models or examples of transient behavior. The song reads as a warning to those who would embrace the ideals of the Beat movement superficially by addressing the youthful abandon of those newly inspired by rock with criticism. The mystery tramp in this example is a symbolic of the Beat ideal of the wandering mystic dedicated to art, poetry, revolution, and enlightenment. In seeing the vast crowds and new faces of the rock movement, itself inspired by the capitalist influences of marketing, advertising, and mass-media, Dylan undoubtedly saw the difference between the small coffee-house gatherings of Beats and the mainstream. Thus, in espousing the Beat ideal of the wandering mystic, he is rhetorically asking the audience to check themselves to see if they really get “it” – or if they are just superficially mouthing the words and buying into the lifestyle without really understanding the deeper implications. Dylan contrasts the rock and roll fan that jumps into what would become the “hippie” movement after 1965 with the Beat ideals, asking: “How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?” (Dylan, 1965) In asking a young girl who has left her home to follow the rock and roll lifestyle to search her emotions for feeling, Dylan is encouraging an inquiry into the nature of the self. This is essential to the quest for self-knowledge at the heart of art, poetry, and mysticism. The subtle point of contradiction that Dylan points out is that most people cannot tell the difference between a “bum” and a “mystic”. The mystic has renounced all attachments and lives wandering homeless in asceticism in order to seek the nature of truth, mind, and consciousness. This is the yogi-sufi-zen-mystic style of being advocated by Kerouac and Dylan in their work. Yet, where the religious mystic seeks to transcend desire, the Beats indulged all of theirs – in sex, drugs, music, etc. Thus, the risk is that the path of religious mysticism would become corrupted, leaving the individual as a drunk, addicted, burnt-out bum rather than an enlightened Buddha. Dylan asked the audience in “Like a Rolling Stone” whether or not they could truly see the difference between these two states of being as an analogy as to whether they could really see if they themselves were on the right path, i.e. whether or not they were truly living the ideals of the Beats. The question Dylan is asking is, as products of the system and now the advocates of the latest fashion, can you be sure that you are still not conditioned and corrupted by the values that you claim to reject? Have you done the requisite research, reading, and self-reflection to understand the path of religious mysticism, what it means to be free and without attachments in the cosmic sense, or is it all a sham? Asking this question of one’s self leads to an important purification process that is key to developing not only the individual, but the revolution. Therefore, Dylan’s lyrics in “Like a Rolling Stone” should be understood as a warning message to the counter-culture as it expands from a small minority movement to a mass youth movement in the 1960’s and as a type of spiritual message of revolution that seeks to set people on the path to truth by stimulating the conscience to reflect on moral values in the lifestyle of rock and roll. Sources Cited: Dylan, Bob. Bob Dylan: Like A Rolling Stone Lyrics. MetroLyrics, 2011. Web. 4 April 2011. ‹ http://www.metrolyrics.com/like-a-rolling-stone-lyrics-bob-dylan.html›. Kemp, Mark. Bob Dylan Biography. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, Simon & Schuster, 2001. Web. 4 April 2011. ‹http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/bob-dylan/biography›. Kerouac, Jack. Beat Generation. Da Capo Press, First Edition, October 4, 2005. Web. 4 April 2011. ‹http://www.oneworldclassics.com/beat-generation-p-162-book.html›. RockHall. Bob Dylan Biography. Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, 2011. Web. 4 April 2011. ‹http://rockhall.com/inductees/bob-dylan/bio/ ›. Sing365. Lyrics - Bob Dylan Biography. Sing365 – Save Your Time, 2011. Web. 4 April 2011. ‹http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Bob-Dylan-Biography/998A168DE56E85B04825696900242006›. Wilentz, Sean. BOB DYLAN, THE BEAT GENERATION, AND ALLEN GINSBERG’S AMERICA. The New Yorker, August 16, 2010. Web. 4 April 2011. ‹http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/sean-wilentz-bob-dylan-in-america.html›. Read More