Black Rider (Bob Dylan song)

"Black Rider" is a minor-key folk ballad written and performed by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and released as the fifth track on his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. It is the shortest song on the album and features a sparse acoustic arrangement but its musical complexity and ambiguous lyrics have generated substantial critical analysis.

"Black Rider"
Song by Bob Dylan
from the album 'Rough and Rowdy Ways'
ReleasedJune 19, 2020
RecordedJanuary-February, 2020
StudioSound City Studios
GenreFolk
Length4:12
LabelColumbia
Songwriter(s)Bob Dylan
Producer(s)None listed

Critical response

Critic Phil Shaw has cited the song as being the best on Rough and Rowdy Ways, acknowledging that it is not "the most obvious selection" but that it is "a grower from the first". He also cited it as his fourth favorite song of the year 2020.[1] Music journalist Sam Liddicott calls it one of the "most impactful" songs on the album and praises Dylan's "surprisingly smooth and sweet" vocal delivery, noting that the song exemplifies how Dylan possesses greater "vocal dexterity" than is commonly believed.[2]

Musical complexity

Dylan scholar and musicologist Eyolf Ostrem considers "Black Rider" to be Dylan's "most complex song ever" from a musical perspective (with the only competition coming from 1967's "Dear Landlord", 1980's "In the Garden" and 1989's "Ring Them Bells"). In a lengthy essay on his website, Ostrem details how Dylan's unusual chord changes (alternating between major, minor and seventh chords in surprising fashion) have the effect of making listeners "expect one thing" while he then gives them "something else". Ostrem sees this uncanny effect as being underscored by some of the lyrics (e.g., "The road that you're on, same road that you know / Just not the same as it was a minute ago").[3]

Matt Chamberlain's percussion in the song is also unusual. There are exactly five faint drumbeats in the song, one at the conclusion of each verse, an effect so spare and subtle that it has caused some critics to inaccurately describe the song as having no percussion at all.[4][5]

Lyrical interpretations

The lyrics of the song feature a first-person narrator addressing a mysterious enemy, the titular "black rider", across five verses.[6] Critics have variously interpreted the character of the black rider as the biblical Third Horseman of the Apocalypse (AKA Famine),[7] Bob Dylan's public persona,[8] Satan,[9] and/or the personification of "death itself".[10]

Writer and disc jockey Scott Warmuth sees the song as possibly relating to Robert Wilson's play The Black Rider, which premiered in 1990 and features songs by Tom Waits and a libretto by William S. Burroughs. Warmuth had already written at length about The Black Rider in relation to Dylan's work in 2013: The play's narrative involves a man making a bargain with the devil. In his libretto, Burroughs references Ernest Hemingway having likewise made a "devil's bargain" by allowing Hollywood producers to give his short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" a "happy ending", a tragedy from which Burroughs saw Hemingway as never having recovered, leading to artistic stasis and death. Dylan, who has acknowledged the influence of Burroughs, also made extensive but subtle use of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in the "Oh Mercy" chapter of his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One. Warmuth sees Dylan as playing an elaborate formal game with close readers of his book: Dylan appropriates aspects of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in Chronicles as an indirect means of showing readers how he avoided making a "tragic mistake" similar to Hemingway during the writing and recording of his 1989 album Oh Mercy.[11]

Cultural references

The surprising line "The size of your cock will get you nowhere", much remarked upon in reviews of Rough and Rowdy Ways,[12][13][14] is a close but more concise paraphrase of a sentence in Satire IX by the Ancient Roman poet Juvenal.[15]

The line "Some enchanted evening I'll sing you a song" is a reference to the Rodgers and Hammerstein song "Some Enchanted Evening", which Dylan had recorded on his 2015 album Shadows in the Night.[16]

The song's final line, "Black Rider Black rider, you've been on the job too long", is an allusion to the refrain of the traditional folk song "Duncan and Brady",[17] which Dylan played live between 1999 and 2002, and a 1992 studio recording of which appeared on his album The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006.[18]

References
  1. Shaw, Phil (December 24, 2020). "My Songs of the Year: From Gabriels to Dylan and The Avalanches". Here Comes The Song. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  2. "TRACK REVIEW: Bob Dylan - Black Rider". Music Musings & Such. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  3. "Black Rider – Dylan's most complex song ever – things twice". Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  4. "Bob Dylan". Tim Cumming. Retrieved January 12, 2021.
  5. Light, Alan (June 19, 2020). "Bob Dylan Doesn't Need to Fear Death. His Art Makes Him Immortal". Esquire. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  6. "Black Rider | The Official Bob Dylan Site". www.bobdylan.com. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  7. "Dylan's Christian anthology 3: Black rider and Made up my mind | Untold DylanUntold Dylan". Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  8. "Rough and Rowdy Ways". Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  9. "Bob Dylan: The Black Rider | Untold DylanUntold Dylan". Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  10. "Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways". Pitchfork. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  11. "Vive le Vol: Bob Dylan and the Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway". Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  12. "Bob Dylan's 'Rough And Rowdy Ways' Breathes, Expands And Contracts". NPR.org. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  13. Harvilla, Rob (June 22, 2020). "Bob Dylan Sounds Like He Could Go on Forever". The Ringer. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  14. "Bob Dylan's Legacy Is Secure, But He's Given Us Another Masterpiece Anyway". Stereogum. June 17, 2020. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  15. "Juvenal Quote". Lib Quotes. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  16. "Some Enchanted Evening | The Official Bob Dylan Site". www.bobdylan.com. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  17. "Duncan and Brady Lyrics". www.lyrics.com. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
  18. "Duncan and Brady | The Official Bob Dylan Site". www.bobdylan.com. Retrieved December 28, 2020.
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