Got a tell-tale heart, like Mr. PoeADDED: "Pink Pedal Pushers" is an old Carl Perkins song — listen here. "Red Blue Jeans" is Gene Vincent — here.
Got skeletons in the walls of people you know
I'll drink to the truth and the things we said
I'll drink to the man that shares your bed
I'll paint landscapes and I'll paint nudes
I contain multitudes...
I sing the songs of experience, like William Blake
I've got no apologies to make
Everything's flowing all at the same time
I live on a boulevard of crime
I drive fast cars, while I eat fast foods
I contain multitudes
Pink Pedal Pushers, Red Blue-Jeans
All the pretty maids, and all the old queens
All the old queens, from all my past lives
I carry four pistols and two large knives
I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods
I contain multitudes...
AND: "Pretty maids" might refer to this Eagles song. Dylan's previous song, "Murder Most Foul" contained the names of 2 of The Eagles ("Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey").
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62 comments:
I am legion.
To me, Dylan is a distillation of 20th century American art. Spoken, written, cinema. He does contain multitudes for me. I love the way he writes.
Also Anne Frank, Indiana Jones, and those British badboys, The Rolling Stones.
Makes me want to be in a white car with the windows open, driving west into a setting sun that lights the windshield yellow and orange, wide flat land passing by empty on the sides, while this plays.
Black vinyl seats, of course.
Maybe the occasional billboard.
I am Laslo.
Judging by the lyrics, that is his best song in years.
Maybe it's just a generational thing, but I never "got" Dylan. I'm a casual fan of some of his more popular records, but that's about it. My mentor was a huge Dylan fan. He used to say, "The Beatles changes the sound, and Dylan changed the words." I can appreciate Dylan's influence on subsequent music, but I'm an even bigger fan of the Brill Building era that he and the Beatles helped put an end to.
The rock star as auteur and the album-as-art movements were important contributions to music, though for every great artist it produced, it probably produced a couple of self-important bores. Cough, Jim Morrison.
I like this one much more than the previous song.
J. Farmer - you have to think of all of them - the Tin Can Alley guys, the deadheads, the cosmic Americana guys, the "english invasions" kids, the Greenwich village hipsters, the Hoagy Carmichaels and the Arlo Guthries ---- as simply just a bunch of guys who wanted to "get a gig" and not mess up too much, and not be too boring, and who every once in a while said the right thing, and, trust me, bless their hearts, sometimes they were not boring (but I challenge you to listen to 4 hours in a row of the Grateful Dead, or of Wings concerts, and not tell me they were not as talented as they thought.)
But that makes no difference. Almost all performers are less interesting than they think,
Trust me they did not want to be great artists they all just wanted to be in a band, to get a paying gig (think of all the guys without musical talent who would have loved to get a gig like that) or be a singer, and have an audience, and be loved for that.
Also they all wanted to have the ladies love them.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not.
The last part of the quoted lyrics reminded me of...
Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red white and blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?
Tupac Zimmerman... Yawn.
Maybe it's just me, but I really prefer a straightforward song that doesn't need footnotes. That said, after listening to it and seeing all the various explanatory notes and tweet, it brings to mind the lyrics from "Stairway To Heaven":
There's a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
Or more. My cousin put that particular quote on her mother's gravestone. And yeah, that's a cryptic song, too.
"I contain multitudes" brought to mind a petri dish.
math
"A petri dish contains three amoebas. An amoeba is a microorganism that reproduces using the process of fission, by simply dividing itself into smaller amoebas. Once the new amoebas mature, they will go through the same process."
a- Write the terms of the sequence describing the first 4 generations of the amoeba in the petri dish.
b- Write a rule for the nth term of the sequence.
c- Find the 10th term of the sequence and describe in words what this term represent.
(Link)
Genesis 35:17
“And it came to pass, when she was in hard labour, that the midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.”
Ever since Old Testament times, midwives have been helping mothers during the birthing process. They are especially valuable should there be difficulties since they not only offer an extra set of hands, but experience in dealing with common problems. Some of the scientists who were studying amoeba behavior observed some very strange behavior which suggests that some amoebas, too, employ midwives.
The scientists were studying an amoeba that lives in the digestive tract of reptiles. As all amoebas, they reproduce by splitting in half. Scientists noted, however, that this particular species is not very good at it. Up to a third of the time, the amoebas fail to split. They begin the process but never manage to complete it. When that happens, the amoeba is doomed to exist as long as it can with two sets of genetic information. But as scientists watched, when an amoeba had difficulty dividing, other amoebas would move in on it and help the division process, thereby serving as a midwife. Further study revealed that the amoeba having difficulty dividing releases a chemical which apparently summons help to finish the process. The midwife amoeba have been seen traveling up to 40 times their own length to help in the birthing of a new generation.
The Bible teaches us that God cares for all of His creatures. Here we see that He provides even for the needs of the lowly amoeba. How much more does He love us and provide for our needs!
