The Dylan World's Burlesque Piss-Take 'on' and of the 25th Anniversary of His

Mid-Eighties Baby-Talk Charade:

I can feel it in the wind and it's upside down

You're-in Extract: Dylan was out: In the Eighties you were cool; Dylan was not. So it was even
more cool not to be into Dylan. But chicken or egg? Was Dylan uncool because you weren't into
him (or even born), or were you not into him because he wasn't cool? As for providing easy
answers, just make sure they aren't dated – not that I expect any from you. As for you, who are you
that I should have to lie? Michael enjoyed commenting (2000) on how Dylan was trying to 'piss
away his stature as an artist'.

As I demonstrated in my previous (unsolicited) article, on Chassidic 'mysticism' in Empire

Burlesque, the album in which Dylan was incapable of thought beyond a movie quote (because that
is all there was on it and people couldn't relate to it), Dylan's album cleanly cutting the decade in
half has a 'code in the lyrics', a term Dylan first used when talking of the Norman Raeben influence
on Blood on the Tracks. In fact elements of the Raeben influence, particularly as manifest(ly
unnoticed) in Blood on the Tracks, are taken up in Infidels, but it is not like, as far as I can tell from
reading the 'experts', anyone actually noticed1; apologies to the fans or students who did notice but
just, almost like me, consider life to be too short to bother remonstrating with the wilfully self-
deluded. While Infidels is far more interesting, my present focus, following the 25th anniversary of
Empire Burlesque (while you fall over yourselves to commemorate pseudo-anniversaries with
bizarrely odd numbers – not including 40), is the immediately-following studio album, in 1985.

For a fuller treatment of the 'code in the lyrics', see that article, a burlesque celebration of its quarter
century. (This has been updated several times, even since Karl Erik's notification; please also note
that until recently if I don't read expectingrain it's not happening.) For a briefer overview, stick
around, baby, we're not through.

The egregious Song of the Day blogger Clay Clifton, unconcerned with the album's anniversary
(although I thought Dylan anniversaries, however contrived, were really where it's at) is, strangely,
concerned with the album – soon after its anniversary. He writes on his blog, Song of the Day:

Empire Burlesque is another of Dylan’s most polarizing albums… I’m amused by how many of his releases
are described as both his best and his worst by different fans. This is the last of the albums I bought to
prepare for this series, and once again I’m glad I did.

(When I am gladdened, Empire Burlesque; when I am saddened, Empire Burlesque.) Can he

produce one of the former? It's not the fans who say it's his best; it's the non-fans or very casual-
look-will-do fans. (What in the world has come over them?) What's up is down, what isn't is; I can
feel it in the wind and it's upside down: the album's 'code in the lyrics' - one aspect of it. On
'development of American burlesque', Wikipedia states:

Put simply, burlesque means "in an upside down style". Like its cousin, commedia dell'arte, burlesque turns
social norms head over heels. Burlesque is a style of live entertainment that encompasses pastiche, parody,
and wit. The genre traditionally encompasses a variety of acts such as dancing girls, chanson singers,
comedians, mime artists, and striptease artistes, all satirical and with a saucy edge. The striptease element of
burlesque became subject to extensive local legislation, leading to a theatrical form that titillated without
falling foul of censors.

Something is Burning, Baby:

1 Do I congratulate myself as a genius? No, but I do wonder why

I can feel it in the wind and it's upside down
I can feel it in the dust as I get off the bus on the outskirts of town

And, Clean-Cut Kid:

They said what's up is down, they said what isn't is

They put ideas in his head he thought were his

John Gibbens: on 'fearful symmetry':

The larger form is the artist’s body of work and also the “order of words” that Northrop Frye speaks of, the
total form of literature.

Add up all the 'baby's on Empire Burlesque to get a secret kabbalistic-code number? (Big jokes
sometimes 'conceal' something more serious. See my next article around about now.) Clifton says
of When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky:

Oddly enough, one of the most egregious examples of 80s dance production on Empire Burlesque winds up
being one of my favorite tracks on the album.

