So it all comes down to “Maggie’s Farm”. That’s what Obama said during a recent interview. That it’s this Dylan song (from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965) and a song of great protest – protesting protest (which was actually a recent part of a local chapter of ImprovEverywhere, for the record, with protestors protesting protest before their city statehouse; more power to ‘em) that he likes the most, and seems to identify with the most. This is the same “Maggie’s Farm” of I-won’t-be-part-of-this-club; I don’t wanna work on this farm anymore, I ain’t gonna work on this farm anymore – well I try my best, to be just like I am, but, but everybody wants me to be just like them.

Hey! Doesn’t that sound like Obama? Everybody’s trying to pigeonhole him, stake some prior claim, yet Obama defies our best efforts to classify him. And he likes Dylan – a lot, he says. No surprise there and it’s reported Dylan likes him back. As we saw Dylan speaking of his own views about pigeonholing (and we all remember the scene in Don’t Look Back with the guy from Time magazine – a raw scene in which a scathing, very young, Dylan, proves that he already has his chops). “I’m not even a pop-singer” he tells him, yet he was clearly “popular, but nor was he a folk singer, nor was he a poet. In the final account, Dylan tells us, “I know more about you just by looking than you’ll ever know about me, ever.” It is arrogant, cocky, but the thing is, he’s probably right. Dylan is pretty good at sizing us up, sussing out what we want, but can we suss him out? Do any of us really “know” Dylan? The real question then – is Dylan “knowable”? Someone once asked him if he was ever “himself”. A rude question and Dylan called him on it right away.

Yes, I think Dylan is quite often himself – and the older he gets, the more himself he is because the more comfortable he is with who he is. But what that reporter was implying, and Dylan picked up on this (as would most intelligent people) was that he was some kind of flim-flam artist – faking it. Dylan is a lot of things, but I wouldn’t say he’s a fake. Far from it, which seems paradoxical for someone who for years pretended to be something other than they are (changing his name, creating a whole past that never was) but what kept Dylan authentic was that he lived that role because he believed in it and felt it much the way an actor falls into and becomes a character. That’s perhaps faking it in the beginning and we all know about that (let’s be honest for a second), but as a very, very good friend of mine told on the first day of a big job, “Everybody’s fakin’ it: You fake it til you own it, then you’re not faking it anymore.”

He was right.

So neither Dylan nor Obama will be pigeonholed. As Dylan said, “I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.” So we take things on their own terms and imagine that Obama picked this song for good reason; taking each on its own terms and without prior definition, Instead then, sorting out for himself as he goes along what is what.  This is really how it should be, so it ought not be so profound, but how many people are so eager to define and pigeonhole? In this world, sorting things out and making your own decisions has (sadly) become pretty fucking profound. And more, one of the things that Dylan has always done best is tap into the collective-consciousness in ways that most other people never could or can (few have succeeded: Shakespeare did, Lewis Carroll did – these two remain the most widely quoted men every single year to this day. Yes, it’s true). In this way Dylan is then the village shaman (I’ve said this before but it’s worth reiterating), speaking for so many, voicing what we cannot find the words for. 

That’s the poet’s job as well: we speak for others. Someone must be held up to say that which people are afraid to say, cannot find the words to say, or simply, won’t say. Then there are those who are either brave or stupid or both or just don’t give a damn and who will say these things for us. Dylan is one of those people. He, like the shaman, travels fast down the witness tree on behalf of the All of us (whether he intends to or not, it is a role we have assigned him and that he has taken on). He returns speaking in tongues, but able to translate for us some things that are profound. No, I’m not saying that all of Dylan’s music is profound, but I am saying that a lot of it is prescient and has been. I am saying that he does say what we lack the words for, despite the fact that we speak the same language some of us, it is in the way he puts them together. It is in the pairing.

For the most part, people feel safer with definitions. Those people and situations that don’t fit neatly into our social register are too unwieldy and so are labeled eccentric or Wrong with the big capital letter.  Sadly, this society, especially Western society, likes judgment. We like Good/Bad. We like Right/Wrong. We like Black/White. We stick to the broad strokes because they make us feel “safer”. The consensus then seems to be if I don’t “get” (because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is do you, Mr. Jones…).

