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Washington Post

The uncanny Bob Dylan song that inaugurated an era of dread

Sometimes you can point to a single, humble work of art — it may be a song, a movie, a book or a work of visual art — and find in it a key to an entire zeitgeist. You would assume, in such cases, that the work in question would be a product of this zeitgeist, the present cultural moment. But it sometimes happens — it's one of art's great mysteries — that the work that most resonates with the present and somehow unlocks it was produced in a much earlier era. Bob Dylan is still alive. But it was in 1965 — essentially a whole other epoch — that Dylan released 'Ballad of a Thin Man,' a simple song that speaks more directly, insinuatingly and powerfully to my sense of what it feels like to be alive in 2025 than any contemporary work I can think of. There is a great precedent for this phenomenon. Charles Baudelaire's poems, especially the 'Flowers of Evil,' and his great essay 'The Painter of Modern Life,' are like the Rosetta Stone of early modernism. Baudelaire's insights into how modernity affected the individual — his feeling for sex robbed of ulterior meaning, for the sloth that results from our failed attempts to lead a spiritual existence, for the links between glamour and suffering, and for the strange forces tying childhood and illness to creativity — inspired generations of 20th-century artists. Those artists didn't care that the works in question were written midway through the previous century. So it is with Dylan — which is why, year by year, the fascination with him only grows. Dylan is the Picasso of popular music. He has had as many creative personae as the Spaniard, and as much longevity (Picasso died, still painting, at 91; Dylan, still touring, is 83). But no Dylan period was greater than the two years, 1965 and '66, that produced 'Bringing It All Back Home,' 'Highway 61 Revisited' and 'Blonde on Blonde.' 'Ballad of a Thin Man' appeared on 'Highway 61.' When the musicians had finished recording it, the drummer Bobby Gregg said, 'That is a nasty song, Bob.' Indeed it is. 'Ballad of a Thin Man' functions as a sort of dark pendant to Dylan's more celebrated 'Like a Rolling Stone.' Both songs, addressing the listener as 'you,' conjure an image of a victim of some great turning of life's tables, and seem to mock this 'you' as he struggles in this new, unwonted predicament. ('You're invisible now … How does it feel?') Everyone who has heard 'Ballad of a Thin Man' remembers the distinctive lilt of its verses, where each phrase is a small, sinister step down from the last. The song's rollicking, carnival-like instrumentation is laced with Dylan himself on piano and band member Al Kooper galumphing along on his horror movie organ. But people particularly remember the refrain, and the descending, deeply ominous minor-key melody from which the lyrics themselves feel inseparable: 'You know something is happening but you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?' The rush of syllables in the refrain's first half feels almost like speech. But the sentence — part statement of fact, part incantation, part sarcastic, menacing taunt — slows drastically as the melody drops into the song's dark and terrifying substrate: 'Do you, Mis-ter Jones?' It's an indelible line. You can feel its dark, heavy import spreading like the silent, ineluctable collapse of an immune system. It's there as we think about artificial intelligence in this burgeoning moment. (We know it will transform everything, but we have no idea how to think about that.) It's there when we think about the climate. (It's changing, direly. But what exactly will it all mean for our kids — and their kids?) And it's there throughout the art, music and film of the past 30 years. Knowing something is happening but having no idea what that might be — only that you yourself are somehow implicated — is, for instance, the premise from which the entire career of David Lynch sprang. Bill Pullman in 'Lost Highway,' Justin Theroux in 'Mulholland Drive,' and Laura Dern in 'Inland Empire' are all versions of Mr. Jones. But it's not just the song's universal applicability that feels important right now. It's also Dylan's sneering, taunting tone. You could hear that same tone — a kind of sarcastic contempt, directed at an unnamed 'you' — 15 years ago in Lady Gaga's anthems of alienated love and today in Kendrick Lamar's diss tracks. ('Your lil' memes is losin' steam, they figured you out.') I sense the same spirit, too, behind television shows like 'The White Lotus,' where almost everyone is morally repulsive but no one knows it, or (if they suspect it) has any idea what to do about