(The Bootleg Series 1-3 version contains a 'above and below' lyric, which shows an influence from
Chassidic mysticism – a fact which displays the Dylan-world commentators on Dylan's Eighties
work to have been incapable of Dylan criticism or code-in-the-lyrics-spotting beyond tracing a
movie quote and complaining of Empire Burlesque's production; this is dealt with in my previous
article.) In his assessment of the album, Clifton might have done well, instead of using a big word I
had to look up, to look at the etymology of shorter words in the album's 'code in the lyrics' – starting
with the title. This egregious omission, on the part of the Dylan world more widely, is really an
ongoing outworking of the syndrome just-a-song-and-dance-man-disingenuous-denier Dylan
'confides' to Mick brown in 1984. But don't worry: we still have 74 years left to stop talking crap
about Dylan's Eighties work. (Was the 100 years an upper limit or a minimum estimate?) Online
Etymology Dictionary:

1530s, from L. egregius, from the phrase ex grege "rising above the flock," from ex "out of" + grege,
ablative of grex "herd, flock" (see gregarious). Disapproving sense, now predominant, arose 16c.,
originally ironic and is not in the Latin word, which etymologically means simply "exceptional."
Related: Egregiously.

Trust Yourself. I do.

Didn't I rise above it all for you,

The most unfortunate circumstances?

Does it never occur to the album's detractors that Dylan was 'taking the piss out of' the Eighties?
That was obvious to me as soon as I saw the cover; what a stupid jacket2. Had Dylan joined Duran
Duran, I wondered. Start with the album title. Sound and arrangements you don't like do not
automatically mean the lyrics are no good, or that they have no depth just because they may appear
bland on the surface. (If you think Blood on the Tracks is so great, you need to check out Bob
Dylan Meets Leo Kottke on youtube. That will sort you out. I had a cousin who said, 'Dylan's guitar
playing is always slightly out of tune. Tone deaf or Dylan trademark?' Then, ironically given Joni
Mitchell's recent comments, he pulled out Hejira and asked me if I'd ever heard Joni Mitchell.)
2 Thanks to Sounes's costume research into the influence of African-American wives or lovers on Dylan's mid-
Eighties dress, we know something of the answer to a question somebody recently put on youtube under a clip of
Dylan in his Petty phase, wearing vest, leather waistcoat and trousers, and earring: 'Was Dylan mocking the Eighties
or was he actually into them?'
The 'key' to the album is the title. Even the 'experts' have failed to look into this sufficiently. It's
simple secondary-school pre-university lit crit; no genius required. Dylan was in fact mocking the
Eighties, taking the piss out of them; he has the last laugh. On you. Dylan said a long time ago that
the key to a song is in the title. The same, by logical extension, applies to the album title.

In 1985 someone asked me if Dylan was taking the piss out of Bruce Springsteen with that pose on
the cover. But the relevant Springsteen album was '73? OK, that was just my friend's opinion,
though a wider case could be made for Dylan's mocking Springsteen, but that is for a different
article.

Again from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1660s, "derisive imitation, grotesque parody," from Fr. burlesque (16c.), from It. burlesco, from burla "joke,
fun, mockery," possibly ultimately from L.L. burra "trifle, nonsense," lit. "flock of wool." Modern sense of
"variety show featuring striptease" is Amer.Eng., 1870. Originally (1857) "the sketches at the end of minstrel
shows." As a verb, from 1670s.

And you all fell over yourselves with ecstasy at the role of black-and-white minstrelsy in 2001's
Love & Theft, didn't you? A Lott. Just like you assume cut-and-paste started with that album.

It seems John Gibbens, champion of 'fearful symmetry' throughout Dylan and something of an
authority on the subject of 'folk' and blues, had some rotten nights in 1985:

I started writing about Dylan in the mid-1980s, at a time when he was really an embarrassment to all but
loyal diehards3. He made a record called Empire Burlesque: “I know it was all a big joke,” he sings,

3 It was actually the die-hards who picketed the album; the casual fans liked it; my mother said, 'That sounds like the
“whatever it was all about.”

Wikipedia:

The term burlesque may be traced to folk poetry and theater and apparently derived from the late Latin burra
('trifle').

The origin of the term 'burlesque' is contentious with most citing the French burlesque, which was, in turn,
borrowed from the Italian burlesco, derived from the Spanish burla ('joke') as its root.[1][2][3][4][5] Its
literal meaning is to 'send up'. In Britain 'burlesque' in verse and prose was first popularised in the 14th
century by Geoffrey Chaucer's satirical The Canterbury Tales.

In Spain when they think you're mocking them, they say, 'Te estás burlando de mí?'

