‘Wiggle Wiggle’: The oddity of Bob Dylan’s worst song ever
Bob Dylan is a masterful musician; I’ve even gone so far as to call him the greatest artist in history, and despite the scoffs of a few in the comments section, in one hundred years, I’ll be vindicated, and nobody can prove otherwise. This makes it all the more bewildering that there is a blot on his copy akin to Michelangelo randomly spray-painting a rogue, crude spam javelin in the corner of the Sistine Chapel. Despite this, the whys and wherefores of ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ have never truly been reckoned with.
Was this song a joke? Was this some sort of elaborate PR stunt that illuminated the brilliance of his back catalogue by providing a point of such sheer contrast that there is no way to judge it other than with extreme bewilderment, dash it from the mind, and reappraise the magnificence of his past? Did Dylan perceive that his stock had fallen so far that the criticism now seemed outsized when scaled up to his former greatness, so, like a disgruntled employee, he clocked in and began a day of sabotage to prove that his previous efforts really did warrant a pay rise?
None of this is knowable, but it is so bad that it proves mysterious… and that is by no means a redeeming factor for this act of self-Chernobyling. Even when the tracklisting for his 1990 Under the Red Sky record was announced, a song by the name of ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ surely stood out as something that should never be uttered from the caustic mouth of the voice of a thousand generations. The track remains an unexplainable oddity that should’ve been shot at birth if only to spare the world from the head-scratching that has followed.
Well, if anything, there is a hopeful underlying lesson to learn from all this: every single person is fallible. This song arose when in 1990 for Under the Red Sky whereby Dylan entered the studio completely devoid of ideas. Lord knows he had given us enough over the years; now he had hit a roadblock but thought rather than rest on his laurels, he’d have a crack at trying to overcome it on the wing, and it didn’t work.
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.” With that in mind, we can almost imagine ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ as an ironic outcry from an anguished artist.
For an artist who had previously written in a manner of creative possession, allowing inspiration to flow through his unbridled stream, the loss of this conduit motif was particularly impactful. “Try to sit down and write something like that,” he said of previous efforts like ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. “There is a magic to that. And It’s not a Siegfried & Roy kind of magic, it’s a different kind of penetrating magic,” he says.
Dylan explains that to reach such sagacious summits, “you have to get power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once, and once was enough”. He’s happy to admit that he “can do other things now”, and indeed he can; his live shows are where the unguarded and inviolable sincerity of playing with pure possessed passion still shines through, but it is harder to channel that energy onto a blank page now that his pen has already bled out myriad masterpieces in frenzied nights.
However, that still doesn’t explain why he thought ‘Wiggle Wiggle’ would be a suitable opening track for an album that can only be seen as a kindly portent to listeners to quit now and give up on the rest of the record.
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