The Times They [Still] Are A-Changin’

Every July there is a two-week international guitar festival here in Córdoba. I think that is because Córdoba claims some credit for the first classical guitar being made here in the sixteenth century. Moreover, every year they seem to make a point of inviting some aged rock and roll star to put on a concert.

In 2015, it was Bob Dylan. Ol’ Bob was born in May 1941, so that means he was 74 years old when he came here. He still dressed like he did when he became popular in the 1960s. He still wore his hair like he did then. He still sang the same songs he did then. So, what is a-changin’ for ol’ Bob? I think it is time to give him a 2020 revisit.

Dylan and his fellow pop singers in the 60s were catalysts for change in Western society. Their lyrics were rebellious and disparaging of the status quo of that era. They cried out for change and they eventually got what they asked for. I think these lyrics from Dylan’s song with the above title will show what I mean:

“The Times They Are A-Changin’”

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your wall
For the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Even though ol’ Bob hasn’t changed much from the 60s, for sure we are living in changing times. Before you can adjust to one change, it changes. The most rapid change is coming in the area of morality. The 60s generation wanted a new one and the twenty-first century has chucked morality altogether. Issues of right and wrong have become issues of rights—one’s right to do what they want morally.

What prompted me to want to revisit ol’ Bob in 2020 is the recent acquisition of a book titled Bob Dylan and Philosophy, edited by Peter Vernezze and Carl J. Porter. It is a collection of essays by various philosophers on various themes in Dylan’s music over his long career.

The first essay I want to mention is, “ ‘I Used to Care, but Things Have Changed’: Passion and the absurd in Dylan’s Later Works” written by Rick Anthony Furtak. The author identifies Dylan’s later music with the existential philosophers Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Albert Camus (1913-1960). He says Dylan’s “later music is filled with cynical and pessimistic lyrics”… “states of mind which are only a few shades removed from an absolutely black despair.” That certainly echoes the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and Camus. Camus is the philosopher who said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether or not life is worth living. Of course, for him, it was not. Dylan expressed almost the same sentiment in his Blood on the Tracks album. “Why are we here?” is an entirely different question from, “Is being here (with all its despair) worth it?” Dylan’s music explored both questions but gave no substantive answers.

The essay that really piqued my interest is “Who Killed Medgar Evers?” by Avery Kolers. In 1963, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in Jackson, Mississippi by Byron De la Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council in Jackson. In his song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, Dylan proposed that some people should not be judged from a moral perspective. He says that even though Beckwith fired the gun, he should not be blamed because the “poor white man” in the South is manipulated into race hatred by divide-and-rule tactics, his whiteness a cheap and easy ‘psychological wage’ that keeps his anger directed away from his rulers and toward his black neighbors.” His lyrics of 1963 do have a message for today:

“Only a Pawn in Their Game”

He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
‘Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ‘neath the hood
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

What goes around comes around. Racism is still alive and it has changed sides. Just substitute “black” for “white” and “white” for “black” in these lyrics and you will have a good description of what is going on in society today.

In the last essay from the book I will mention, “Just Like a Woman: Dylan, Authenticity and the Second Sex” written by Kevin Krein and Abigail Levin, the authors state, “Dylan’s voice has served as a conscience to the collective soul of America in pointing out injustices we have committed and flaws in our worldviews.” Billy Graham was doing the same thing during the same time period as Dylan, but unlike Dylan, Graham offered a sure remedy for the morass of society that changes the heart. All Dylan could come up with is, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”

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