The John Lennon song written to mock Bob Dylan
John Lennon may be one of the most singular entities in rock music. No matter what era of music he found himself in, Lennon would only sing a song how he could articulate it, never sticking to the conventional structure that most other chart-topping artists have been used to. Although Lennon thought what he was doing was completely new, he faced massive competition when hearing Bob Dylan for the first time.
Starting from the folk tradition, Dylan’s penchant for writing story-driven songs about human issues struck a nerve with Lennon in the early 1960s. Rather than the old-school sounds of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Lennon went head over heels for Dylan’s writing, playing The Freewheelin Bob Dylan nonstop throughout the band’s tours.
Dylan would end up listening back, eventually going electric in the wake of the rock revolution going on overseas. Throughout both artists’ careers, though, they weren’t afraid to take a few swipes at each other out in the wild.
In response to The Beatles’ attempts to go folk on Rubber Soul, Dylan’s ‘Fourth Time Around’ bore a striking similarity to Lennon’s own ‘Norwegian Wood’, which allegedly made the Beatle paranoid about his songwriting colleague. Although both men had a great deal of respect for one another up until Lennon’s death in 1980, there was one subtle dust-up when Dylan decided to embrace the Christian lifestyle.
After years of writing and endless miles on his heart, Dylan took a break from secular music in the late 1970s, becoming a born-again Christian and making songs that had to do with his newfound faith on albums like Slow Train Coming.
Although Lennon was going through his own career reinvention with the album Double Fantasy in 1980, he didn’t understand why Dylan would make such a sharp pivot into the world of religion. Given Dylan’s caustic tongue when talking about the greatest injustices in the world, it was difficult for Lennon to watch the same writer adopt a lifestyle that emphasises obedience to one specific faith.
When discussing Dylan’s work in one of his final interviews, Lennon admitted to having a bias against the preaching style that Dylan was catering towards, remarking, “I don’t want to say anything about a man who is searching or has found it. It is unfortunate when people say, ‘This is the only way.’ That’s the only thing I’ve got against anybody if they are saying, ‘This is the only answer.’ I don’t want to hear about that. There isn’t one answer to anything.”
While never released officially, Lennon would write the song ‘Serve Yourself’ as a direct retaliation to Dylan’s own ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’. As opposed to Dylan’s emphasis on finding faith after being lost in the world, Lennon is still denying what he sees as false idols, going after Dylan’s mantras directly, saying, “Well, you may believe in devils, and you may believe in lords. But Christ, you’re gonna have to serve yourself, and that’s all there is to it.” Lennon would never write a song to hurt Dylan, but ‘Serve Yourself’ is a good look at how much they had drifted apart over the years.
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