While it is sheep who are more commonly known to flock together to piss all over Dylan's uncool
Eighties work, clean-cut kids also have wool – or at least did before they got sacrificed. Great
theological pun? Well, I'll leave that to the rabbis, theologians and experts on the definition of
burlesque and the relation of goats to the paschal lamb in the Jewish (and Christian) scriptures to
decide (though I hope I haven't lost those who pronounce Infidels to be a secular album way behind
here4. I don't actually care. Consider also how a secular album can simultaneously be a Return to
Judaism; difficult balancing act – even for Dylan); but the album is full of sacrificial imagery:
blood, wine, bread. How does the clean-cut-kid pun work? Perhaps not very well. Wikipedia on a
hundred years before Empire Burlesque:

By the 1880s, the genre had created some rules for defining itself:
• Minimal costuming, often focusing on the female form.
• Sexually suggestive dialogue, dance, plotlines and staging.
• Quick-witted humor laced with puns, but lacking complexity.
• Short routines or sketches with minimal plot cohesion across a show.

Does the Dylan world's egregious omission to check out the meaning of 'burlesque', beyond
Michael Gray's half-way movie-house finding about the Empire Burlesque movie houses mean I
think the album is Dylan's best? Of course not. But I do think people have not been learning, or
even yearning, to see behind closed doors – the closed doors of triteness. Not so closed, really.
More like closed minds. The album is a pastiche, deliberately blending cheap rhymes with hidden
depth.

Clifton's recent Infidels post appeared creepily at the same time as the brother-that-I-never-had
Robert Michael's Infidels follow-up to the Monty Python stuff. But on closer inspection it seemed
that Clifton's apparently automated post (he always posts at 12:03 am) preceded mine by almost an
hour. (Just because he wasn't out to get me doesn't mean I'm not paranoid.) But then there is this
other one about Empire Burlesque. He seems to be revel(l)ing in buying albums a quarter of a
century after their release, then reviewing them. Some of Clifton's comments, and absence of them,
do make me think of the Mick Brown interview; but this is the beauty of Dylanology.

I Shall Be Free No. 10

I was shadow-boxing earlier in the day

I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay
I said “Fee, fie, fo, fum, Cassius Clay, here I come
best thing he's ever done'.
4 Try 'non-devotional' – just as Slow Train Coming was, compared to Saved, non-devotional while Saved was not
really evangelistic. Also Shot of Love was not a third of a trilogy but the first of a duo constituting Dylan's
Caribbean period; and if the former was secular it can't also complete an evangelical trilogy, can it?
26, 27, 28, 29, I’m gonna make your face look just like mine
Five, four, three, two, one, Cassius Clay you’d better run
99, 100, 101, 102, your ma won’t even recognize you
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, gonna knock him clean right out of his spleen”

And count the number of times 'shadow(s)' occurs throughout Empire Burlesque.

At bobdylan.com, someone comments on the album as follows:

Amazing Lyrics, Questionable Style

No Rating
The 80's pop sound is a bit taxing, but the amazing lyrics more than make up for this album's technical and
stylistic issue.

Submitted by propertyofjesus on Sun, 08/03/2008 - 09:08.

Clifton:

I don’t rank it on either extreme — it’s a strong collection of songs hampered by some very dated production
techniques, but for the most part the quality shines through.

Does it shine through egregiously? Don't flock to answer. John Gibbens on Modern Times:

It’s a postmodern record: that seems the only term for its a-historical appropriation of historic styles. To
emphasise its distance from modernity, the title itself is borrowed from a work of 70 years ago.

Does it not occur to John that in Empire Burlesque Dylan was also paradoxically referencing the
past with a term rich in historical allusions to make a big joke of the the then-current Eighties by
mocking its production values? Dylan puts a lot of thought into his album titles (but not nearly as
much as into those offhand point-blank mug shots to maximize his chances of being recognized
wherever he goes so that he can then feel perennially sorry for himself in I Shall Be Released).

Gibbens continues:

It’s a sign of humility, perhaps, that Dylan’s record, marvellous and memorable as it may be, is always going
to be the other Modern Times. In Charlie Chaplin’s film of the same title, made in 1936, he played for the
last time, after 22 years, his famous role of the Little Tramp. Its theme is the dehumanising effect of modern
mechanisation, but it tackles it in a most backward-looking manner. It was Chaplin’s first ‘talkie’, but it’s
made like a silent film, with no spoken lines, and plot pointers and dialogue appearing on title cards. In fact,
it was the last major American film to use these devices, the last ‘silent’ in effect. For the first and last time,
the Little Tramp’s voice is heard – but only singing a song in nonsense words. There are voices in the film,
but they are all from speaking machines.