it. And it's there in the paintings and sculptures of our best contemporary artists, among them Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz and Amy Sillman. These artists' most powerful works all speak in acid tones to brokenness, cynicism, and despair, both political and personal. People have interpreted 'Ballad of a Thin Man' as Dylan's critique of the journalists who hounded him with petty questions, forever demanding that he explain himself. Dylan himself fed the idea that there was one particular journalist who served as an inspiration for Mr. Jones. But fixing the song's interpretation in this way is itself a form of explaining it away. It snuffs out the possibility that the song speaks to something much deeper. Like many of Dylan's songs from the same period, 'Ballad of a Thin Man' is a carnival song. Its characters include sword swallowers, geeks, freaks, camels, cows and lumberjacks. They give the song its universal, timeless stamp. But Dylan's lyrics also have an uncanny specificity. 'Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels/ He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels/ And without further notice, he asks you how it feels/ And he says, 'Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan.'' Somehow, despite the apparently free-floating surrealism, lines like these have undeniable grip. They seem tailor-made for our out-of-joint world, when almost every old verity, every 'safe assumption,' is in the process of collapsing. A world of algorithms, dopamine-driven addictions, conspiracy theories, meme-coins, natural disasters, geopolitical upheaval, resurgent fascism and brazen, ubiquitous gaslighting. The first and final verses of 'Ballad of a Thin Man' both begin: 'You walk into the room.' To enter a room where you are utterly at a loss — and, moreover, where you are also the object of mirth, derision or outright intimidation — is a universal anxiety. It's a scenario as fraught and frightening for captains of industry, political kingmakers, Ivy League academics and Wall Street bankers as for socially struggling teenagers. To tell someone that they don't know what's happening is to imply that you, or at least someone, does. But Dylan casts so much doubt on anyone having the upper hand (epistemologically speaking) that, by the end of the song, all sense of a higher authority has evaporated. 'You raise up your head and you ask, 'Is this where it is?'/ And somebody points to you and says, 'It's his'/ And you say, 'What's mine?' and somebody else says, 'Well, what is?'/ And you say, 'Oh my God, am I here all alone?'' Questions about who owns what, who can claim which rights, and indeed on what basis rights exist at all, are obviously acutely germane today. But 'Ballad of a Thin Man' goes far, far beyond this dark political moment. We used to live, for example, with the idea that, for all its flaws, the news media played a part in connecting individual citizens to wider social and political realities. All that is rapidly disappearing. The 'self-publishing revolution' and the attention economy have stimulated an unslakable thirst for unfounded assertion and rampant conspiracy thinking: Alex Jones, Pizzagate, QAnon, and all their proliferating progeny. At the same time, our culture has developed an unchecked obsession with 'data,' a commodity or resource it equates with knowing. We have arranged things, in fact, so that the world produces data almost on demand, like cows produce milk. ('You see this one-eyed midget shouting the word 'Now'/ And you say, 'For what reason?' and he says, 'How'/ And you say, 'What does this mean?' and he screams back, 'You're a cow!/ Give me some milk or else go home.'') No problem, it seems, can be acknowledged, let alone meaningfully addressed, before the geeks have converted it into data. But of course, data, like conspiracy thinking, creates only the illusion of control. What it represses is precisely what former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld called 'unknown unknowns,' since these (by definition) can't be quantified. Yet, as Dylan knew, we are besieged by 'unknown unknowns.' Amidst all this, certain people — as the song's fourth verse reminds us — continue to hope that an advanced education, or a prestigious profession, or good looks or a passing acquaintance with 'The Great Gatsby' will secure their status, their right to succeed in life. But such forlorn hopes were discredited long ago. Where we're all going, F. Scott Fitzgerald won't help a bit. I could go on. But why am I even writing this? I know no better than anyone. I have been around half a century, but I've never felt it more powerfully: I, too, am Mr. Jones. And I've just walked into that room.