Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited

Dylan’s music has always struck me with a feeling of both deep sorrow and deprivation yet it holds the beauty of Nature and Man. His ability to grasp sadness and laughter within the same breath of air has always impressed me. The feelings of Man expressed in one song. For me Dylan binds together the negative and positive sides of life, thus underlining that what makes human life worth living is that we experience both. He is as much a common man as a flamboyant artist, a man with a bleeding heart and a laughter resounding every album, song or text.

A woman whose beauty sooths or eyes yet our memory of her causes us pain. Or a memory many years ago which fills us with joy but whose impermanence is painful. His ability to describe and make us feel the world that we live in through his music and thoughts are for me brilliant. 

On Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited released in 1965, Dylan successfully creates an album that contains a wide palette this wide palette of feelings and notions. He takes on a trip across America discussing, debating and commenting on himself, American History and everything in between. With 110 miles an hour Bob collides with the contemporary America as this is his first album where his songs are electrified – a choice not likened by Dylan’s fans and the folk movement. But luckily Dylan had the courage to rewrite and challenge a genre that, despite it not being conservative in any way, had its identity and self-image in a country that no longer existed. And if I may blatantly and tastelessly quote the man himself: “Then you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a changin’.”

His eyes are fixed on the road ahead of him; sticking it to the man, the development of welfare America, the breaking up of traditional values: family, race, classes and politics. But while at the same time managing this mishmash – he has a third eye looking through the rearview mirror. The young folksinger is never stupid or naïve enough not to acknowledge that the ground he stands on and the breath he breaths was there long before his time. He is as well travelling down memory lane. He never forgets that he is rooted in the North Country, his past and the musical roots of folk. In the same way, the modern and progressive America that Dylan describes originates from a time long gone. A time of slaves and slave owners, wars and world wars, blacks and whites - deprivation and depression.  In order to understand our own time and foresee the future ones we must investigate and rationalize our past. Anything doesn’t originate from nothing, and we must break with our past in order to write our future.

The road on which we are travelling was paved by the Man of the past, a man of history and identity as well as a social identity. A man who domesticated the Wild, a man who “made” America with a pick axe, pencil and shovel. For me, this is Dylan’s way of saying that to change America  into something better, we must first deal and rationalize its past so that we may pave the road ahead ourselves and kick out the man in a suit. And that is for me what makes Highway 61 Revisited such a great album: This is an album whose, songs, themes, lyrics and persona are as multifaceted as the country it describes. It is a reflection of a society whose diversity and sheer scale is tearing it apart but at the same time adding a great deal of cohesion. Like the album America is one big melting pot.

It’s a Buick 66 travelling at a hundred different directions with the pedal to the metal. With endpoints miles apart with nowhere but everywhere to go. It is a car whose cabinet is long torn apart but whose engine is still running held together by an idea of equality, sense of community and a shared past.

Laika

40 years after the Bolshevik revolution, Russia had seen massive changes. Under the reign of many different leaders the country had been shaped to what it was known as in the sixties: a glorious and powerful soviet nation contrasting to the western, namely the US. Alongside the unrest of the cold war, another battle hastily took form: conquering space.

On October 4, 1957, over two thousand kilometers from Kreml, Sputnik 1 was launched from a remote location in Soviet-ruled Kazakhstan. It was the first unmanned satellite to orbit the earth, and a great success for the USSR. This ignited the space race, and the next step would be to have human beings in space. Both American and Russian scientists were intensively researching the possibilities of launching man into space. This would require many more technicalities than an unmanned vessel, and technology was primitive at the time.

Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow was chosen to be the subject of the next flight. Together with two other dogs, she was trained extensively prior to the launch. The success of Sputnik 1 made the Soviet leaders very optimistic, so much that the only gave a months notice before the launch of Sputnik 2, which would contain a living dog. The launch would then take place on the exact day of the 40 year anniverseyr of the Bolshevik revolution. This extremely short notice gave the project an unforseen pressure, which resulted in tragic decision: Laika was deemed for a one-way trip.

November 3, 1957.
Sputnik 2 launches successfully, onboard is cosmonaut dog 'Laika'. The satellite reaches space, but some of the thermal insulation is torn in the flight. This made the cabin temperature rise considerably. After three hours of flight, Laika's biological functions settles to near normal after the stressful launch. Succeeding four orbits around the Earth, no further life signs are received from the satellite; Laika is dead, supposedly of overheating. Laika became the first animal to be successfully launched into space and orbit the earth.

After the fall of Soviet Union, scientists who participated in the project admitted that the project was a subject to extreme political pressure. The launch was far more important politically than scientifically, and sadly Laika was the casualty. As one of the participating scientists expressed it: "We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog."