The Times They Are a-Changin'

Writer: Mahmoud Fadel

Editor: Youssef Fahmy

Mahmoud is an editor and an engineering student who’s interested in politics, history, music, and cinema; probably anything but engineering.

The complexities of history are not usually amenable to hasty characterizations and generalizations. Nonetheless, we cannot help but sequence snapshots of the past into one thematically unified motion picture or song. Most of the time, even an honest and rigorous look at any given historical moment will produce competing and even contradictory notions of what happened and what we have learned from it. Even by any contemporary account, whether in art or history books, confusion and uncertainty surrounding events is what we will find. Bob Dylan, who was considered to be the voice of the United States’ political dissent in the sixties and seventies, wrote the song The Times They Are a-Changin’ in late 1963, at a time which could be considered the most pubescent in American history. Dylan’s treatment of the times is more abstract and philosophical than political or spiritual; and the specifics of his era are irrelevant, as the concept of change he analyzes is continuous throughout history. For more than 50 years, the song has been able to embody the highly abstract concept of change; that is why any attempt to analyze it must focus on the song’s layers of metaphorical representation, instead of speculating on what Dylan might have been foretelling in this or that line.

Come gather ‘round people

Wherever you roam,

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown,

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone.

If your time to you Is worth savin’,

Then you better start swimmin’,

Or you’ll sink like a stone,

For the times they are a-Changin’.

Narrative, or rather narration, are an often used tool in the pantheon of modern folk music, and Dylan excels at creating a speaker far more compelling and imperative than he is. The speaker’s tone in the song resembles that of a Biblical Prophet warning his people of incoming change. Prophets like Noah, Isaiah, and John the Baptist (known in Islam as Yahya), come to mind—all of them known for cautioning about impending change. The first verse provides us with a handle on the relationship between speaker and listener, or rather the prophet and the masses, as the biblical archetypal backdrop of the Great Flood, like that of Noah, infuses the rhetorical situation with a prophetic urgency. However, the main difference between the song’s speaker and the aforementioned prophets is that the speaker prophesies without preaching. Prophets tell people what to do in order to escape the wrath or the impending doom, but Bob Dylan’s speaker is only saying that the winds of change are coming. He is saying that we cannot do anything about it but accept the “new order,” or else we will drown and perish. We are not told what this new order comprises, or what is wrong with the present or ‘old’ order. We are only told to get out of the way, or rather more metaphorically speaking, swim to escape the rising tide. Such a worldview forces us to find which way the wind is blowing and act accordingly. In the same sense, the following verse applies this notion to politicians and what they should do to adapt to the winds of change:

Come senators, congressmen

Please heed the call,

Don’t stand in the doorway

Don’t block up the hall

For he that gets hurt

Will be he who has stalled

There’s a battle outside

And it is ragin’

It’ll soon shake your windows,

And rattle your walls,

For the times they are a-Changin

Dylan continues to explore the idea of change using heavier political overtones with the ‘prophet’ speaking truth to power, subjecting politicians to a call that must be heeded. Change is emphasized in the verses as an amoral, arbitrary, and destructive force, in order to stand equal to the political process with all of its might. Meanwhile, the house in the middle of the battlefield seems like a metaphor for the idea of the status quo, and the battle outside is Change shaking windows and rattling walls. But looking more closely into the metaphor, we will find that the status quo is the well-structured and stable element, while change is chaotic, disruptive, and dangerous; for example, there is no indication that the battle is being waged by freedom fighters, while those in the house are corrupt bureaucrats. This could stand as the most versatile idea in the entire song, as for more than 50 years since its release, the world has witnessed all kinds of change. We have seen this in the Arab Spring which tectonically shifted, and continues to shift, the already failing political bedrock upon which the Middle East helplessly stands. As this present decade comes to an end, we can see how it echoes the turmoil of Dylan’s sixties where, in a period of only 10 years, the United States was exposed to hippie counterculture, the war on poverty, the Vietnam War with its protests, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, the space race, and a second wave of feminism. One could spout off Wikipedia subheadings all day long, but what is certain is that change and insurgency are always just around the corner, wherever and whenever we take a certain notion in society to be granted. There are vast differences between the circumstances and outcomes in both regions and both times, but they still manage to reflect human nature because no matter the time, geography, belief, or culture, the metaphor still stands.

Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don’t criticize

What you can’t understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin’

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand,

For the times they are a-changin’

There is no indication or guarantee that the new road will pave over injustice, inequality, or any other grievances that revolutions are meant to address. The speaker doesn’t necessarily imply that sons and daughters somehow have a better understanding of life, and that the older generations should gleefully disengage their parental locks out of some great moral imperative. The message isn’t explicitly to lend a hand to lay the new road, but to at least get out of the way if you don’t want to be run over. This change and conflict, in intergenerational terms, is still happening to this day. Just as parents criticized their children’s music and fashion in the sixties, elders continue to criticise the youth’s politics, beliefs, and life choices. This is evidently relevant nowadays— especially in Egypt and the Middle East—because of the new generation’s Western-influenced culture and lifestyle, compared to their parents’ vastly different conservative and mostly religious-based ideals.

The line it is drawn

The curse it is cast

The slow one now

Will later be fast

As the present now

Will later be past

The order is Rapidly fadin’

And the first one now

Will later be last

For the times they are a-changin’.

There is a world of difference between telling someone that they should embrace change because it is good, and telling them that they should embrace change because it is inevitable. Change may be inevitable, but that does not mean that all change is good. Goodness and inevitability are not mutually exclusive. From an idealistic perspective, change and progress are inherently entwined and that the development of ideas over time is the fundamental change that causes overall improvement. It could also be argued that a tension within human nature itself is the source of change. But if we take a literal look into the lyrics of the song, not to the context in which it was written, we can see the pragmatism in Dylan, or rather his prophet, who is more concerned by what is true than with what ought to be true.

Sources:

-Brandon, Stephen. “Bob Dylan: The Prophet of Social Change in the 1960s” 2017.

-Cossu, Andrea. “It Ain’t Me Babe : Bob Dylan and the Performance of Authenticity” 2012.

-Edwards, Christopher. “Down the Foggy Ruins of Time: Bob Dylan and the Concept of Evidence” 2010.