Dylan, Bob
Entry updated 26 May 2025. Tagged: Music, People.
Pseudonym of US folk singer-songwriter, filmmaker and author Robert Allen Zimmerman (1941- ) until 2 August 1962, now legally Bob Dylan; one of the central figures of post-war popular culture, whose seemingly boundless lyrical invention, erudition and wit made him the only songwriter to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2016. On numerous occasions during his early career, his lyrics have evoked apocalyptic imagery of both a Biblical and more sf nature (see Music). "Talkin' World War III Blues" from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) has its protagonist visiting a doctor after dreams of a Post-Holocaust future, only to find that everybody else is also dreaming of being the only person left alive; the mood is humorous in a darkly Paranoid way. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", from the same album, is a mystical journey through another nuclear wasteland. "When the Ship Comes In", from The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964), uses imagery from the Old Testament and the Ancient Egyptian Great Hymn to the Aten (approx 1500 BCE) to describe a fairer society rising from the ashes of Western civilization. Some of the songs from his Christian period, very roughly 1979-1981, allow Eschatological readings.
By the early 1980s, however, Christian-themed imagery began to lose any evangelical specificity in his work, though contributing to the aura it continued to generate, a sense that many of his songs are written and sung in an aftermath world far from heaven, close to Hell. This sense, though pervasive, may be detected with particular sharpness in various titles, perhaps beginning with "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)" from Street Legal (1978), "Caribbean Wind" (written circa 1980-1981; released on Biograph 1985), "I and I" from Infidels (1983), "Blind Willie McTell" (written 1983; released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 1991), and continuing for the next decades up to and including "Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" from Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). Over and above their manifest power, what may be most vividly noticed in these works is their exceedingly complex relationship to the place-time in which they are set.
In his fantasia Kopfgeburten oder Die Deutschen sterben aus (1980; trans Ralph Manheim as Headbirths or The Germans Are Dying Out 1982), Günter Grass unpacks a complexly time-fluid portrayal of his native land as executed through a linguistic procedure he here defines as Vergegenkunft [very roughly, "meeting"], a made-up conflation of three German words: Vergangenheit for the past, Gegenwart for the present, and Zukunft for the future. It is a term that helps elucidate the interflow of desiderium, imprisonment and premonition that can suffuse examples of contemporary Fantastika when the workings of Time are at issue: passages where all three tenses may seem simultaneous: like the music of the spheres. Listeners to some late omen-loaded songs of Dylan, so disruptively unstable as to their place-time, seemingly sung not about the future but from it, may perceive them as being washed in the wake of Vergegenkunft (see End of the World). [CWa/JC]
Bob Dylan
born Duluth, Minnesota: 24 May 1941
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