Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was a music-video prototype — it has been copied ever since.
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Rolling Stone named Beyoncé’s “Formation” the greatest music video of all time in 2021. However in terms of essentially the most influential, first place can arguably go to a clip that isn’t even a correct music video — and was shot in black & white 60 years in the past.
Final week, Margo Value launched a jaunty new single, “Don’t Wake Me Up,” accompanied by a video through which she holds up white playing cards with snippets of lyrics — amongst them, “cow pasture cemetery,” “honky tonk leaky tent,” “dive bar,” “insanity” — because the track performs. It didn’t take a classic-rock historian to see the video as a nod to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the canonical footage of the younger Bob of 1965 in a London alleyway holding, and discarding, playing cards with bits of the tune’s lyrics; within the background is poet Allen Ginsberg speaking to off-screen Dylan pal Bobby Neuwirth.
Not an precise music video, the scene was the opener of documentarian D.A. Pennebaker’s penetrating 1967 movie Dont Look Again, shot throughout Dylan’s U.Okay. tour of two years earlier than. As Pennebaker later said, the idea got here from Dylan himself: “He stated, ‘I’ve acquired this concept for a movie the place I take a complete lot of sheets of paper and write lyrics for a track, and maintain them up because the lyrics come up within the track after which I simply toss them away.’ And I stated, ‘That’s a incredible concept.’ So we introduced alongside about 50 shirt cardboards.”
The footage was shot within the alley behind the Savoy Lodge in London, and based on Pennebaker (who died in 2019), a number of the handwritten lyrics have been provided by Joan Baez and Donovan, who have been each in Dylan’s neighborhood (and crosshairs) on the time.
As soon as the MTV period started, the sequence, comparatively primitive because it was, was seen as a music video prototype and started to encourage knockoffs and tributes. “When Margo approached me with the idea, I did a deep dive on teams who’d carried out related tasks with poster playing cards or cue playing cards and was shocked to see what number of there have been,” says Hannah Grey Corridor, who directed Value’s “Don’t Wake Me Up.” “It’s like preserving a practice going.”
The primary could have been “Misfit,” the 1986 video by the trendy British pop band Curiosity Killed the Cat, which featured Andy Warhol dropping white playing cards throughout a quick cameo.
The next yr, INXS’ “Mediate” elevated the Dylan homage to a different degree. Beginning with singer Michael Hutchence, all of the band members held up and subsequently dropped lyric playing cards in sequence. “You needed to get the timing proper,” INXS’ Andrew Farriss tells Rolling Stone of filming outdoors of Sydney within the band’s dwelling nation of Australia. “You had to verify the playing cards landed.” In one other salute to the Dylan video, a number of the phrases on the playing cards have been deliberately misspelled.
In an indication that not every part was immediately accessible on YouTube in 1987 (after all, YouTube was but to exist), Farriss says he wasn’t conscious of the supply materials on the time. “I’m unsure if it was the director’s concept or Michael’s, however I’ve to confess that I didn’t even know Bob had a video like that,” he says. “Perhaps a number of the different guys did. All I do know is that it seemed like a good suggestion. I noticed [the original] later and went, ‘Oh, wow.’” The recreation was so apparent that one critic on the time famous that “each the filmmaker [Pennebaker] and his topic [Dylan] must spherical up the legal professionals,” however that didn’t stop the track from profitable Video of the Yr on the 1988 MTV Music Video Awards, at the side of the band’s companion clip for “Want You Tonight.”
Since then, a cottage trade of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” movies has risen up, every honoring the unique in numerous methods. As with Curiosity Killed the Cat, some approached their remakes as parodies. “Bizarre Al” Yankovic’s “Bob,” in 2003, discovered everybody’s favourite satirical hero with a Dylan wig, vest, and alleyway of his personal, a fake Ginsberg behind him, as Yankovic tweaked Dylan’s surrealistic imagery (“Rise to vote, sir/Do geese see God/Do 9 males interpret/9 males, I nod”).
Despite the fact that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” isn’t one in every of Dylan’s topical songs, others have used the setup for protest photographs of their very own. Les Claypool and the Frog Brigade’s “Buzzards of Inexperienced Hill” has sometimes carnivalesque Claypool lyrics, which could possibly be concerning the perils of drunken driving, therefore Claypool’s use of cue playing cards within the track’s video.
Earlier this yr, Kim Gordon redid the packing-list lyrics of “Bye Bye” into a minimalist anti-Trump protest song, “Bye Bye 25!,” full with a video with Gordon holding playing cards with the brand new lyrics (“immigrant,” “hate,” “injustice”). Artist Ed Ruscha has a Sonic Youth connection of his personal (the band named its track “Courageous Males Run” after one in every of his work) and a Dylan one too: In 2012, his supplied up a lyric-card homage, honoring pal and conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner with snippets of Weiner’s personal phrases.
Wir sind Helden’s 2005 video “Nur ein Wort” (“Simply One Phrase”) featured the now-defunct German pop band in their very own alley, dancing and cavorting as they flashed their lyric sheets. (For the reason that track is about encouraging a personal particular person to specific themselves — “your silence is your tent” — the usage of phrases within the video made conceptual sense.) And earlier than he was slaying zombies, Andrew Lincoln was wooing Keira Knightley in Love Really with, yep, phrases on white playing cards.
Within the case of Value’s video, director Corridor says Value’s group approached her about doing one thing just like Dylan, “however they stated to make it my very own and do a up to date tackle it.” Utilizing 77 completely different poster-board playing cards for her shoot, Corridor thinks these lyric snippets additionally hook up with the track’s theme and to Dylan’s personal legacy: “Margo and I didn’t speak about it in depth, however to me, it speaks very closely to our present social local weather and folks being remoted in their very own methods and never wanting into different individuals’s opinions. It’s extra social commentary than protest track.”
For Farriss, one factor unites practically 40 years of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” homages. “It’s easy,” he says. “Simply because one thing’s difficult doesn’t imply it’s essentially good.”
From Rolling Stone US.