So, “it” or “something” must be Wrong and it must be Weird because we just don’t get it.  Both of these are absolutely incorrect, of course, but that’s just how it is; “You try so hard, but you just don’t understand”. There is Weird, and there is maybe (and I say this with great emphasis for such catholic judgments have no true philosophical value) Wrong, but I frankly don’t see what any good these judgments do us. For the record, “judgment” is of no use to the Dalai Lama also, who tells us how useless it is. Sure, in terms of real Platonic absolutes then Yes, some things (murder, rape, etc.) are absolutely Wrong (but even here, it gets rather sticky). But personal situations and the like, it does no good for us to judge them as Good or Bad. They just Are. Judging a thing doesn’t change it. It still is.  You can hate it, but face it, you can’t unring a bell.

You have to love that Senator John Kerry when running for office reportedly picked “Lay Lady Lay” as his favorite Dylan song (likely the only one he could come up with on the spot, but amusing, regardless). I’d also wager that Kerry doesn’t know the lyrics to any Dylan song with perhaps that one exception (which is no crime at all, but why fake it?)  And now I’m getting a visual that I just don’t want, or maybe he does know now, but that’s retrospective and called “Learning from your mistakes”. Hey, maybe he’ll write to me and complain and impress me with his vast, broad, and comprehensive knowledge of Dylan. And I would be impressed. After all, according to John, all of our votes count and if anyone is “the people” the true “working class” then shit, I qualify big-time.  Hey, maybe he’s got a really hip iPod list, wft do I know, but I suppose that depends on who is doing the looking. Who is the final arbiter of taste anyway? Ask me and I’ll go from massive amounts of all things Dylan (which takes up the most gigs on my iPod, including both films, Eat the Document and Don’t Look Back (hey, something to watch while waiting about) and most all of the videos are Dylan as well, my favorite of the moment being “Blood in my Eyes” and possibly “Jokerman” though I think “Blood in My Eyes” comes out ahead because there is more Dylan in Dylan there. Dylan on Dylan… That’s the title of my interview, should he grant one. Maybe. I’ll see if/when that comes to pass, but alas, I don’t keep my fingers crossed because I’m too much of a realist and I hate to say it, but either Dylan is a. very shy (and so am I – it’s easy to be brave behind a computer screen, but put me in real life and it’s another matter entirely), or b. he’s become one of those famous people who will only grant an interview to the “right” people (Ed Bradley? Please. C’mon, Bob), or c. Maybe my request is not getting through to him directly or d. Worse of all, no matter that I have true press credentials and have spent my entire life as a member of the Fourth Estate, I’m just not “good enough”, whatever the hell that means. So our Dylan who at one time perhaps knew what it meant to desperately want something so badly you could taste it, overlooks me because he’s forgotten what it means to be so wanting, so yearning, so damn hungry, and to love a song “just because”. In short, he doubts, and in doubting, he disses. Damn, I can get an interview with Obama, with Pennebaker, but not Dylan. He’s not only older than that now; he’s apparently better than that now.

Maybe Obama is listening to “Up To Me”. He says he has over thirty Dylan songs on his iPod, he tells us (now, in the article that I read, and someone astutely pointed out that the larger iPod holds 80gbs, and even the small ones have 8gbs these days, so that isn’t that many. I’d also like to know which Dylan songs he does have. Does he have the “usual” and expected Dylan, or does he have the more obscure stuff and also, does he have any bootleg versions (which in my view, are often the best versions or my favorites) of any songs, or just the album versions? How conformist is Obama?

More, did Obama play it “safe” by listing a lot of old blues as his favorites and other artists, most notably, Stevie Wonder (who I think is great, because you gotta love Stevie) and Elton John (who I also like), but let’s face it, both are “safe” picks. He didn’t say The Cure, The Sex Pistols, The Clash, XTC, BAD. He picked the safe music of his generation. Indeed, true blues can be filthy and explicit as hell, but you have to remember that it all had to be codified because it was largely played on street corners and you could get arrested, so “Little Red Rooster” and hey, “you can squeeze my lemon” all took on a double-entendre. So we “get it” but what I want to know is this: is Obama giving us a double-entendre as well? Is he saying he “gets it” too, or is he being a sad and typical two-faced politician?

It was incredibly savvy of Obama to pick Dylan because in Dylan’s case, his music spans many generations, as one writer who recently wrote for Tant Mieux noted. He reaches an older crowd as well as a very, very young crowd (especially “Modern Times”) and everyone in-between. I’m hoping Obama’s appeal is as equally varied and spans multiple generations, both men and women alike. I don’t’ think of either Dylan or Obama as an “easy” sell because again, it comes down to definition and you can’t define Dylan or Obama. Dylan is not “just” a protest singer or folkie, he’s not just a rock star, he’s not just a poet (which he has both accepted and denied at various points – where does he stand now?), he’s an artist, an author, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He’s sexy and attractive but not in any dull, banal or conventional way. He just as a “thing” going on and maybe Obama does too. Perhaps they recognize a piece of themselves in each other. I can’t say with any certainty.

