Bob Dylan‘s gotta be a Shakespeare guy: He took the title to his 1997 album Time Out of Mind from the Queen Mab monologue in Romeo and Juliet (“Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut/ Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub/ Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers”). But it’s the one-off to Othello in “Po’Boy” – a song off of his next album, Love and Theft – that has been driving me crazy since its 2001 release. This is a spectacular tangent, but I’ve been waiting seven years for a public forum in which to vent, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let the opportunity slip through my fingers now.
The offending lyrics, according to bobdylan.com:
“Othello told Desdemona, ‘I’m cold, cover me with a blanket/
By the way, what happened to that poison wine?”/
She says, “I gave it to you, you drank it.”
Now what bothers me here isn’t that he’s mixing methods of death and the roles of victim and executioner – Othello, of course, was the one who offed (the entirely blameless) Desdemona, and he did it in the bedroom with his bare hands.
Chalk it up to artistic license, I could care less. But what I can’t abide – what has been getting under my skin for SEVEN YEARS NOW – is the manner in which Dylan delivers the last line. (You can listen to it here.) He actually sings it so that there’s no second “you” in the last line. He either slurs it all together or doesn’t bother to say it in the first place, thus delivering the line as: “I gave it to you drank it” …
… which doesn’t make a lick of sense and which has ruined for me a perfectly lovely song that also includes testaments to Dylan’s wit (“Calls down to room service, says, ‘Send up a room'”) and his romanticism (“All I know is that I’m thrilled by your kiss/ I don’t know any more than this”).
Whew. Sometimes it’s just good to talk it out, you know? Seriously. I feel so much better now.
We can now go back to our previously scheduled program.
This article appears in August 15 • 2008.