Look out kid. There is music on Empire Burlesque, but it has been synthesized by Arthur Baker. Or
so I hear. (Sorry I never knew or cared in the Eighties.) It turns out Gibbens's Little Tramp had
some interest, like Bob, in burlesque. Wikipedia:

Charlie Chaplin in his autobiography gives this account of burlesque in Chicago in 1910:
Chicago... had a fierce pioneer gaiety that enlivened the senses, yet underlying it throbbed masculine
loneliness. Counteracting this somatic ailment was a national distraction known as the burlesque show,
consisting of a coterie of rough-and-tumble comedians supported by twenty or more chorus girls. Some were
pretty, others shopworn. Some of the comedians were funny, most of the shows were smutty harem
comedies—coarse and cynical affairs.
—Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography: 125–6
What goes around, comes around (and doesn't). Gibbens on the Little Tramp's last bow:

(And it could hardly be coincidental, surely, that the final song is called ‘Ain’t Talkin’’.)

Renaldo-Jack Fate, the poor tragically-misunderstood unmethodical screen-inept method actor –

just like on the Infidels inner sleeve, which you all ignored. If Modern Times was about Ain't
Talkin', Empire Burlesque was about garrulousness, as Michael commented about Seeing the Real
You at Last. But he would not go along with the charade. Online Etymology Dictionary:

1776, from Fr. charade (18c.), from Prov. charrado "long talk, chatter," of obscure origin, perhaps from
charrar "to chatter, gossip," of echoic origin. Cf. It. ciarlare, Sp. charlar "to talk, prattle." Originally not
silent, but relying on enigmatic descriptions of the words or syllables; the silent form was dumb charades.
Welsh siarad obviously is a loan-word from French or English, but its meaning of "speak, a talk" is closer to
the Provencal original.

Quit this baby talk now. A few years ago, somewhat against my own judgment but on the
suggestion of someone else, I contacted the editor of a Dylan magazine with some of my ideas – the
only definite reason for doing so being to get a reaction. When I mentioned Dylan's own term 'code
in the lyrics', a term and, in most cases, concept seemingly ignored by the Dylan literati, his ears
pricked up. I sent him a couple of pilot articles to see his reaction. I was never going to give him my
good stuff. His response? 'The most difficult Dylan material I have ever read. You have some
GREAT ideas but' he was worried about upsetting his readers. He said he wasn't sure they would
like the 'I told you so' tone. Well, in addition to making sure I told him little, I had never told
anybody (like him), as such, so previously. So there would and could be no 'I told you so'; rather, 'I
guess you should have known' – in the case of those experts in the Dylan world berating work they
have not really understood, such as Michael Gray describing Infidels as a 'mudcake creature' (a
typically laden-with-irony Gray comment that can only come back to haunt him) and 'failing in a
small-minded cheating kind of way', with the 'marvellous exception of 'Jokerman''.

Not I told you so, but I guess you (or 'they') should have known; there's a big difference. I never
asked them to set themselves up for a fall. In this context there are things of far greater import than
the relative frivolity that is Empire Burlesque. If an 'expert' commentator dismisses with a snarky
pun on Dylan's lyrics a song as having no place on an album at all when in fact the song is the
lynchpin of that album's 'code in the lyrics', which the commentator, for all his expertise in such and
such a subject, has failed to identify, then that commentator deserves to have that exposed with a
pertinent pun on that album's 'code in the lyrics'. There's no escaping that; it goes with the territory.
No buts.

John Gibbens on 'fearful symmetry' – again, just to be symmetrical (fearfully):

The larger form is the artist’s body of work and also the “order of words” that Northrop Frye speaks of, the
total form of literature.

What isn't is, what's up is down. I can feel it in the wind and it's upside down. Empire Burlesque has
its own 'code in the lyrics' and fearful symmetry, which I discussed in my previous and longer
article. Never underestimate Dylan, however much you may pay lip-service to his 'genius'.

Seeing the real Empire Burlesque at last. Some of it.

Sunday Times, 1 July 1984 Week in Focus p 15. Mick Brown exclusive interview:
Bob Dylan tugged at a cigarette, stroked the beginnings of an untidy beard and gazed pensively at the stream
of traffic passing down the Madrid street. 'What you gotta understand,' he said at length, 'is that I do
something because I feel like doing it. If people can relate to it, that's great. If they can't, that's fine too. But I
don't think I'm gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now. What I've done, what I'm doing,
nobody else does or has done.'

The messianic tone grew more intense.