(Link)
And of the lowly coronavirus ;)
After a pregnant pause... Yes J Farmer.
Apologies. The smartass in me couldn’t resist. It is a lovely sentiment.
I first went back and heard the last song David Bowie supposedly recorded.
Lazarus is nothing like this Dylan song. Possibly the opposite.
"Do I contradict myself. Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."
-Walt Whitman
Drivel. Grow up Ann, your not a teenager anymore, your close to RMD requirement age.
The amoeba is an interesting creature. As stated above, they reproduce by splitting in two. Since they have been around for around 500 million years, the amoebas that are alive today have essentially been alive for that long. Amoebas die but their numbers stay the same because they reproduce every 2 days or so, so half of them die every 2 days. Consider the terrible state of an amoeba: It has been alive for 500 million years and yet there is a 50% chance it will die in the next 2 days.
All the old queens from all my past lives? I suspected as much ever since he sang "The air burns and I'm trying to think straight" in "Can't Wait." I probably should have taken the whole sword-swallower business more seriously.
I liked that. I haven't read other comments, so my reaction is pure--
Narr
I really liked that
Althouse, for all of her whimsical female bizarre tics, does love her some Bob Dylan. God bless her.
"I'm a man without conviction I'm a man who doesn't know. How to sell a contradiction You come and go, you ..."
Dylan is quoting everyone, but Culture Club? The last time I saw Dylan was at the Chicago Theater and he only played keyboard and "sang" but you couldn't really hear him underneath his too loud Asian rock band backup guys. I told my wife that would be the last time we would ever see him. However he seems to have reemerged into a new philosophical quoter of other peoples lyrics. I am saying that, of course, with harsh neutrality.
LakeLevel - unattractive people who will never be able to mate also descend from millions of generations of descendants, according to the evolution school-teachers.
So, in every generation, you have many people who are descendants of millions of ancestors who reproduced, and who will be ancestors in their turn, after many many bouts of (sometimes) pleasant sex, but also in every generation you have many many unloved, unwanted creatures whose chances of being ancestors in their turn are next to zero, because they are unlovely, unloved, and lonely.
This is true in every generation.
You see, my friend, this is a very very harsh world.
Good thing that God loves us all.
I could tell you more about who God loves and who God does not love.
Trust me, God loves the unlovely people the most.
I have seen, again and again, the look of joy on their faces when they realize what this world really is all about.
The last shall be first and the first shall be last .... that is the simple way of putting it.
Can I trust you to follow along when I put it in a less simple way? ------ You were all made to be sons and daughters of God ----- that is a very complicated statement.
But true.
Trust me, God knows how wonderful each of us can be, and there is nothing to be afraid of, if you remember that.
and no, this is not really 2020. try and keep up.
Referring to the source of the lyric, how does one clutch four pistols and two large knives? (BTW, neither venetianblonde nor Althouse bothered to mention the source is the late Civil War scholar, Shelby Foote.) Assuming one has thumbs on his feet like a chimpanzee, that still leaves two of the weapons assortment unclutched.
Evidently, Dillion recognized the problem and changed the verb to carry, which is possible assuming a plethora of holsters and sheaths.
HT to Prairie Wrench for catching the Whitman reference that is the foundation of the thing.
Actually , the person who contained multitudes was the possessed gentleman who had his daemons exiled into the herd of swine in Mark 5:10-20. I quote the Bible in a literary cultural context only, of course. "I don't need faith, I have experience!" said Joseph Campbell, smugly.
I was thinking exactly of this too:
"Actually, the person who contained multitudes was the possessed gentleman who had his daemons exiled into the herd of swine in Mark 5:10-20."
"how does one clutch four pistols and two large knives?"
Questor, I interpret this as a reference to the band "Sex Pistols" so it is meta and not a representation of physical reality. Dylan is not careful in the phrasing and depends on poetic license, he is a Nobel Laureate, you know. Harsh neutrality.
The source: Foote, Shelby The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1, Fort Sumter to Perryville page 37.
The topic therein was the vicious rumor-mongering by the hostile press and cartoonists about the newly-elected Abraham Lincoln's arrival in Washington, which only proves that President Trump isn't the first Republican savior of the nation to suffer the mendacity of Democrat propagandists in the guise of journalists, though he may be the first to fight back.
More intelligible than Biden, which is saying something.
That's some Nobel Prize winning poetry right there.
Whitman and Dylan both gathered in and contained so much experience of their times that expressing it was a Herculean task. That little gem of a song was as good as it gets.
As they would have said back in 1968:
Heavy man. Heavy.
@Josephbleau
No, the reference is definitely to an alleged drunken assassination attempt on Abe Lincoln as documented by Foote. Note that clutch is replaced with carry in the lyric.
I miss the magical music of the Bus Boys.
