Bob Dylan is an example of a Rock musician going in the opposite direction to Al Green and Larry Norman. After his conversion to Christianity he continued recording and performing initially releasing albums that explicitly named the name of Jesus before more successfully integrating his faith into art to write songs that view the world from an end times/apocalyptic perspective.
Jokerman is a song depicting the apathy of humanity in the face of the apocalypse. We are the jokermen of the song’s title who laugh, dance and fly but only in the dark of the night afraid to come into the revealing light of the Son of God. The final verse comes straight from the Book of Revelation and describes the birth of the Anti-Christ who will deceive humanity into following him rather than Christ. The accusation and challenge that Dylan puts to us in the final lines of this final verse is that, even though we know exactly what will happen (it has all been prophesied in the Book of Revelation), we make no response; we are apathetic in the face of the apocalypse.
Our lack of response is what is fatal to us because it is only through repentance and turning to Christ that we will be saved from the coming judgement. Without naming the name of Jesus, Dylan captures well the Biblical portrait of humanity as made in the image of God but marred by our rejection of God which perverts our potential for beauty and compassion into a selfish search for self-aggrandisement.
T. Bone Burnette is a Southern musician who got his first major break playing in the band for Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour and has gone on to have a successful recording and production career. It is Burnette who said that he “learned early on that if you believe Jesus is the Light of the World there are two kinds of song you can write – you can write songs about the light or about what you might see by the light.” Al Green gave up his secular recording career in order to sing about the light while Larry Norman and Bob Dylan in the songs I have mentioned have aimed to sing more about what you might see by the light.
Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Gothic novelist, said that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural." Burnette has written a number of witty, erudite and critically acclaimed songs that address the distortions about which O’Connor wrote. In Hefner & Disney, a short story set to music, Burnette turns our understanding of the stories we tell ourselves on their head and claims that in our sentimentality and sensuality we are all dupes of the wicked King who wants to rob the children of their dreams.
If you were going to write songs about what you can see by the Light of Christ what might you write about?
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Bob Dylan - Jokerman.
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