Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
Bob Dylan's Most Shocking Music Video
What more can be said about Bob Dylan? To call him the voice of a generation would be a colossal understatement. His music has influenced listeners for over fifty years, and will continue to have a profound impact on generations yet to come. While the poet/singer/songwriter was at his most famous in the 1960s when he was churning out hit records like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Blonde on Blonde, the Minnesota-born artist never stopped making music, and still releases new albums to this day.
Dylan’s music often has a melancholy aura of grim foreboding, like on the 1962 classic, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, a brooding anthem about living life while surrounded by insurmountable fear and injustice. Desolation Row, off of 1965’s game-changing Highway 61 Revisited, is an odyssey of Americana, literary figures, and the depths of Dylan’s own imagination. The song is an eleven-minute epic, setting up grandiose imagery in each verse and knocking it all down to the depths of despair every single time. It’s not depressive, but it is oppressively nihilistic. Even when he was in his 20s, Dylan had the wisdom of a hardened old man, an apocalyptic minstrel.
To that end, some of his best work came in albums like 2006’s Modern Times and 2009’s Together Through Life. No longer a young herald of doom yet to come, Bob Dylan was now the battle-hardened cowboy, walking a dusty road lined with the dead bodies of weary travelers who were cut down by the rabid hordes. Songs like “Ain’t Talkin’, Thunder on the Mountain, Life is Hard, and This Dream of You all have a dark outlook, sometimes paired with startlingly violent lyrical sensibilities. After decades of living and singing, Dylan’s voice evolved from the nasally tones of an acoustic kid to the raspy gravitas of a nihilistic historian with blood-spattered boots. The music changed, replacing the dustbowl blues of Woody Guthrie‘s era with odes to Armageddon Americana.
This all leads us to Beyond Here Lies Nothin‘, the first track of Together Through Life, and its shockingly brutal music video. Directed by Nash Edgerton (Gringo), the clip stars actors Joel Stoffer and Amanda Aardsma as a couple in the midst of a domestic dispute. The video contains explicit imagery of domestic abuse escalating to an all-out brawl with an uncomfortable twist ending, all set to the bittersweet lyrics of the song, which ruminate on romance’s fleeting embrace and inevitable doom, with just a hint of sociopathic dependency.
It’s a surreal video, full of intense action and deep psychosis, and one which absolutely needs to be seen to be believed. It’s a difficult song, and an even more challenging video. The interpretable messages of Dylan’s songs are not simple and clean, but complex and dirty; in analyzing its meaning for yourself, the conclusions you reach may not be the ones for which you were hoping, but that’s what makes him one of the greats.
