Quote:
Originally Posted by JonPR
Dylan was certainly capable of cynicism, of sending up critics and fans alike. I'm not aware he wrote songs with that purpose, but I wouldn't put it past him.
What is certain, however, is that John Lennon felt that way, and wrote I Am The Walrus as a deliberate parody of nonsensical lyrics, believing (quite rightly) that most listeners didn't care whether Dylan's surrealist lyrics made any sense or not. The psychedelic era was all about pushing boundaries, exploring the arcane and mysterious, and if lyrics made no literal sense that was all good - they became like dream images in that sense. It was good brain exercise trying to work out if they actually might mean something... It's all "wow man, far out!" If you found you could actually understand a lyric, that might make it disappointing!
There are definitely some phrases in Dylan songs which resist any sensible interpretation, and could well be a put-on. "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" has several. Ostensibly about Joan Baez (a kind of oblique love song), it has - among some beautifully evocative phrases - some nonsense ones like "curfew plugs" and "warehouse eyes". it was as if he was writing at the boundary of meaning, and just occasionally stepped across the border...(hey who cares... let the critics chew on those...)
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Yes, this move to random connections and purposefully mixed diction is an old Modernist literary tactic that was at least 50 years old when Dylan started putting it to use in popular song lyrics. It originated during WWI when what passed for conventional wisdom was easily questioned by a group of artists who called themselves by a nonsense word: Dada. Some Dada lyrics and poems were just not-actual-words sounds, essentially pointing out the arbitrariness of language itself (rock'n'roll derivation, Gerry Goffin's lyrics to Barry Mann's "Who Put the Bomp...") Others used made up words or words used in nonsense ways. (Rock'n'roll derivation: I Zimbra by the Talking Heads, lyrics adapted from Dadaist Hugo Ball).
As you point out though, this kind of purposeful destruction or ignoring of normal use of language easily crosses over into meaning for a listener as the linguistic mind finds patterns just as the eye does looking at clouds or starfields.
I've translated some Dada poets myself, and it's a real challenge trying to figure out what to, well
figure out as a distinct image, and what was intended to be a impenetrable random set of words.
Here's one of the most popular pieces done for my Parlando Project, translated from Dadaist Tristan Tzara
"The Death of Apollinaire," a elegy written about the writer who died of the 1918 flu pandemic while still recovering from his war wounds just before the WWI armistice.
play my English translation and performance of The Death of Apollinaire
I think Tzara was sincere in writing this, or at least that was my best sense after translating it from French, other translators differ.
But when I was presented with the challenge of translating one Dadaist Hugo Ball it was a lot tougher to decide what to make into a perceptible English image and what to leave as random combinations. I wrote about that process in some detail on my blog, but the choice I ended up making was to make it into a blues (a move Dylan often choose too). After all, it's just not Dadaists who make us wonder what they're talking about, when blues like
"Smokestack Lightning" are not exactly straightforward narratives even if they have undeniable power.
blog post about translating Hugo Ball's The Ghost into Ghost Blues
Here's a book that helped me consider how framing and expectations can change how one reads a song lyric compared to Modernist poetry. It takes a bunch of transcribed Blues lyrics and prints them as if they are Modernist verse, as if the pre-war Blues folks where Modernists like e e cummings or those Dadaists.
The Blues Line book listing on Goodreads
It took me a few years to decide. Yes, they were Modernists. Bob Dylan was smarter, he figured this by 1965 or so.