HT to Prairie Wrench for catching the Whitman reference that is the foundation of the thing.
Besides a poet, Whitman was a Civil War hospital orderly who cared for the wound and took the last dictation of many dying Union soldiers.
Wounded. dammit.
No, the reference is definitely to an alleged drunken assassination attempt on Abe Lincoln as documented by Foote. Note that clutch is replaced with carry in the lyric.
I agree, you have demolished my premise.
It would have been clear to me if "lilacs last in the door yard bloomed."
I'm an introvert. I contain solitude.
"Amoeba ‘Midwives’
other amoebas would move in on it and help the division process,
That makes sense since they're genetically identical, so one helping another one (moving toward a scent and wiggling) is genetically and reproductively the same as helping itself, like cells in a body.
More interesting are the social insects, where the sterile "workers", etc., are more closely related to each other than they are to the queen that produces them.
"Actually , the person who contained multitudes was the possessed gentleman who had his daemons exiled into the herd of swine in Mark 5:10-20."
What I was referencing in the first comment.
"Amoeba ‘Midwives’
other amoebas would move in on it and help the division process,"
As long as they were girl amoebas that would be A-OK with this "amoeba." (can we have a conversation?, my 5th grade teacher told me to include punctuation within the quotes. Is that OK now??)
He is a parody of himself here. Not even a couplet that is memorable.
both Bene Gesserit and The Kwisatz Haderach contain multitudes
Mr. Cooper, I think I do have some understanding of God's love for his forsaken children. This understanding is a precious gift, a glimpse of how we really are created in God's image.
It must still be hard to be Dylan, and try to live up to the legend.
Personally I think his delivery here is perfect; he's finally an old bull.
"I sleep with life and death in the same bed."
Narr
That's a good one
I liked it. Isn't the melody line the same on he used on "It's Not Dark Yet"?.....I rarely understand his imagery, but in some indefinable way those images connect. He's definitely a poet.
Yeah, okay, Dylan never wrote any poetry that topped "Fern Hill", but, to be fair, neither did Dylan Thomas.
Bumblebee is not getting the proper attention because Tupac and Zimmerman are boyfriends. Thanks Lgbtqia.....
Thanks for the four pistols and two large knives reference. Dylan in "Chronicles" wrote that he liked to read newspapers from the Civil War. Could have come from that.
I like this song much better than "Murder Most Foul", which moved from awful after the first listening to OK after the third. The lyrics in this song have more bite and the music is more in sync with his singing/reciting. It would be an appropriate swan song if he quits now. But hopefully it won't be.
“Cosmic Americana guys”. ❤️
Isn't the melody line the same on he used on "It's Not Dark Yet"?
That's what I thought after the first line. But then it sounded more like "Po Boy" from "Love and Theft".
Is this a "Midwest Renaissance" thing? A century ago, there was talk of the Midwest coming into its own with writers who grew up far away from the usual literary centers on the East Coast: Cather, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. That renaissance dried up pretty quickly, but here is Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing Minnesota, bringing back another Nobel Prize to the region. Of course, there is a lot of the South and Southwest in Dylan. NYC and maybe California and some interstellar region of his own brain as well. But he could be seen as a belated voice from a region that got assimilated too quickly to fully express itself in literature. Or not.
"My cousin put that particular quote on her mother's gravestone. And yeah, that's a cryptic song, too."
The 2 meanings are to the phrase "stairway to heaven." The behavior in question will take you to a higher place, and it could be either of the 2 meanings of "heaven" — earthly bliss or the afterlife.
Did your cousin's mother OD?
I still like best Dylan's version of "This Old Man Goes Rolling Home" from the Disney Pediatric AIDS Benefit album of 1991.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.
""I'm a man without conviction I'm a man who doesn't know. How to sell a contradiction You come and go, you ..." Dylan is quoting everyone, but Culture Club?"
Good catch. Totally consistent with caring about The Eagles and other pop singers. "Karma Chameleon" is one of the best pop singles ever.
By the way, Dylan sings, "I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods..."
But "Karma" rhymes "conviction" with "contradiction" (even though Boy George never calls himself a "man of contradiction"):
I'm a man without conviction
I'm a man who doesn't know
How to sell a contradiction
You come and go, you come and go
"Contradiction" also ties to "I contain mulititudes" — from the Walt Whitman poem:
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
But I agree that the double "I'm a man" has to be an evocation of Boy George. I don't think Dylan accidentally channeled the old lyrics. He seems to contain an encyclopedia of musical verse.
This song is better than "Murder Most Foul", mostly because it is considerably shorter. It has a couple of good lines in it. I don't care if I never hear it again. I am tired of Dylan tracks with slow, "subtle" instrumental backing and portentous intoning of so-so lyrics. I would rather hear a remake of "Wiggle Wiggle", which is, in fact, one of my favorite Dylan tracks. Give me a tempo that gets the blood moving!
Song Salad
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