Submitted by eyolf on
This chapter is probably my first attempt at using the language of functional harmony to interpret the harmonic content of a Dylan song. It may not be my best attempt, and it is probably too much of a torso to merit inclusion, were it not for its status as the first.
One of the main obstacles to bridging the gap between traditional music analysis and popular music is that it seems like a pointless undertaking in the first place. The song structure, where the same, relatively short music is repeated for each verse, hardly allows for any more intricate motivic elaborations to be untangled, and on the harmonic side, it seems difficult to get beyond pointing out the obvious: that the song (any song) is closely related to formalized chord patterns. We knew that already.
But still: – the temptation remains, and the desire to ‘find’ something in the song. And lo! (and behold) suddenly a connection strikes you, and you can’t help but grasping for your analytical box of tools, to see if there isn’t a wrench somewhere that will fit one of the nuts after all.
Take Just Like A Woman. It was one of the first Dylan songs I heard, yet it took me until last Friday to see the genius in the song (as apart from its beauty or its cleverness).
It all works on the harmonic level, of course. Not much more than three chords and their variants, but here, it all comes together very nicely. Whatever the text is about – drugs, transvestitism, or whatever – that’s for the lyric scrutinizers to figure out; but the music is about pain and unfulfilled love.
‘Nobody feels any pain,’ the first phrase states. The music says precisely the same, in its own language: F major-Bb major-C major-F major. Or more technically: Tonic (T), Subdominant (S) , Dominant (D) and Tonic (T). The oldest and most thoroughly established turn in tonal music, popular and classical alike, and it represents the highest degree of tonal stability. Full circle. Nothing has happened. It means Rest, Stability, Repose, Return, Cadence – No pain.
In the next phrase there is evidence of rain, but the chordal level is still the same: No pain.
The third phrase – ‘Everybody knows’ – is sung to the chords Bb–C, or S-D, which is the first two steps in the turn back to the tonic in the basic tonal cadence, as we have met it twice already.
This is the point where the musical ear is beginning to think: Again? We heard that twice already! We get the point: Nothing’s happening in here.
We’re clearly waiting for a Tonic to complete the progression – S-D is just screaming for it, to reach the resolution. But the expected tonic is even further delayed by the declaration ‘that baby’s got new clothes’ to the same two S-D chords as in the previous phrase. Once again: yes, we get the point. think you told me once before.
‘But lately…’ – yes, it is late, and we’re still waiting for the tonic! What we get, instead, is a quasi-descent, still circling around in the Subdominant-Dominant area, still waiting to be resolved. This could be called: building up tension. Prolonging a preparation. Like when you’re travelling, you always reach a point when you’re no longer leaving, you’re on your way back home, and if you still have ten days left on the road when you reach that point, that’s going to be ten long days. That kind of tension.
And then, after all this: ‘have fallen…’ You realize the train you got on didn’t take you home, it went to the shitty, no-good neighbour town of yours, Kill Devil Hill, Goosebum Gulch, Namsos or whatever it’s called, and you still have a long way to go. In the language of tonality it’s called the relative tonic, and is represented here by D minor. This harmonic turn, to the minor key that is the closest relative of the tonic, which is just about the smallest conceivable deviation from the ‘trodden path’ of the three-chordal scheme, is nevertheless one of the pillars that the dramatical course of events rests upon. The effect is a combination of the expectations that have been created and the words that accompany this: ‘fallen’, ‘fog, amphetamine, pearls’, ‘I was hungry’. It’s a punch in the stomach that forces you to re-evaluate all that has happened so far. The State-of-No-Pain was just make-believe. And what’s worse: there’s more to come.
Whereas the introduction of D minor was more of a gesture, the real drama begins in the bridge, and it’s hardly bringing anyone safely over troubled water this time – ‘It was raining from the first, and I was dying there of thirst.’ The lyrics recount past events, as a reference to the rain in the first verse, but the thirst is new information, you didn’t say anything about that then? The chord here is A7, what one might call a ‘reconciliatory gesture’, since A7 is the dominant – the preparatory chord – of Goosebum Gulch, a.k.a. D minor. Look upon it as an attempt to look at the Gulch from a more benevolent perspective; maybe it isn’t such a shitty town after all. But just at the point where the now longed-for D minor was supposed to enter, comes the most fatal mistake: ‘I came in here’. Back to the Tonic, F major, instead. Really – you shouldn’t have done that. The Tonic, which only a moment ago signified Rest, Stability, Repose, Return, Cadence, No pain, is now rather an act of desperation in a hopeless situation. You can’t recover what’s lost. (She breaks, you know.) But this time, you can’t escape: ‘This long time curse hurts, and what’s worse …’ – yes, what is? Once again the A7-chord waiting to get to D minor – ‘…is this…’ – are we finally going to get a D minor after all? – ‘pain in here’. Not even a Tonic this time, but a Bb major: the Subdominant of F major, but not even remotely related to A7. A complete loss of tonal direction, in other words, or as the lyrics state: ‘I can’t stay in here.’ Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you?
Back to start, but then not at all. The same full circle in the beginning of the last verse (as in every verse), but this time: ‘I just don’t fit’. The same music, but with a completely different ‘meaning’. Interestingly enough, this is exactly the way a classical sonata works: The exposition is quoted again in the end of the movement, but all that has happened in the mean time transforms the music (or the experience of it) into something different.
These are the essentials of the song, musically speaking: A delayed release of tension, then a release in the ‘wrong’ direction, before at the third attempt the release is withheld completely. From here the analysis can go in several directions. One is the rather obvious question: Is this withheld tension sexual tension? And in that case: what happens when the string breaks? The musicologist Susan McLary has called Beethoven a rapist based on the evidence of his ninth symphony, because of the enormous tension that is generated and then violently released, with a ‘pelvic pounding’. The style of Beethoven had such an influence on his followers, which remotely includes even popular music, that it is not entirely wrong to compare Dylan with him. Arguably, the aesthetics of the violently released tension is fundamental to most or all music written ever since. But in the case of Just Like A Woman, there is no pelvic pounding, only frustration.
A more psychologically oriented analyst might find it an interesting task to go through all the different live versions to see if there is more or less ‘pelvic pounding’ in the performances depending on how Dylan’s life was at the moment. I prefer, in accordance with my analytical credo, to view the song solely as a musical expression of a frustrated love affair and the laborious and impossible way back from the point of no return. It is the flip side of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, if you like.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And look down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In that sense it really is a ‘Just Like A Woman Revisited’. And it proves no better place to be than Highway 61.
The journey is over. Please leave by the left hand side.
(1998)