Song of the Day 8/16: Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”
Who lost the war in Afghanistan? Certainly not the defense industry, which got the lion’s share of the trillion dollars the country wasted waging it. Big win for them.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, which seemed to awaken Americans to the fact that they could be incinerated at a moment’s notice, was still fresh when Dylan wrote this protest song in the winter of 1962-63. He first recorded it for the February 1963 issue of Broadside, the folk music magazine, before it appeared on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” that May.
The song, Dylan once said, is interpreted as “a pacifistic song against war. It’s not an anti-war song. It’s speaking against what Eisenhower was calling a military-industrial complex as he was making his exit from the presidency. That spirit was in the air, and I picked it up.” In Broadside, the lyrics appeared alongside a drawing by his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, shwoing a man carving up the world with a knife and fork while a hungry family watches.
Less than ideal timing for this choice:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bob-dylan-accused-of-drugging-sexually-abusing-12-year-old-in-1965?ref=home?ref=home
How so? I’m supposed to automatically give credence to someone who files a lawsuit making outrageous claims 56 years after the fact, even though that lawsuit contains not a single specific allegation? I’m supposed to believe that Dylan had time to drug a 12-year-old and carry out a grooming campaign? C’mon, pull the other one.
I’m supposed to pretend he never wrote what he did because of it?
You read a lot into my brief words. Simply said it was poor timing, that’s all.
And I say it’s not.
Exactly. The time and place in question, NYC in April & May of 1965 found Bob in the UK. Few performers have had their work schedules, whereabouts and the people involved documented to the detail that Bob Dylan has.