Like a Rolling Stone

In both the four-minute-thirty-second “Radio Mix” and the six-minute-twenty-six-second “1-800-Mix,” the Mystery Tramps open with a sample of the original fanfare: distant, thin, and undeniable, like the vision of Shangri-La Ronald Colman can’t get out of his head. Over a conventional hip-hop drum and bass track, there’s a thick, crass, tiresomely knowing male lead singer, instantly answered by an automatic female chorus. There’s scratching, and then a sample of Bob Dylan: “How does it feel?” “Check it out,” says the leader, sounding as if he wants to sell you dope. “This a story about a girl who goes from riches to rags, and it’s a drag, so check it ouuuuuut.” It’s the most reductive story in the song: “a put-down,” as Jon Landau described it in 1968, full of “self-righteousness, its willingness to judge others without judging oneself”; an example of “sixties songwriters” refusing “women any middle ground between the pedestal and the gutter,” as Charles Shaar Murray wrote in 1989, a song “sneeringly and contemptuously sung to a spoiled rich girl,” with “the reactionary stagnation of the social order . . . personified as female”; “a view of the Socialite life of the Big Apple,” as C. P. Lee wrote in 1998, if not “another song about” the Warhol actress Edie Sedgwick. “Even now,” Dave Marsh wrote in 1989, “it still seems strange that the record is so long because in real life, diatribes are never allowed to last this long: somebody interrupts.” The Mystery Tramp singer can’t wait to push the buttons. “How does it feel? I really want to know,” he says, but he already knows. There’s only one real hint of the bad news the leader insists the song is about but never offers: when he chants “Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street,” you hear a car honk. Something in the timing of the way it comes in, the abruptness of the horn, as if the driver is both angry and shocked, lets you see who he’s honking at: someone wandering in traffic, oblivious, confused, someone who has given up.

Right at the beginning of the first chorus, there’s a cut-in of a girl in the bloom of youth: “Spare change?” she says. “Spare change, anybody?” Her voice is so clear and untroubled, that you don’t believe her for a moment. When the singer gets to the third verse, which for the Mystery Tramps is also the last verse, to “After he took from you everything that he could steal,” the girl is back, as if from a sitcom: “Hey! Where’s my stuff?” The recurrent Dylan sample, “How does it feel?” is plaintive and small, Midwestern, heard as if from across the country, and, along with the girl on the street, the only source of soul in the piece. You hear Dylan calling out to her—he’s the one who really wants to know.

The shorter version ends with the girl buried in a fade, barely audible: “What is this? Can you help me?” That will be the heart of the long mix. There’s that fanfare again, but speeded up and tinny, with a heavier rhythm on top of it, and then a second male voice, a more secretive voice: “Yeah, can you dig it?” It’s a hipster’s tone, an old man’s gravel in the throat: the Mystery Tramp. And then the girl whose last words were almost lost at the end of the first version comes through all too clearly, in a panic: “What is this? Can you help me out? Where am I, what’s going on—This isn’t cool.” She is trapped in the song as if she were locked in a closet. “Heh, heh, heh,” says the Mystery Tramp.

The sneer Charles Shaar Murray heard when Bob Dylan sang the song, that the Mystery Tramps heard, is altogether gone when Articolo 31 takes up the Mystery Tramps’ arrangement five years later.

There is a distorted, chopped up, Dylan sample—“I got, I got something to tell you,” from his version of the blues “It Hurts Me Too,” and instantly you are plunged into darkness. Like the girl in the Mystery Tramps’ “1-800” version, you don’t know where you are. There is the original fanfare, sounding like the trumpets of Jubilee—and then a harsh but leveled rap, relentlessly chasing what seem like thousands of words.

Articolo 31’s “Come una Pietra Scalciata” is a rewrite of “Like a Rolling Stone,” following Dylan’s themes, only three verses in four and a half minutes, but in terms of its Italian word count at least four and a half times as long as Dylan’s long song. It’s a flood of words, with the first verse run over a chopped, pulled-back sample of the original fanfare behind a slow hip-hop rhythm track, then a new organ track. A repeated sample of the lilting piano from Dylan’s original recording is the dominant instrumental sound, all loose notes, like pieces flying off a machine in motion. The song is shattered, but it never loses its body, reconstituting itself as if each fragment carries a genetic code. And then Dylan, with the same faraway sample of “How does it feel?” that the Mystery Tramps used, but this time the female singers for the chorus are warm, present, full of desire. They are actors, not a sound effect; as Dylan calls out they answer him. This is how it feels—complete, knowledgeable, strong, and Dylan continues as they do, the spectral singer and the flesh-and-blood women now answering each other line by line, neither side surrendering anything.

Both ride the chorus like a horse. As the women throw every line that comes from Dylan in English back to him in Italian, as if there’s nothing he can tell them they don’t already know, you can hear him singing directly to them, as if they were always the subject of the song, the audience it sought. It’s as if he means to tell them, with more passion than his voice, heard as it was recorded in 1965, has ever carried before, that there is something they don’t know, something they cannot know, because like the language in which he made the song it has been forgotten. The feeling generated by “Come una Pietra Scalciata” is finally that the Dylan captured in the recording is not asking how it feels but what it means—and you can hear the women singing directly to him, as if the song is now as much theirs as his. He is questioning; they are deliberate. For them the chorus is a staircase and each word is a stair.

How does it feel?
Dimmi comme ci si sente
To be on your own?
A stare sempre da sola
With no direction home?
Né direzione né casa

A second rapper comes in for the second verse, moving faster than the first, over a more cut-up, stop-and-start sample from the original, moving faster over the slower, jerking rhythm. Then the chorus returns—with familiarity, with repetition, even more powerful, even more alive—and then the first rapper, back to take the third and last verse, as if he can’t believe how many words there are left, as if this is a chance to say everything he’s ever wanted to say, and have it validated by the way Bob Dylan will answer him—“How does it feel?”—and the way he will answer back: “e dimmi come ci si sente ora che devi sudarti i beni materiali vedi che hai poco spazio per i problemi esistenziali . . . ”

All sense of a put-down, of a sneer, has been erased as if it never was—if it ever was. (“Why does everybody say of something like ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’” Dylan asked Robert Shelton in 1965, “‘That Dylan . . . is that all he can do, put down people? I’ve never put anybody down in a song, man.’”) In the few moments of the song that play on the soundtrack of Dylan’s film—the fanfare, the first rap, the first chorus—it comes through whole, moving across the scenes of social collapse, of America as a plague, like a call to arms. It’s thrilling; it’s confusing. In this blasted version of the U.S.A. as what you see and what you hear refuse to come together, the song asks not how a new life feels, but why what is now so plainly an affirmation of freedom, of a world to win, has persisted in any form at all. It’s as if you’re hearing a distorted radio signal from a station that went out of business years ago, or—with the body of the song now cut up and reassembled with pieces of bodies of people not born when the song was first heard—as if the true precursor of “Like a Rolling Stone” is not Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba” but the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” from 1959, with its sound of two or three or four different stations cutting in and out of the same band, the classical station, the R&B station, the Top 40 station, the ether, a mistake that will leave your life forever incomplete, because you will never hear it again, because you will never be sure you heard it at all.