ABSTRACT
This chapter explores musical irony in several early Bob Dylan songs, showing how Dylan enlists irony to mediate between the romantic inner world of the artist and an oppressive societal world. Dylan plays with time through a web of transhistorical connections linking different styles, songs, and mythical references. Through the creative blending and juxtaposition of styles and historical topoi, the listener hears Dylan playing with style, with detached self-awareness, rupturing the illusion of being in a style. Dylan also projects irony through recurring themes that present an inherently ironic dilemma. The paradoxical dynamic of engaging the listener while creating resistance is akin to a Brechtian approach to theatre. Dylan came to know Bertolt Brecht's song lyrics in the early 1960s by way of an off-Broadway theatrical presentation, Brecht on Brecht, which featured Brecht's songs with translations by Marc Blitzstein.
