Bob Dylan’s Mississippi: An Aesthetics of Existence as Parataxis in Blue

Abstract

This article presents a reformulating and contextualizing, text-hermeneutic, and in part musicological interpretation of Bob Dylan’s song Mississippi which was written in the mid-1990s. The starting point for the interpretation is the cultural-historical and biographical background as well as the context in which the song was composed and published. The core of the paper is a line-by-line interpretation of the text, which follows its paratactic style. The analysis shows that it is not useful to look for a comprehensive, conclusively valid approach to interpreting the song. Rather, it turns out that, depending on the contextualization and the focus on the lyrics and music, multiple perspectives and interpretations are possible. The piece reveals a somewhat recognizable, multifaceted aesthetic of modern existence, in which success and failure in life, as well as the impossibility of undoing events and actions in one’s own life, form the core of reflection. The song is understood as an expression of a fundamental aesthetic attitude characterized by the overcoming of ultimate certainties, the acceptance of ambiguity and incompleteness, and the search for a deeply individual form of reflective self-actualization.