In this week’s blog post, I will be breaking down Bob Dylan’s song Blowin’ in the Wind as a cultural resource, analyzing what it meant to cultural movements of the '60s, and what it means in 2023. The song was released on his 1963 album, Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The song's lyrics are a series of rhetorical questions relating to civil rights, war, and spirituality ending in the refrain “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” The recording features only his voice and an acoustic guitar, leaving space for the poignancy of the lyrics to shine through.
The song didn’t so much reimagine an alternative to the social and political conditions of the 60s as it did provide the listener an opportunity to do that in their own mind. Lyrics like “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free? Yes, n’ how many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see?” are imaging a world in which civil rights exist and everyone believes in human’s rights to be free. The song goes on to ask “How many times must the cannonballs fly Before they’re forever banned?” The song was released in 1963 so it is likely referring to the Vietnam War, however, it is a question that can be asked at any age and still have potency.
The song was actively imagining and asking for systemic change, both in its message and in the significant moments it was sung. This NPR article by Brian Naylor recounts “Dylan sang it himself at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the spring of 1963. Peter, Paul & Mary performed it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of that year, a few hours before Martin Luther King delivered his `I Have a dream speech.“
Though much can be read into the meaning and intention of the song. It is written in a way that some have described as passive, using rhetorical questions and refraining from demanding change, rather than waiting for it. In this NPR piece titled 'Blowin' In The Wind' Still Asks The Hard Questions, Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul, and Mary said “You can hear in this a yearning and a hope and a possibility and a sadness and sometimes a triumphal proclamation of determination. The answer is blowin' in the wind means we will find the answer."
Though the song came out in the 60s, it was written in such a way that one can listen to it in 2023 and feel similar emotions they might have felt in 1963. There are certainly elements of the world this song paints that are reflected in current conditions. Though struggles for justice and civil rights may have come a long way, the question “How many years can some people exist Before they’re allowed to be free?” is absolutely still worth asking. You could hear the lines “How many years can a mountain exist Before it’s washed to the sea?” and think of climate change or hear “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?” and think of our struggles to see the danger and take appropriate actions to slow the spread of COVID 19.
In Sing Out! magazine in 1962, Bob Dylan said "There ain't much I can say about this song, except the answer is blowin' in the wind. It ain't no book or movie or TV show or discussion group, man. It's in the wind." Writer David Hajdu says “Its ambivalence is part of the song's appeal.” Be it ambivalence, metaphor, or truth the song holds a true power.
As we near the end of this Digital Media Literacy class and I reach the end of my college career I find myself in a jumbled state when I think about my major, Mass Media and Communications. We live in a media landscape filled with deafening noise. There is little that hasn’t been said or tried to be sold. There is too much content to consume and an endless stream of perspectives I may never understand. This leads me to a defining question of who am I going to be as a (now slightly more educated) grain of sand blowin’ in the media landscape? I don’t want to add unnecessary noise. I want to use my knowledge and skills for good, which is itself an idea constantly blowin’ in the wind.
I reflect on this song as a guide, ask important questions even if they are impossible to answer, be a proponent for human rights, be honest even when it is painful, seek humanity in everything, and hold tight to the fact that everything will end up as dust blowing in the wind.
Image by Oliver Hihn. Accessed at Unsplash.com.