81. Mozambique

It’s often been pointed out that the nation Mozambique circa 1976 was not a nice place to be, but the ahistoricity of Bob Dylan’s song doesn’t bother me any more than the facts about Joey Gallo do. I believe in the rights of fiction to tell the stories it wants to tell, and believe in the capacity of those who engage with works of fiction to think and investigate the relevant facts for themselves.

Here’s something for those of us who’ve played Final Fantasy VII: this song reminds me of the first time the party arrives in Costa del Sol. It’s a moment of relaxation after a fraught journey (Jehova and Sephiroth shipboard, etc.).

In addition to being one more travelogue on an album of travelogues, Mozambique plays the Costa del Sol role for me on Desire. Hurricane is an intense opening and Isis a grand adventure; up ahead will be One More Cup of Coffee and Oh, Sister and their weighty, lovesick ruminations; the valley, the sea. How good, then, to stop for three minutes in Dylan and Levy’s jointly-conjured Mozambique, “Lying next to her by the ocean / Reaching out and touching her hand / Whispering your secret emotion / Magic in a magical land.” And what’s wrong with that?

Musically the song is light and quick and easy (like the playful words) but far from spineless. Scarlet Rivera’s violin, not the sort of instrument to fade out of attention, is the channel for the main melody. Howie Wyeth, having sat out the first verse, makes a thrilling entrance in the break before the second, sounding like the first morning waves breaking on the shore. The song is the album's biggest showcase for Emmylou Harris, who sings every word with Dylan, and whereas elsewhere on Desire she’s clearly the backing or supportive singer, Mozambique is a true duet. And now that I investigate, it turns out that Emmylou Harris included Mozambique on a duets compilation released under her own name—for which tidbit, thank you, Michael Gray.

But this is not, like If I Don’t Be There by Morning-via-Eric, a truly accomplished laid-back song; it’s too musically involved for that, the melodies in verse and bridge both too striking. This is not something you can absentmindedly nod your head along to. The shift to the Bm chord for “Lying next to her” catches me by surprise every time, after which I anticipate and then relish Bob and Emmylou’s “laaaaaand” leading over to the final verse. The Desire band evokes the breezy atmosphere, the suggestion of sun and sand speckled by cloud shadows. I love how during the fade-out Dylan’s acoustic guitar suddenly starts working double-time.

While the lyrics are of no great thematic import, neither are they to be scoffed at. In them the mighty Christopher Ricks locates one of his favorite of Dylan’s rhymes, “‘Mozambique’ with ‘cheek to cheek’ (along with ‘cheek’ cheekily rhyming with ‘cheek’ there, a perfect fit).”

I like the visual correspondence of “aqua” (as in "The sunny sky is aqua blue") with the title, the ‘a,’ ‘q,’ and ‘u’ inside ‘Mozambique’ all accounted for in aqua too.

The more-than-ordinarily flighty attitude of Dylan’s narrator toward relationships makes me laugh; right after saying “and maybe fall in love, just me and you,” he observes that “there’s lots of pretty girls in Mozambique.”

There’s a densely-rendered atmosphere of romantic questing in the second verse: “Everybody likes to stop and speak / To give the special one you seek a chance / Or maybe say hello with just a glance”—a chance to do what exactly left for the listener to puzzle out, the narrator already on to the next thing, as quickly as he’s likely to flit from girl to girl—and all those alliterated ‘s’s, ‘p’s, ‘sp’s, and ‘k’s.

In the final verse, the narrator takes “a final peak” and sees “lovely people living free / upon the beach of sunny Mozambique.” This completes the picture of bliss presented by Mozambique the song but not by Desire the album, in which, five songs later, we’re brought to another tourists’ paradise. And there’s a beach landscape near the end of Sara, too. But…