‘A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall’: Bob Dylan’s bleakest song
There’s a Bob Dylan song for anger, for joy, for lust, for love. There’s a song for deep religious awakening, or raging against the world. There are songs for politics or songs for giving in on politics. Really, there’s a Bob Dylan song for everything, including total unbridled bleakness in the case of ‘A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall’.
In 1963, people were scared. Since 1953, there seemed to be an on-going escalation of the enduring cold war as the nuclear arms race sped on. Along with changes of leadership across the globe, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the continuation of the Vietnam War, the world seemed a scary place. Or at least, a place where major global disaster seemed absolutely imminent.
When Oppenheimer built the first nuclear bomb, he’d hoped that the mere presence of the weapon would be enough to bring about world peace. He hoped people would be so terrified of it’s power that there would never be conflict again in order to protect one another. Obviously, that wasn’t the case. And so, by the 1960s when things were escalating again, the artists had to step in.
As one of his more cryptic political numbers, ‘A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall’ also feels like Dylan’s bleakest the second it’s message is understood. Here, we meet a narrator traversing a post-apocalyptic, post-bang world. With “dead oceans”, “sad forests” and the need to crawl down highways for futile survival, it’s a destroyed earth, as it would be if nuclear war ever broke out.
But Dylan never says that, he never utters the word. Instead, he sings of debris and ash and chemicals as “a hard rain” that’s gonna fall on the world if it continues barrelling towards destruction.
In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan speaks to the tracks doom and gloom as something representative of the way he felt at the time as he read the newspaper each and every morning. “After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course,” he said as he fell into a hole of complete and utter pessimistic despair about the reality he was seeing around him.
And so he built this track in response, piecing it together with the abandoned imagery of other abandoned songs as proof that the topic of the end days was heavy on his mind. With scenes of abandoned kids, dying animals, children at war, nature bleeding and so on into the bleakest depths of his mind, he said succinctly about the track, “It’s all one long funeral song.”
Decades on, it remains a sadly apt one that’s been covered time and time again by modern artists who still believe the message held here is an essential one. In 2017, Laura Marling took on the track, while in 2016, Patti Smith chose to perform this song, out of Dylan’s entire discography, to honour him at his Nobel Prize ceremony. In a world that still feels on the brink of major disaster, it seems that Dylan’s darkest song still rings true.
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