Bob Dylan Plays Harvard

by Thad Williamson

"I can see what everybody in the world is up against."

So claims Bob Dylan, not in one of the iconic anthems of his youth but on "Sugar Baby," a song from his 2001 album Love and Theft. Perhaps the most fundamental attribute of Dylan's work is the notion that popular music can be a vehicle for understanding the world we live in, and for communicating wisdom and perhaps even truth.

Indeed, the single author, the single text that I remember most from my college education was not Marx or Rousseau or any other canonic figure, but Dylan's work, the constantly playing soundtrack I carried around in my head almost continuously for four years. At the time--the late 1980s and early 1990s--Dylan was seen mainly as of historical interest, a washed-up middle-aged star as likely as not to embarrass himself and his fans with unintelligible, uninterested performances in his occasional appearances in the national spotlight.

Times have changed again, however, and now, on the back of two strong albums and aided by a highly professional, exceptionally tight tour band Dylan is now widely regarded not just as a living cultural icon, but as a still vital contemporary artist.

Equally important, Dylan still has something to say about the world we live in, and his appearance at Harvard University Sunday evening was pregnant with meaning. Here in Cambridge, unofficial capital of Blue America, just about everyone--Harvard undergraduates included--is still reeling from November 2nd, worried about the price we will have to pay for living through George W. Bush twice, stung by the apparent repudiation of the core liberal faith that reason and truth will trump ignorance and deception.

What, then, would Bob Dylan choose to sing and say at such a moment? Might he cast a blind eye to current events and simply crank out his most familiar tunes, songs like "Tangled Up in Blue" (specifically requested by one student's cardboard sign) guaranteed to win approval from a college audience, and play host to a "let's forget all about that stuff" party? Or might he focus on his ballads and love songs, turning the audience's attention to matters of the heart and placing the focus on the quality of his emotional expression through music?

Dylan gave nods in both those directions Sunday--but the main thing he did was provide a tough-minded musical statement of his worldview. Dylan's social theory can be boiled down to a few key themes: The world is ruled by corrupt, out of control power; the system is out to get you; we live in a society in which phoniness and conformism reign, advertising cons us, and even mothers lose sight of the real costs of war. Despite all this, Dylan insists, there is still scope for individual virtue and living meaningful lives, that there is still hope in youth.

Consider the set list from Sunday's show: Dylan opened with "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35," usually a party song saved for the end of shows. But here the emphasis seemed to be less on everyone getting stoned than on the warning that everyone will try to stone you--watch out, kid. The follow-up song, "Forever Young," set the tone for evening: the 1970s concert anthem came off not as syrupy sentimentality but as poignant and sincere blessing, and also a call for the young to embrace courage, authenticity, and having a firm foundation. It was as if Dylan wanted to tell the assembled students, "I care about you, and I care what becomes of you."

"God Knows," Dylan's third number, a relatively obscure 1990 song that impresses more as a concert piece than it did as a studio song, conveys a similar message: the world is out of control, but there is still divine justice, and we can still "rise above the darkest hour of any circumstance." And just what are the circumstances we have to deal with? Dylan provided vivid answers to that question with compelling, back-to-back performances of perhaps his two most epic, mid-1960s statements of alienation from modern America: "Desolation Row" and "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."

While Dylan was often labeled a "protest singer" in the 1960s, both fans and critics often have overlooked the distinctive quality of Dylan's modes of social analysis. As Mike Marqusee reminds us in his fine book Chimes of Freedom, the young Dylan was not content with either simple storytelling about injustice (although he did plenty of it, often brilliantly) or mouthing platitudes about peace and justice.

Rather, Dylan's early political music offered a power analysis of contemporary American society and a vivid dissection of the ways we are misled, confused, and scarred by living in a hyper-consumerist society--"bent out of shape from society's pliers," as "It's Alright, Ma" puts it. Moreover, Dylan's world is one in which evil is present, manifest not just in individuals but in power structures, and not easily tamed or eliminated. This vision of America distinguishes Dylan from naive idealism of all stripes, be it a false pacifism that fails to confront evil or a liberal technocratic view that claims that power can easily be bent to reason.

Sadly, perhaps, Dylan's realistic vision has better stood the test of time than simple liberal idealism--which in turn means that "It's Alright, Ma" is just as powerful and relevant a song, a statement about the world, as it was when it emerged straight out of Dylan's stream of consciousness some forty years ago. Ours is still a world in which human gods make "everything from toy guns that spark/ to flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark," and needless to say, in which "even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked."

Nor did Dylan did not let the evening go leaving matters of war and peace undiscussed. Only the hard-core Dylan fans in the Harvard audience would have recognized "John Brown," Dylan's biting and bitter critique of blind militarism, with the added twist that the purveyor of militarist ideology is not a general in uniform but a proud mother seeking to bask in the reflected glory of a son's military honors.

The cumulative impact of this selection of songs in the first hour of the show, for this audience at this moment, was stunning, even for seasoned Dylan-watchers. But was Dylan's blistering assembly of statements about the world lost on the many Harvard undergraduates seeing him for the first time, many surely with only a limited familiarity with Dylan's vast catalogue?

Probably not, or at least not entirely. Even slower, quieter songs such as the aforementioned "Sugar Baby" earned appreciative applause from this audience, most of whom appeared to understand that one comes to a Dylan concert primarily to listen and to think, not to dance (though there was some of that too by the end).

My fondest wish is that Bob Dylan did enough Sunday night to persuade at least a handful of 19-year old neophyte fans to explore the back pages of Dylan's music, to let the ample body of Dylan's work become a key "text" helping them to make sense of this world gone wrong.

No teacher at Harvard or anywhere else could do better than to help students understand that while we inhabit in a world dominated by unjust powers and a society that makes every effort to mislead us, the proper response to this reality is not to give up on human agency, but rather to become more resolute, determined to keep on keeping on no matter what.

Reading Marx and Rousseau is all to the good, but Bob Dylan still merits--and surely will continue to claim--an important place in the unofficial curriculum of the young and conscientious, struggling to come to terms with 21st-century America.

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Thad Williamson is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard and a member of the editorial collective of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice. He is also author (with David Imbroscio and Gar Alperovitz) of Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era (Routledge). He can be reached at thwilliamson@earthlink.net.