‘TV Talkin’ Song’: Bob Dylan’s stupidest lyric
Just about every religion professes that God created the world and everything in it. That means he also created Walkergate Industrial Estate, proving that everyone can have an off day. Bob Dylan could certainly be considered some of The Almighty’s better work, but he is bound by this same rule of highs and lows.
The folk star even accepts that there have been periods when he wasn’t at his best. Perhaps the sorest was when he hit the road with his younger pals. ”I’d been on an eighteen month tour with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. It would be my last,” he mournfully wrote in his 2004 memoir. ”I had no connection to any kind of inspiration. Whatever had been there to begin with had all vanished and shrunk. Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine.”
Our hero was crushed. Young blood had swept him off of his tracks, and he was having to be bludgeoned by this reality night after night as The Heartbreakers seemingly soared to new heights with each new show and Dylan sank ever lower. He tried to regather some inspiration away from the stage, but even his songwriting skill seemed to have abandoned him. ”I couldn’t overcome the odds,” he continues. ”Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me.”
In 1990, he was trying to look the world in the eye as clearly as he once had. But he was struggling. Looking back on the period with Rolling Stone in 2006, Dylan explained that he “wasn’t bringing anything at all into the studio” while making Under the Red Sky. “I was completely disillusioned,” he recalled. “I’d let someone else take control of it all and just come up with lyrics to the melody of the song.” Even his shoes on the album cover don’t seem to fit.
‘TV Talkin’ Song’ is a tragic timestamp of this period. It’s a track that just seems hollow and sad—a grim reminder of how time strips away our virility. Dylan once penned with sagacious vigour one of the greatest attacks on cynical trolls in history, “While one who sings with his tongue on fire / Gargles in the rat race choir / Bent out of shape from society’s pliers / Cares not to come up any higher / But rather get you down in the hole / That he’s in.” And then, in the dark days of his ’90s downfall, as if to prove the erosion of time, he simply proclaimed that too much TV is bad for you.
It’s not just the simple philosophy that leaves ‘TV Talkin’ Song’ seeming vapid and lazy either, lines like “Your mind is your temple, keep it beautiful and free / Don’t let an egg get laid in it by something you can’t see,” are as messy as the top shelf of a dwarf’s fridge. Complete with unoriginal but inoffensive boogie riffing, Dylan might lament that TV “drag[s] your brain about”, but it’s his own thinking cap that seems partly lobotomised here; perhaps he’d binged a bit too much Coronation Street this time out.
Contemporary television and its trappings may well be exhausting, but putting that point over found Dylan exhausted. It is as dull and lifeless as his lyrics have ever gotten, making a simple point badly and then leaving it at that. Ultimately, it’s hard to see how the same man behind ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ could’ve written this sham of a song. Thankfully, he’s got more than enough masterpieces to make up for this perplexing oddity.
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out Bob Dylan Newsletter
All the latest stories about Bob Dylan from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.