"Are we all global village idiots whom television has reduced to voyeurism, or has television so deadened us to catastrophe that we can't tell a real crisis from a fictional one?"1
Thus the seemingly prophetic question is posed by
Robert Shelton in the
1986 pressing of his
Bob Dylan biography,
No Direction Home, regarding the song "Black Diamond Bay". The eighth song on Bob Dylan's
1976 effort,
Desire, penned by Dylan with songwriter
Jacques Lévy, and performed by Dylan alongside
Emmylou Harris, is not necessarily one of Dylan's better known
narrative songs. It is, however, a powerful
collage of
imagery and
perspectives, nonetheless.
In this song, one that
conjures up images of a modern-day
Atlantis, Dylan and Levy weave a tale containing a
colourful cast of characters, including a
suicidal Greek man, a compulsive gambler, and more than a handful of highly
self-confident other major
players. Here, the cast of characters, in their blissful ignorance and
delusions of grandeur, are swept under by a natural disaster that, from all accounts, seems to have been a long time coming.
The vast majority of this song takes place on "
ground zero" for the catastrophic event, but in the end, takes a surprising turn. Again, Dylan, known for his
lyrical "
sleight of hand", radically changes the
perspective on the listener, giving a whole new twist to the tale. At the same time, however, the apathy found in the last verse can be shrewdly threaded directly to those other instances found throughout the story.
A truly
fantastic piece of fiction, "Black Diamond Bay" nonetheless makes the listener/reader ponder whether Dylan is trying to make another, more subtle point in the song. Regardless of how one
interprets it, however, the song stands quite tall on its own
literary merits.
Lyrics removed due to E2 Copyright Changes :(
Lyrics can be found at: http://bobdylan.com/songs/diamond.html
See also: The E2 Bob Dylan Literary Analysis Project
Works Cited:
p. 467,
No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan -
© 1986, Robert Shelton, Da Capo Press