"Idiot Wind"

"We're idiots babe, It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves"We chose this line next, particularly because there is no penis joke to be made, & they'd been coming pretty fast & think (oh... I guess, there's a little double-entendre there). None-the-less, this song is the 4th track on his mid-'70's masterpiece. It starts off as a kiss off to a woman, but ends with these lines. We he shifts from "You're" to "we're" he is suddenly able to include himself and maybe everyone else in the song. Ten years earlier, his all-inclusiveness would have been happy and positive. Here he is commenting on the state of humanity. We've all become like those need to be fed.

Who needs to be fed? Babies & invalids? That seems to be about it. If we're to be compared to these people, we need to then think about what else they can't do, namely, wiping their asses. He's basically calling us a race of drooling, diaper wearing infants. You have to respect the directness, but also his ability to throw that little twist on @ the end. In fact, if we're all in the same boat, perhaps it's not an insult, but simply a flag of membership.

I guess I don't really have much to say about this one, but maybe that's because it's so short. The unity of image might point to it's simplistic brilliance though. Short & sweet. But then he adds "Babe" to the end of the line (& many other lines in this song) which connects it to his earlier work w/ songs like "It Ain't Me Babe," a much more anti-authoritarian tune. Here, he's moved from radical to nihilist. There's no longer any reason to fight since we're all in the muck (literally, if we consider the adult diapers we apparently need) together. It's a fun nihilism though. And it's the sense of humor that invites comparisons to the post-modern move from the anxiety of the Cold War to the freedom to have fun... or was John Perry Barlow would put it 10 years later, "enjoying the ride." We're all doomed, but that doesn't necessitate any sort of Yeatsian fear. The center may not hold, but he seems to be suggesting that, as he said in "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," it doesn't matter anyhow. It's life on the periphery that he is celebrating, & we're all on the outside looking into the void together. And that's OK.