Back to “Maggie’s Farm”. A pissed-off and angry and wailing, electric Dylan giving the “what for” so it would seem (given the timing), to the protest movement that wanted really, to own Dylan and claim him as one of “them”. But Dylan refused. As Baez noted in “No Direction Home” people constantly asked her at various protests when Dylan was gong to show up. Her answer was “Never” because he never showed up because that wasn’t what he was about.

So Dylan went electric, pissed off everyone in Newport, said the hell with it, became “Judas” and whined out, appropriately, “I don’t belieeeve you” which could be interpreted any number of ways and it was his quick, direct response and damn, good for him. No Judas he. As Van Ronk pointed out in one interview, “Everybody wanted a piece of Bobby” and right… has anything changed, I wonder. Do we all want a piece of Dylan? Do we all want to lay some prior claim on him? We can like him, hell, even love him – and love music for what it is: a riff here, the sound of his harmonica in Mr. Tambourine Man at Manchester Free Trade Hall or elsewhere, but these seemingly small things count and they count a lot. Maybe Dylan himself doesn’t understand it: maybe he thinks we all need to get a life (uhm, I would wager that most of us do have a life and that Dylan is but an addition to that already very good life: no, my world does not revolve around Bob). But I do ask myself the question, If BD wanted to be famous, as he did, and as BD became famous (as he did) and only because of people he calls fans who held him up on high and supported him, then why is it that “fan” is almost a dirty word or not taken seriously. What if you are a fan and a journalist, as I am? A fan and a photographer? Must I be only one of these things to get anyone’s attention, to be taken seriously, at least by Mr. Dylan. Frankly, it was easier to interview the reclusive Tom Verlaine of Television or get Paul Weller’s attention.

As they say in the film Almost Famous (this is not a direct quote, but based on one), it’s possible to love a little piece of music and I mean, really love it. So, do I know what that’s like? Absolutely.  I could and have listened to the harmonica riff from the ‘66 concert bootleg (a favorite album) and hear “Mr. Tambourine Man” a gazillion times and even practice it on my own harmonica (truly pathetic), but the point is, Dylan nails it and we crave that. We crave that ability and natural gift (don’t mistake “gift” and “talent”; a “gift” is what you are born with or have naturally. “Talent” is the ability to take that “gift” and to market it. Dylan has both),

So it is we crave the silence during a given solo and there are thousands of people listening and that is gift and talent combined. I mean – talk about commanding an audience. It’s impressive, but no doubt, comes with an incredible amount of work as well as some savvy marketing. I don’t think it came easy for Dylan, but he does love what he does, and that makes all the difference in the world. If you love what you do, you are likely to come out ahead sooner or later – oftentimes later, alas – but eventually, we hope, it does catch up and someone pays attention.

Perhaps Obama sees himself in Dylan and vice versa, as I said earlier. They both have an incredibly natural charisma and a vitality and energy and I would even say that in terms of looks, both are great to just look at. There’s something really moving about that – the same way JFK gave people hope, Obama does the same thing. I think Dylan does this for us as well. Somehow, without being associated with any movement, he gives us hope when we have none, he seems to go through the bad times with us – god knows there are songs that are just not at all happy or light – a lot of them: “Dirge”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “It’s Not Dark Yet”, and other songs, but “Dirge” and “It’s Not Dark Yet” because they have that approaching and retreating bass-sound, which sounds like a heavy tide approaching and retreating, sucking at our ankles. Sure, we could pick a lot of songs, but those come immediately to mind.

So, if Obama ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more, where is he gonna work? And if he ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s Pa or Ma, who is he gonna work for? Such are the questions that Obama himself has raised by citing this as his favorite Dylan song. It was a savvy move, and maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not. Maybe some quick-thinking and very savvy political advisor thought it up. I’d like to just believe it’s the truth and leave it at that, and I get that he’s making a point here: that he’s not going to “work” for any establishment or be part of any system and pigeonholed, and so on, but that leaves us still with some questions – specifically, so what song does speak to you and reveal who you are. Now we know who you are not, who are you?

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is the Founder & Editorial Director of The Tant Mieux Project & Bob Dylan, So Much the Better. She is a founding officer of the Genius Club. A widely published author, she is a member of PEN America.