Who hasn't at least once had the feeling of being remade through music? Who is there who doesn't date a new phase in life to hearing this or that symphony or song? I heard it—we say—and everything changed. I heard it, and a gate flew open and I walked through. But does music constantly provide revelation—or does it have some other effects, maybe less desirable?
For those of us who teach, the question is especially pressing. Our students tend to spend hours a day plugged into their tunes. Yet, at least in my experience, they are reluctant to talk about music. They'll talk about sex, they'll talk about drugs—but rock 'n' roll, or whatever else they may be listening to, is off-limits. What's going on there?
When I first heard Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965, not long after it came out, I was amazed. At the time, I liked to listen to pop on the radio—the Beatles were fine, the Stones were better. But nothing I'd heard until then prepared me for Dylan's song. It had all the fluent joy of a pop number, but something else was going on too. This song was about lyrics: language. Dylan wasn't chanting some truism about being in love or wanting to get free or wasted for the weekend. He had something to say. He was exasperated. He was pissed off. He'd clearly been betrayed by somebody, or a whole nest of somebodies, and he was letting them have it. His words were exuberantly weird and sometimes almost embarrassingly inventive—and I didn't know what they all meant. "You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat / Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat." Chrome horse? Diplomat? What?
I sensed Dylan's disdain and his fury, but the song suggested way more than it declared. This was a sidewinder of a song—intense and angry, but indirect and riddling too. I tried to hear every line—Dylan's voice seemed garbled, and our phonograph wasn't new. I can still see myself with my head cocked to the spindle, eyes clenched, trying to shut out the room around me as I strained to grab the words from the harsh melodious wind of the song. "Ain't it hard when you discovered that / He really wasn't where it's at / After he took from you everything he could steal."
I couldn't listen to that song enough. I'd liked music before that. I'd liked stuff I'd heard on the radio; I'd even liked the Beethoven and the Mahler that my father played at top volume on Sunday mornings, though I never would have admitted as much to him. But Dylan was different. Other music made me temporarily happy, or tranquil, or energized. But this music made me puzzled. There was something in the grooves that I wasn't getting. There was something in the mix of the easy, available pop hook and the grating voice and elliptical words that signaled in the direction of experiences I hadn't had yet, and maybe never would. The song made me feel that life was larger than I had thought and made me want to find out what I was missing.
That song kicked open a door in my mind—to borrow a phrase Bruce Springsteen used to describe his own experience with it. But to be honest, in time that door may have gotten a little rusty from lack of use. Because really, after I heard "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio and bought the single and listened to it 50 or so times, I put it away. I never went out to cop a Dylan album. I never even thought much about the guy for the next five years.
by Mark Edmundson, The Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Photo: Tim MacPherson, Cultura, Aurora Photos
