“Subterranean Homesick Blues”
is the opening theme of Bob Dylan’s fourth album, Bringing it all Back Home (1965), and it marks a transition from
folk music and more obviously engaged lyrics (protest songs) to rock’n’roll
rhythms (in fact a comeback, since this was Dylan’s starting point) and
open-ended verse indebted to nonsense, surrealism, beat poetry. The fact that
the song was made a film clip for Dylan’s British tour documentary Don’t Look Back (directed by D. A.
Pennebaker) with Allen Ginsberg in the backdrop, reinforces the latter
influence, as well as the word “Subterranean” possibly alluding to Jack
Kerouac’s 1958 beat-novel The
Subterraneans, though this word may also generally be interpreted as a cue
for the “underground” atmosphere of the 60s hippie culture in the US.
The fact that the song lyrics
start “in the basement” reinforces the underground message, and the
introduction of a character “mixing up the medicine” suggests the process of
codeine distillation for drug intake that was generalized among the “hip” youth
of the time. The lyrical subject, in turn, places himself on the sidewalk,
while he “thinks about the government”, an understatement about the street
protests that objected to US politics of ethnic oppression (the Civil Rights
movement), wars of power display (Vietnam) and competing world ideologies (the
Cold War and the repression of Communism within the US). The next couplet of
the first line continues in the political vein, conveying to a certain extent a
continuity with Dylan’s formerly engaged career. Certainly, unemployment (“laid
off”) and social welfare (“paid off”) are evoked, but they are compounded by a
dissonant allusion to the figure of conspiracy, the spy, with the words “trench
coat” and “badge”, triggering nonsense and a sarcastic tone that, throughout
the song, will mark a disruption with Dylan’s previous more linear punch-lines.
The second stanza introduces
a phrase, “Look out, kid”, a sort of warning to the youth of his time, which
will weave a refrain with variation in every other stanza, remindful of the
making of “the blues”, a genre indicated in the song title, though subverted in
its content. The development of the phrases that follow this warning, “it’s
something you did”, “don’t matter what you did”, “you’re gonna get hit”, “they
keep it all hid”, points to a growing menace to youth’s carelessness vs. the
plot of society. This crescendo accompanies a bi-part structure, where the
first 3 stanzas mainly thematize rebellion against the establishment, whereas
the last 5 gradually point to an ironic conformity. The latter, still, is
dubiously first conveyed by another piece of advice, in the fourth stanza,
“Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose / Keep a clean
nose”, where we mark a reference to the police strategy for clearing away
demonstrators, through high-pressure water hoses, and another reminder against
drug addiction, “keep a clean nose”, whose ambiguity and truth-value is meant
to sound puzzling through the preposterous rhyme of “hose” and “nose”.
This kind of ambivalence
pervades the poem, since the imperative formula, which may point to the
structure of protest calls or banners (at once emphasized and undermined by the
film clip where Dylan exhibits handwritten loose phrases from the song, but in
a desynchronized manner and sometimes subverting the original sense), is
twisted through humor and absurdity. These last two traits are also
particularly evident in the most enigmatic of the stanzas, the third, where the
character Maggie might or might not be growing illicit plants but persecution
is a sure thing that arises from the paranoia of tapped phone lines and the
haunting figure of the D. A. (District Attorney).
Two couplets are worth
mentioning for conveying ideas that Dylan has clung to throughout his career:
the image of the “blowing wind” as a mystery of nature to be deciphered by the
hip individual – “You don’t need a weather man / to know which way the wind
blows” – and the punch-line “Don’t follow leaders”, echoing the former protest
songs where the villains were political and religious leaders (e. g. “Only a Pawn in their Game”, sung in
1963 on the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom). However, the
straightforwardness of this indictment, in the tradition of self-reliant
Emersonian idealism that Dylan favored, is again thwarted by the dissonant
follow-up “watch your parkin’ metters”, short-circuiting intelligence in a way
that marks Dylan’s allegiance with the contradictory revelations of the Beat
poets and their predecessors, among them Walt Whitman. Indeed, Dylan’s shift
from the position of the “I” to that of the “you” throughout the song is also
very Whitmanian, and a sign of his poetics of adhesiveness, in this case with
the troubled “kid” being addressed.
The
abovementioned appearance of the poet Allen Ginsberg in the song’s promotional
clip points moreover to Dylan’s aspirations as principally a “word player” and
a (song-)writer in his own right. Such a claim is made blatant by the stress on
words throughout this clip, which marked the modern era of music videos and is
justly said to have been an inspiration for rappers and hip-hop performers
alike. Dylan’s preference for open-ended rhetoric, arguably a trademark of most
of his career, is fully displayed in the song’s last line, my favorite, where
deadpan humor, or sarcasm, prevails, subverting the commonsensical grudge
against delinquency, through non-sense and a surrealistic vein bound to blow
things up: “the pumps don’t work, ‘cause the vandals took the handles.”
