Dylan's Visions of Sin. Christopher Ricks
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Covetousness
Gotta Serve Somebody
There is a story of a country squire who, leaving church after having heard tell (once more) of the Ten Commandments, took some comfort to himself: “Well, anyhow I haven’t made a graven image.”114
Only one of the seven deadly sins is granted one of the Ten Commandments to itself. For although anger may lurk within “Thou shalt do no murder”, and lust within “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, these Commandments neither identify nor identify with one particular sin. But the sin of covetousness has its very own Commandment, the Tenth, no less. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.” Do not covet his wife or his maid, even though you may happen to find your pleasure in somebody’s mistress or in having women in a cage. Do not covet his servant, and do remember that you yourself are going to have to serve somebody. You may be this, that, or the other,
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
The Old Testament concurs with the New Testament in the warning against covetousness that is Gotta Serve Somebody. “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth,” Christ urges in the Sermon on the Mount.115
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk
Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk
Might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread
May be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-sized bed
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
The Victorian provocateur Samuel Butler put in a word against the word of the Lord, that we cannot serve God and Mammon.
Granted that it is not easy, but nothing that is worth doing ever is easy. Easy or not easy, not have only we got to do it, but it is exactly in this that the whole duty of man consists.
If there are two worlds at all (and about this I have no doubt) it stands to reason that we ought to make the best of both of them, and more particularly of the one with which we are most immediately concerned.116
Gotta Serve Somebody is unrelenting, and this in itself presented its creator with a challenge. How do you vary the unrelenting? And how, once you have started on the infinite possibilities of You may be anything-you-care-to-name but you’re gonna have to etc., will you ever be through with instances and remonstrances? You are assuredly characterizing all these people most vividly, with no end of styptic scepticism, but you’re gonna have to serve notice on the song sometime.
But the first thing of which to take the force is the combination of the song’s inexorable speed with its radiating deftness of sidelong glances, sly touches and chances. Take the opening verse, which opens, very diplomatically, on to the summit of the social world:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
What’s going on here? Everything.
“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Such was the straightfaced definition given by the seventeenth-century ambassador Sir Henry Wotton. An ambassador is a servant of his country (as a minister is supposed to be), and the word “ambassador” is from ambactus, a servant. To England or France: old sparring partners, and – in their European culture – constituting a rival to the United States of America as to who should be the heavyweight champion of the world.
So to the second line, where at once we can’t help wondering whether the move has immediately been to two other very different worlds and Yous, or whether there aren’t mischievous intimations that the second line has not lost touch with the first.
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
Being an ambassador is a bit of a gamble, for you and for your country, and it often asks a poker face. Moreover, you had better like to dance all right, not just because of all those social occasions at the Embassy but because the diplomatic soft-shoe shuffle is one name of the game. Anyway, “gamble” makes its way smilingly across to “dance” on the arm of gambol. “You may like to gamble, you might like to dance”: one “You” after another, presumably, and yet the two halves of the line are perfectly happy either to be dancing partners or to form a onesome. The world of the song is socially gathering:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
England and France have become the world – but then these are the two countries that were (formerly) the ones most in danger of supposing that they were the world. Not just the social world, although the social world is there as the string that connects the ambassador and the long string of pearls. The heavyweight with a long string of successes117 turns into the socialite with a long string of pearls, lite on her feet. The long string of pearls helps to reinforce, with a glint, the point that she is a socialite, not a socialist.118 She is a lightweight champion of her world, not with a towel but with pearls around her neck.
Dancing, whether on the international ambassadorial stage or in the ring, turns now to prancing, bringing on some more of the worldly successes who keep forgetting something:
May be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage
Money, drugs at your command, women in a cage
The initiating ambassador has given way to a rock ’n’ roll performer, but then a performer – like a heavyweight champion – is often presented as an ambassador of a kind. (Never forget that you are an ambassador for our way of life, representing your country abroad . . .) The “rock ’n’ roll addict” is apparently addicted to his own rock ’n’ roll (the fans are another story), though not only to rock ’n’ roll: “Money, drugs at your command”. Is it truly the case that, thanks to money, the drugs are at his command, or is he at theirs? As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, the next line was straightforward, “You may be a business man or some high degree thief ”, but I hear what he sings as askew and buttonholing: “You may be in business, man”, with a sudden addressing of “You”, and with the further suggestion that things are proceeding apace, you’re in business, that’s for sure, man, you’re not just some business man.
You may be in business, man, or some high degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
The high degree is wittily succeeded by “They may call you Doctor” – now, there’s a higher degree for you, not just a high degree (of whatever). “If I were a master thief”, Dylan had sung in Positively 4th Street. But even a Master thief would have to yield to a Doctor thief.
You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk
May be the head of some big TV network
You may