Dylan’s Back Pages
“But I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”, muses Bob Dylan over a progression of softly strung melancholy chords in his song My Back Pages. Released on his album Another Side of Bob Dylan, it is exactly as the album title suggests: a realisation of an alternate, disillusioned and disenchanted side of Dylan both as an artist, and as a figurehead for the progressive movement of the sixties in America. Certainly not the most popular of Dylan’s songs, it is perhaps one of the most fundamental in his artistic growth.
My Back Pages sounds like any typical folk-like, Dylanesque song. Guitar chords stand alone, paired only with his distinctive voice. The true substance of his lilted singing, however, are a diversion from the norm. Although the previous song on the album, Motopsycho Nightmare, is funny, light-hearted and rambunctious, the latter is deeply introspective and wistful.
The song sneeringly takes aim at idealistic surety that pervaded the youth movements and protests of the early 1960s. Songs like Oxford Town, Blowin’ in the Wind, and The Times they are a Changin’ all protested some sort of political injustice. In My Back Pages, while his guitar continues a usual folk tune, his words speak a different story: they are profound and—in some sense—enlightened. Like the guitar on which he plays, Dylan strikes a chord with the misplaced idealism of the time. His epiphany of sorts leaves him distant from his past beliefs; beliefs that he used to cling onto with internal and moral surety. Now he sees another side to himself, another side to Bob Dylan, hidden in the unseen back pages of his life.
Dylan is essentially feeding his adoring young audience a bitter pill to swallow. While each verse undulates along beautifully crafted poetic aphorisms, they all slur into a wonderful molto crescendo and diminuendo before being put to rest through the aforementioned concession, “Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” In this refrain, Dylan is alluding to the juxtaposition of wisdom and age, and poking fun at his previous self-professed job as a political activist. It is assumed wisdom comes with time, and that the older we are, the more we know about how the world ‘works’. Somewhat senselessly, he assumed to have found ultimate truth in the situations he was protesting against—he was certain in his principles—“high and mighty”—and therefore intellectually mature. In reality, he was mentally adolescent, with “crimson flames tied through [his] ears”. Although the young believe they have wisdom, it is an illusion: they really don’t know enough. He acknowledges this paradox. He has entered a new and reflective phase of confusion from “stern to bow”; no longer is the world “black and white,” lies romanticised somehow in the culture of activism. Although he may be physically older, he has an undeveloped knowledge of the world.
Dylan has the astounding ability to get it all right. While his eloquent words float contemplatively over the guitar, if you listen closely they purposefully recount and investigate his own journey from the dark hole of blind belief. Like many Dylan songs, he is actually telling a story, the story of his intellectual enlightenment and the wider hypocrisy among the activist movement. Whilst using “ideas as his maps” for his music, he is never truly sure when it will end. In his quest along this idealistic map, he tries to become a romanticised figure of political ‘good’, though much of it is actually led by trying to impress women. In his hatred for professors, who preach their own politics which their students are forced to recite mindlessly, he is not aware of his own political preaching, which many people sing along to. Although activists push for equality in school for African-Americans, liberty is not attained through such simple acts. Ultimately, Dylan realises he is unwilling to play the puppet for the liberal, guilt-afflicted white youth protestors he was so inspired by initially. In many ways, the Dylan in this song is a troubadour for individuality of thought.
Despite his attempts to distance himself from his image among his listeners, many continued to adore Dylan’s music. It was trendy. The song went somewhat unnoticed; the general public still loved the idea of Dylan the protestor and they still wanted his music.
Perhaps the greatest insult to Dylan’s masterful My Back Pages is the far more popular cover by The Byrds, released in 1967. Poppy and tinny, the arrangement sounds soulless. While Dylan’s My Back Pages is 4:23 minutes long, by removing verses and speeding up the tempo the Byrds’s is cut down to 2:31 to enable easier radio airtime. With a guitar solo and a chorus over the refrain, the original verses are rendered meaningless—the evocative, honest truths Dylan bequeaths for the listener are drowned out by a gaggle of instruments and a catchy tune. The Byrds did what the sixties did best and commodified Dylan’s song into an easy to swallow pill that wouldn’t offend or inspire.
Perhaps the most contemporary link to Dylan’s artistic and political disillusionment is the case of Ye West, formerly Kanye West. Infamously known for his outburst on TV that George W Bush “didn’t care about black people”, Kanye has been a black rights activist through Rap. Like many of his fellow rap artists, he extoled racism which he saw as prevalent in American society. It was a shock then, for many, when he released a photo of himself wearing a Trump Make America Great Again hat. Nearly overnight, he polarised his liberal fans.
Kanye was intent on reshaping his image. While struggling with bi-polar disorder, he realised that he couldn’t keep making music for those that wanted to use him as a spokesperson for black activism. He had become part of a group mentality, both black and white, that he saw as deeply hypocritical. For him, Trump was a step away from that, and one more towards intellectual freedom.
While Dylan and Kanye have very little in common artistically, they both felt the rule of mob mentality overwhelming any semblance of individuality of thought. While they at first championed activism, they slowly began to feel disenchanted with their own public and self-ordained image. As Kanye notes, he “didn’t want to become part of the black monolith.” Similarly, Dylan says: “I don't want to write for people anymore. You know – be a spokesman." Both artists refuse to compromise to meet anybody’s expectations but their own. For both Ye and Dylan, this tactic worked remarkably well—Ye’s music is still wildly popular. Perhaps artists have very little control over how their public image is received and portrayed; the best they can do is create meaningful music that resonates with people, regardless of their orientation.
Bob Dylan’s My Back Pages rouses a sense of wonderment, but also sobering reality. Dylan is confronting his worst demons: his blind faith and hypocrisy as a political activist. In reality there is no black and white, right and wrong, good and bad. Dylan reminds his listeners—whether they be keen, wide-eyed youths, or old, ‘wise’ professors—that we all have more to learn from life, and that sometimes idealistic surety can lead to disaster.
