Among the unsuccessful contenders for my 100th favorite song was Joey. Seeing Angelina and Joey so close to each other on my worklist, I got to thinking of the two songs’ structural similarities. Both are made of long meandering verses anchored by choruses that are mostly the elongated pronunciation of the title name. But whereas Joey is a straightforward narrative (birth, dramatic highlights of youth, imprisonment, release, death by gunfire, funeral) Angelina is about as far from straightforward as Bob Dylan gets, even while it gives the sense of being a story. And if Joey is musically rather bland, Angelina glows with abundant colors, courtesy of the unhinged and scattershot Shot of Love sound and band.
Cousin to The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar, the rewritten Ain’t Gonna Go to Hell for Anybody, Caribbean Wind, Jokerman, and I and I, Angelina hails from Dylan’s all-too-brief period of prolix, dreamlike, associative, and apocalyptically-tinged songwriting that links the deeply felt and intensely biblical Gospel era numbers to the film-quoting tough-guy-keeping-you-at-arm’s-length persona’ed love ditties of Bob’s mid-to-late ‘80s. A long way to go, you would think. (The latter half of this bridge is, perhaps, crossed on the likes of Infidels’ Sweetheart Like You and Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight.)
I wouldn’t have minded if Dylan had paused in Angelina territory long enough to compile a whole album of like-minded numbers, but if my own experience as a writer and songwriter is anything to go by, the truth is that the muse leads the writer around by the nose, and not the other way around.
It took me a lot of listens to get past the rigidity of the rhyme scheme, which initially struck me as ridiculous. To my mind, the best rhyming (its finest practicioners in English being, from what I’ve come upon in my reading, Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats) makes the rhyme seem not inevitable and predictable but fresh and surprising, even when the word pairings are as commonplace as, say, shore/before, skies/eyes, age/rage; whereas inferior rhyming is the kind that makes you think, “Oh, I got it, the writer only reached for that word because he needed something to rhyme.” It’s hard to explain concertina, subpoena, etc. otherwise: surely Dylan wouldn’t have chosen such words as line-enders if he hadn’t set himself the goal of rhyming with Angelina.
But I like what Michael Gray has written about the way that the exactness of the Angelina rhymes and the inevitability of their placement in the song’s rhyme scheme serve as an anchor in the sea of dim and blurry imagery that otherwise constitutes the song’s lyrics. And once I finally got used to those rhymes, as I eventually did, nothing remained between me and fuller appreciation of the spirit of the piece.
For sheer measured loveliness, Angelina is a highlight of its time. Lenny Bruce boasts a comparable palette but no drums, and nothing like the same imagery or thematic scope.
And while it’s Angelina’s arrangement and melodies that win me over, I allow that the words have their part in pushing the song to the heights it climbs. I’m impressed by the case Daniel Syrovy makes for the narrator being an older and transformed version of the man whose “eyes were two slits that would make any snake proud,” whom Angelina cannot pretend to know any longer because he and his priorities and beliefs have changed so much—because, for instance, his allegiance has shifted from Eros to Christ: “Do I need your permission to turn the other cheek?”
“Worshipping a god with the body of a woman well endowed / And the head of a hyena” reminds me of “He worships at an altar of a stagnant pool / And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled,” from License to Kill. In each song, we have the narrator understanding that what he once held as the highest good was actually something paltry, dead, pathetic (License to Kill) or misguided and sinister (Angelina).
All in all, though, and as with many other Dylan songs, I don’t spend much time trying to figure out what exactly the story here is or what the song has to say about its characters. I’m content to let slivers of imagery rise up and, like tendrils emanating from the tree of smoke, tickle the musical backing and the emotion that laces' the singers’ voices. The final verse of the song is the most powerful in this regard, with its evocation of a land being swallowed by war and destruction, where hiding places are few and hard to reach. On his harrowed way to shelter, the narrator is accompanied—or shall I say pursued?—by his unsettled feelings for the woman that he long ago, perhaps, loved, and whom he knows, for sure now, that he can love no longer.
I think the main problem with Angelina was that it was written in the 80’s when Dylan was years past his prime. Overall it was adequate. I like when he sings Angelina. What I’m discovering is that perhaps you’ve ordered these numbers backwards however. Allow me to translate:
ReplyDeleteIn my officially completely valid, expert opinion, the actual rankings of these songs should be:
1. Like a Ship
2. All you have to do is dream
3. Angelina
...Damn. I wrote a long comment and then Google ate it.
ReplyDeleteThe gist of it was something along the lines that I love the idea of the -ina/Angelina rhymes being an anchor, a counterpoint to the violent and unrelenting imagery of the rest of the song; that the song is that rare(ish) Dylan beast, a song about peace or serenity. (Coincidentally, so is "All You Have To Do Is Dream"... maybe.) "Angelina" is obviously not a song *of* serenity, but after two years of being more or less at war with the world and his own fans, writing religious songs that speak of persecution and confrontation as much as of grace and forgiveness, and writing an album where several songs (arguably) veer into bitterness and resentment... Dylan's songs, throughout his career, rarely find the peace and clarity that either romantic love or political understanding or religious salvation appear to promise. And then he writes two songs that *are* about that in very different ways, that could both have served as album closers: "Every Grain Of Sand" and "Angelina". He made the right choice as songs go, "Grain" is clearly the better and more agreeable song, but "Angelina" might have served the album better - it doesn't ignore the statements of "Property of Jesus" or "Dead Man, Dead Man" or "Watered-Down Love", but instead puts them up so he can tackle them with his eyes on something beyond, the idea of peace and acceptance that may not be *attainable* or even permanent, but at least exists as an idea. As a small angel.
...or something.
/Björn
Great to hear from you, Björn!! Awesome comments, even if they're the less spirited re-write ;) That's brilliant about Angelina probably being a better closer for Shot of Love. Every Grain of Sand just kind of shifts off to speak of other things, whereas Angelina is about seeking peace in the whirlwind: and so, right after Trouble, and with all those other songs of chaos and conflict in the rear view, we would've had a song that raised the prevailing theme while elevating itself above it, or at least, as you say, aiming in that higher direction. Right on.
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