Free Dylan's Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks

differentiated: Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Leadbelly are spoken of famously and familiarly, though not
impudently. Woody Guthrie is Woody in the title, Song to Woody , but in the song proper he is treated with a propriety that is saved from being too deferential by the affectionately chaffing
lead-in: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song” (that might seem cheeky of young me, but honestly it isn’t), and
    Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
    All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
    That is quite something to say, and to sing, and it asks – as art, I mean, not as a personal plea – a substantiated trust that we will take it in the spirit in which
it is offered: not as false modesty but as true tribute. For the song has not moved, as it so easily might have done, from the words of the firstverse, “I’m
seein’ your world”, to something along the lines of “Now I’m goin’ to show you my world”, but to a world that is neither yours, Woody Guthrie, nor mine (as yet .
. .), “a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along”. And “I know that you know” can, on this happy unenvious occasion, have nothing of the icy negation of
Positively 4th Street with its soured repetition of the word “know”. No?
    Positively 4th Street
    If you want your good book to get a bad review, have a friend review it. Envy has a way, regrettably and even regretfully, of rearing its sore head. Of course friendship thinks
of itself as the enemy of envy, but then there is nothing more embitteredly envious than a friendship betrayed.
    You got a lotta nerve
    To say you are my friend
    When I was down
    You just stood there grinning
    You got a lotta nerve
    To say you got a helping hand to lend
    You just want to be on
    The side that’s winning
    But if there had always been positively no two-way street, they wouldn’t now be standing in this acid rain.
    For friendship (and Positively 4th Street has to be a song about a friendship that went wrong, that soured) differs most of all from love in this: that friendship has to be reciprocal,
reciprocated. I can love you without your loving me, but I can’t be your friend without your being my friend. (My befriending you is something quite other.) “You just want to be on /
The side that’s winning”? Careering into envy, are you? The song itself is concentratedly one-sided, and from the very beginning it makes clear that it is going to strike unrelentingly
the same note and the same target.
    This starts with the immediately metallic rhyme within “You got a lotta nerve”. (Nerve as impudence, but with nerves tautly a-quiver in every arrow-strung line.) Then there’s
the re-insistence, promptly, of the entire line repeated, “You got a lotta nerve”, same timing, same placing, pounding with the same instrument – and this with the very next linethen saying yet once more “you got a”. (Helping hand to lend? You must be joking.) At once obsessedly repetitive and laconically flat-tongued, the song is a
masterpiece of regulated hatred – the great phrase for the key-cold clarity (not charity) of Jane Austen. 74 The fire next time, maybe, but the
ice this time. Anyway, revenge is a dishing-it-out that is best eaten cold. 75
    Impact impinges. Repeatedly. The song exercises its sway while swaying (like a boxer), for it has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving. 76 “You just stood there grinning”: the song just stands there, not grinning, but grinding. Might it even be said to just stomp there? No, because it bobs a
bout. So when we suddenly find (it is a surprise) “surprised” precipitating “paralyzed” –
    You see me on the street
    You always act surprised
    You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
    But you don’t mean it
    When you know as well as me
    You’d rather see me paralyzed
    Why don’t you just come out once
    And scream it
    – it is that the song has realized its power,