'When I'm dead and gone maybe people will realize that, and then figure it out. I don't think anything I've
done has been evenly mildly hinted at. There's all these interpreters around, but they're not interpreting
anything except their own ideas. Nobody's come close.'

That was a year before Empire Burlesque. Following the woefully misunderstood Infidels, I see it
as a trough in terms of 'code in the lyrics' and, yes, even sound, almost, but there is some good
instrumentation in there. But that doesn't mean there was not more to the album than seemed at the
time. Indeed, if Dylan is such a 'genius' wouldn't you expect there to be more to albums you have
dismissed than you in fact spotted? Or is Dylan's genius limited to your own perception and
experience? Perhaps by rather than to.

I'd post a genuinely interesting article, but I'd hate to put ideas in anyone's head that s/he thought
were his/hers. And all just for a thousand non-paying readers when Dylan pissing in a public urinal
gets almost three times that.

What an indictment of the 'Dylan world'. I guess I should have known. In case you think I'm
blowing my own trumpet, consider this: when I was doing English literature at secondary school, ie
just before university, I was in a class with members all the opposite sex. Many of them got As; I
never did. (Could have been something to do with not finding Shakespeare as interesting as Dylan?)
One day I got a comment from the female tutor, who was only one of them: 'I have to bear in mind
when marking Paul that once he has said something that's it, he doesn't mince words or pad it out'.

I was always suspicious of why the pretty girls got the As from the male tutor. But in any case,
looking back on it now, I would consider that the reason for not getting an A on yet-to-exist Empire
Burlesque would have been failure to identify the 'upside down' code in the lyrics, its links with
'mystical' Chassidic aphorisms, and its being an instance of the post-Raeben 'conscious artist' legacy
(which so upsets the Dylan-writes-everything-from-the-unconscious school – almost to violence),
plus, to cap it all, the fact that one element or definition of burlesque is an 'upside down' style.

But this is nothing compared to what was going on in Infidels, the album which, parts of it at least,
Michael Gray rated as an 'embarrassing fourth-grade schoolboy attempt[s] at poetry' (albeit with a
'marvellous exception' or two). I noticed that Prof Ricks dreaded to tread where Michael did (or did
not). Some subjects are just taboo.

For Michael's chapter entitled 'Jokerman', largely snubbing the rest of the album and so, by default,
the 'code in the lyrics', I give him a C+; to know why not an A+ is going to cost him.

But that would have been if he hadn't written that Infidels had 'no fearful symmetry', for which he
gets downgraded to an F. Any fourth-grade schoolboy (note Michael's feminism here; 'another'
story but intimately intertwined with his failure to understand Infidels) would know that there is.
And John Gibbens points out that 'dance' in the album's closing song mirrors the Jokerman's dance
in the opening song. I'm glad someone is awake.
Pull the hat down, baby, pull the wool down over your eyes. Ain't no critic self-righteous, no not
one. Ed: I just read that Sid Griffin doesn't talk down to his audience, refreshingly. Well, when
'critics' such as Sounes, Griffin's inferior and far-less-insightful sidekick on BBC6's Bob Dylan's
Changing Times in December 2009, stop talking down to (about) Dylan's Eighties work as having
'no unifying concepts', I'll consider adopting the warmer tone to Dylan experts that Sid displayed to
Dylan's work on that program.

What's good is bad; what's bad is good. I can feel it in the wind and it's upside down. Michael took
Empire Burlesque's reality and cast it to the wind – time to turn his pockets and thoughts inside out.

With the ubiquitousness of the web, there is no longer any editor's 'house style' to comply with;
there is only the 'muddiest superhighway in the universe' – which completely levels the playing
field – the superhighway. I don't comply with an editor's house style (which incidentally includes
use of the seriously-feather-ruffling I-told-you-so Heylin in his videos – he certainly gets under
Wesley Stace's and Liz Thomson's skin with his 'inattention to punctuation and grammar' and
misuse and misunderstanding of literary terms, and use of literary non-terms. Personally, I'm
unmoved5 but I love reading the reviews); rather, the editor(s), ever needing to keep on top of the
secrets of the breeze, come(s) to read my upside-down style in the wind. For, indeed, Dylan experts
need to comply with the house style of Dylan's codes in the lyrics – album by album. Not with
anything else.

You'll know everything Bob knove, down below and up above – when the new Dylanology comes
falling from the sky ...

Egregiously (yours – always)

Copyright (June) 2010 Paul Kirkman. All rights reserved (unless being plagiarized by Bob Dylan)

5 And I congratulate Heylin for doing the one thing that the Dylan world didn't do