The Bob Dylan Top 125 Countdown & This Week's Statistics

There are more changes in this week's statistics, but we'll get to that in a while. Firstly, let's count down the top songs of Bob Dylan.

At #48 is the song that announced to the world that Dylan had shed his folk poet laureate skin and went electric. The folk crowd booed and whistled, but Bob never looked back.

The song with which he opened his debut electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, was in fact a folk song: a riff on the evil boss-man tune Down on Penny's Farm, by 1920s folk band The Bently Boys. In its studio version, Maggie's Farm was a swinging country rocker, but the Newport take wasn't so jolly. Over lacerating guitar, Dylan declared, "I try my best/To be just like I am/But everybody wants you/To be just like them." 

The song, essentially a protest song against protest folk, represents Dylan's transition from a folk singer who sought authenticity in traditional song-forms and activist politics to an innovative stylist whose self-exploration made him a cultural muse for a generation. On the other hand, this biographical context provides only one of many lenses through which to interpret the text. While some may see Maggie's Farm as a repudiation of the protest-song tradition associated with folk music, it can also (ironically) be seen as itself a deeply political protest song. We are told, for example, that the "National Guard" stands around the farm door, and that Maggie's mother talks of "Man and God and Law." The "farm" that Dylan sings of can in this case easily represent racism, state oppression and capitalist exploitation.

Dylan's defiant tone later inspired Barack Obama, who cranked the song to steel himself during the 2008 election. "I've got probably 30 Dylan songs on my iPod," he told Rolling Stone. "One of my favorites during the political season is Maggie's Farm."

The original studio version, from one of Dylan's greatest albums, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), is nowhere to be found, but the electric version from the Newport Folk Festival is, and it's every bit as good, if not more:

Here's a good version by Rage Against the Machine:

At #47 is a song from a year earlier: With God on Our Side was the third track on The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964). The song has nine eight line verses all questioning America’s involvement in various wars. Music critic Tim Riley once wrote: "With God on Our Side manages to voice political savvy mixed with generational naivete" as it "draws the line for those born long enough after World War I to find its issues blurry ('the reasons for fightin'/I never did get') and who view the forgiveness of the World War II Germans as a farce."

Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave) wrote:

"I may be the last person alive who still believes that Dylan sold out at Newport in 1965 when he went electric. The pressure was on to lead a movement, something he didn't sign up for and wasn't interested in. I think he missed an opportunity to see if there was a ceiling to what music could do to push forward radical politics. But he came close with With God on Our Side."

"I never knew how politically radical Dylan was until I got The Times They Are A-Changin'. He was 22 but sounds like he's 80, like this wizened guy who's had a long life as a vigilante, croaking out songs of hard truth. But With God on Our Side is not some historical relic. It is a living exposé of war crimes, past, present and future. Dylan lays bare the hypocrisy of war and unmasks the whitewashing of our military ventures. He's singing about the people who make war, profit by it, and the families that send children to die. "You don't count the dead when God's on your side," he sings. "And you never ask questions when God's on your side." From shock-and-awe to Abu Ghraib to the morass in Afghanistan, those phrases can very much be applied to our exploits today."

Here's the original, majestic version:

With God on Our Side

Here's a shortened version that he sang live at the BBC, during his visit to Great Britain.

Here's an awesome version by the great Odetta:

At #46 is a recent song: Time Out of My Mind (1997) is one of his best post-70s albums and Love Sick is one of the album's three best songs. A Blues song with echoes of Americana, it once more brings forth Dylan's ambivalent feelings towards romantic love. On the one hand he claims to be love sick in the sense of being infatuated with someone who wants nothing to do with him, and on the other he is love sick in the sense that his desire for the person is making him feel ill.

 It was the album's second single, and the song that Dylan performed at the 1998 Grammy Awards. This is the video from that performance:

Here's a good cover version by The White Stripes:

Now to our weekly statistics. The two Oscar stories were wildly popular, while Martin Del Caprio keeps getting a great number of visits, finishing third for this week, and already being April's top story.

As far as countries are concerned, this week's big winners were (again) France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. That actually caused changes in the all-time Top 10: while France consolidated its rise to #3, the United Kingdom, for the first time in months, overtook Russia and settled at #5. The way it's moving, if I were Germany, I wouldn't feel too safe at #4. Also Belgium has overtaken neighbouring Netherlands and entered the all-time Top 10 for the first time (I think). Congrats to all! Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. France

3. the United Kingdom

4. Greece

5. Belgium

6. Cyprus

7. the United Arab Emirates

8. Italy

9. Germany

10. Canada

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Czechia, Denmark, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 50.03%

2. Greece = 8.9%

3. France = 6.9%

4. Germany = 5.6%

5. the United Kingdom = 4.8%

6. Russia = 4.6%

7. the United Arab Emirates = 1.02%

8. Italy = 0.96%

9. Cyprus = 0.86%

10. Belgium = 0.63%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!