We’ve looked at Bob Dylan’s greatest love songs and his epic story songs. Today, we turn our attention to the type of song that made him most famous at the outset of his career - the political protest song. That type of song was what launched the folk revivalists who really came of age with Dylan in the early 1960s. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger inspired them and began by playing populist worker songs before the Vietnam War became their primary target.
Dylan was too prolific to stick to political protest – Phil Ochs was more of a constant voice about political issues. But when he turned his attention to it, Dylan could write a powerful polemic – equally caustic and incisive about the issues of the day.
It began with one of the two original songs on his self-titled debut. “Song to Woody” is only political in its wistful longing for Guthrie’s voice to return to the early ‘60s. (A Dylan devotee, Steve Earle, would follow suit 35 years later with his own plea to Guthrie – “Christmas in Washington.”)
Five of the best political songs from Bob Dylan
The following album opened with the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the restrictor plates came off. Dylan would study politics in poetic terms (“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”), in comic terms (“Talkin’ World War III Blues”), and in outright anger (“Masters of War”).
Then with his third album, opening with “The Times They Are a-Changin,” he really hit his stride. And that is where we begin our countdown of Bob Dylan’s five greatest political songs.
WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE (1964)
The third track on The Times They Are A-Changin’ begins with a wistful harmonica, and its gentle, singsong melody could almost support a romantic memory of childhood and growing up. But this is far from romanticized.
He opens simply enough – “Oh, my name, it ain’t nothin’ – My age, it means less – The country I come from – is called the Midwest.” Then he recounts his childhood history lessons – the defeat of the Natives, the defeat of the Spanish, the victories in WW 1 & 2, up to the present battle with the Russians. Each verse concludes with the simple panacea – “with God on our side.”
Toward the end, he begins moving on from the simple lessons he was taught into self-realization: “But now we got weapons – Of chemical dust – If fire them we’re forced to – Then fire them we must – One push of the button – And a shot the world wide – And ya never ask questions – When God’s on your side.” He then wonders aloud if Judas believed God was on his side, before concluding with the most obvious question of all – “The words fill my head – And they fall to the floor – That if God’s on our side – He’ll stop the next war.” Not bad for a 23-year-old.
SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES (1965)
It may be the greatest song Bob Dylan ever wrote. It certainly was one of his most shattering. Roaring out at the beginning of Bringing It All Back Home, the elliptically-titled track delivers four rapid-fire verses that sum up the zeitgeist of the mid-60s as well as anyone ever had. This was a more mature voice – still full of youthful righteousness – but now taking everything a little more seriously.
Do you know one often-overlooked way you can tell? The title of the album was Bringing It All Back Home and not Bringin’ It All Back Home. Prior to this, Dylan would have relied on the folkie vernacular and dropped the final ‘G” from “Bringing.” He would rarely do that from this point forward.
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” is jam-packed with cultural references and visions of Big Brother pulling the strings. He ends the second verse with one of his most famous lines “Keep a clean nose, watch for plainclothes – You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Bill Ayers would borrow that name for his militant protest group, The Weathermen, a few years later. What more bona fides could a political song have?
BALLAD OF A THIN MAN (1965)
The same year, one album later, “The Ballad of a Thin Man” is Dylan at his most cryptic and his most haunting. The haunting part comes from Dylan’s apocalyptic piano chords which open the song, backed by the eerie echoes of Al Kooper’s swirling organ. The cryptic part comes from the lyrics.
“You walk into the room – With a pencil in your hand – You see somebody naked – And you say ‘Who is that man?” – You try so hard – But you don’t understand – Just what you’ll say when you get home…” The verse ends, as do all seven of them, with the refrain “Because something is happening here and you don’t know what it is – Do you, Mr. Jones?”
The questions from the hallucinatory lyrics abound. At one point, a one-eyed midget demands that Mr. Jones provide him with milk. At another point, a sword-swallower returns Mr. Jones’ throat to him after using it – well, I suppose to swallow a sword. The fact is, Dylan puts us squarely in Mr. Jones’ shoes.
Like him, we don’t really know what is going on, but we know something is happening here. This was a sophisticated put down of the culture’s elders, who have nominal control over how everything functions, but who are clearly blind to what is bubbling under the surface. Who exactly is Mr. Jones? It has been debated quite a bit. Dylan says it was based on a real person. More than fifty years later, it doesn’t really matter. By this point, we all have some Mr. Jones inside us.
SLOW TRAIN (1979)
The album Slow Train Coming was the first of three in which Dylan explored a newfound (and ultimately short-lived) Christian faith. The album has been clouded by overt references to faith, which upset some fans while pleasing others. Nowhere is that cloud more obvious than on the album’s second single “Slow Train.”
Though there are references – both overt and hidden—to religious faith, I have always heard the track as an incisive political statement of America’s place in the world in the late 1970s.
This was the era of the oil crisis and there are obvious references to that situation – “All that foreign oil controlling American soil,” in addition to throwbacks to the old-school protest of corporate greed – “People starving and thirsting, grain elevators are bursting.” These complaints may be grounded in what he saw at the time as a turning away from religious faith, but the situations he describes are nothing if not political, eventually concluding that “In the home of the brave, Jefferson turnin’ over in his grave.”
He chastises false healers who talk “in the name of religion.” Whether or not you buy into the Christian worldview expressed in “Slow Train,” it is proof that religion and politics are more inseparable than some of us would like to believe.
NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY (1983)
Infidels, released in 1983, was a pretty clear pronouncement that Dylan’s flirtations with Christianity were over. Faith didn’t vanish from his songwriting, but it took a back seat to his observations about love and life. And about politics, which he was largely turning away from at this point in his career. “Neighborhood Bully” was as overt a commentary on a particular geopolitical issue as Dylan had ever written.
“Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man – His enemies say he’s on their land – They’ve got him outnumbered about a million to one – He’s got no place to escape to, no place to run – He’s the neighborhood bully.” Lou Reed would be a little more bombastic in his defense of Israel a few years later in “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim,” but Dylan is pretty obvious here.
Listening to it today is painful, regardless of which side of the current brutality you are on. It’s hard to hear “Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace – They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed will cease – And they wouldn’t hurt a fly, to hurt one they would weep – They lay and wait for this bully to fall asleep” and not be forced to confront uncomfortable questions. Which is what makes for a great political song.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
- “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963)
- "The Times They are a-Changin'" (1964)
- "Clean Cut Kid" (1985)
- "Mother of Muses" (2020)