Well...yes and no. There are songs that are plain, they tell a story. Country songs are good at this. There are some songs that make no sense and are pretentious. And then...I would argue, there are some songs that don't make literal sense, at least complete literal sense, but they communicate very well.
I read the memoir of Dave Van Ronk a while back. (If you don't know him you can read about him at this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Van_Ronk) In this memoir he wrote about his own song writing and how Dylan had opened up new possibilities for him. But he also had problems with Dylan. He said, "...the more self-consciously 'artistic' the writing became, the less interest I had in taking part. As someone once said, 'When I hear the word 'art' I release the safety catch on my Browning.' That whole artistic mystique is one of the great traps of this business, because down that road lies unintelligibility. Dylan has a lot to answer for there, because after a while he discovered that he could get away with anything...So he could do something like 'All Along the Watchtower,' which is simply a mistake from the title on down: a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can't go along it...Poetry is automatically suspect to me, because if you are a good enough poet, you can make bullshit sound so beautiful that people don't notice that it's bullshit...I eventually came to the conclusion that you should never say anything in poetry that you would not say in prose. Poetry has the same obligation to make sense as any other statement by the human mouth." ("The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir" by Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, pages 206-207, De Capo Press, 2005) Well, Mr. Van Ronk, tell us how you really feel!
He has a point. But there is a reason there are different genres, poetry and prose, and you can do some things in one you can't do in another. Regardless of the genre, this argument that it must "make sense" is a bit like the argument about abstract and realistic art. There is a place for both in my world.
Sean Wilentz talks about Dylan working in a mode of what T. S Eliot called "the dissociation of sensibility...cutting off discursive thought or wit from poetic value, substituting emotion for coherence." When talking about the lyrics of "Blonde on Blonde" Wilentz says they "never completely lose their delirious quality." ("Bob Dylan in America" by Sean Wilentz, Anchor Books 2010, pages 125-126) With "Desolation Row" I suppose the lyrics are "delirious" all the way through!
I still love "Desolation Row" and "All Along the Watchtower," for that matter. (I'd always pictured something like the great wall of China where the latter is concerned.) But for now I will leave off with a beautiful painting by Gerhard Richter. He did paint some realistic paintings but he also did these absolutely astounding paintings where he used a squeegee to move paint across the canvass. What does it mean? Hard to say in an analytic way. Does it communicate? Absolutely. So here's one of his paintings.
This painting may be found in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Va.
Beautiful, yes?
You can read the lyrics of "Desolation Row" at this link:
For me, prose tells me something about the writer while art tells me something about myself.
ReplyDeleteThanks Bo,
ReplyDeleteAs a complete aside, my daughter's high school marching band plays All Along the Watchtower for the dance team, but somehow it just doesn't sound the same.