I saw someone interpreting Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” performance with Mumford & Sons and The Avett Brothers at this year’s Grammys as a political message.

Of course the song’s themes of defiance in the face of a longstanding if vague oppression will always apply to political issues, but I don’t think the ‘message’ here could have been more clear.

A song that was initially played as the first song of the legendary, infamous Newport Folk Festival electric set in 1965 that caused a vicious backlash from the folk scene Dylan turned his back on and ushered in the fantastic, deeper electric rock of “Like A Rolling Stone” and its infinite influence (Search for Bruce Springsteen’s statement of it as his sole motivator to play music), it has always symbolized Dylan’s refusal to let the folk scene claim ownership of his identity.

Here, 56 years later, he plays it with young, celebrated but outside the mainstream progressive folk revivalists.

I don’t think the message could be more clear when taken in the context of Dylan’s perspectives and messages across his career — Don’t pigeonhole me as the folk protest song guy AND don’t pigeonhole me as the guy who won’t do folk protest songs.

Just stop trying to define me.

The reappropriation of the same song, and the same meaning, to be on opposite sides of the exact same issue it was always taken to mean fits perfectly with Dylan’s only consistent message — That life, even identity, consists of concurrent, conflicting, yet somehow still cohesive perspectives and that everything is always changing.

I’ve always seen Dylan as the artist who brought a way of seeing a world that was defined in black and white terms at the time with new grayscale complexity (Even if he knew it was really moving in color), enabling people not just to love the music, but to see their own lives in terms that resonated deeper and more truthfully with what they actually experienced than the framework they’d been handed.

In his own life, he fought against every possible definition of himself — He made up stories about his background, shapeshifted from folk –over singer to poet to innovator to entertainer to preacher to roots-revivalist to whatever he may be today.  In a constant state of ‘becoming’, as he has put it.

So, the humor to me, and the almost scary vision of something innate to the human mind, is our refusal to accept this.  With every thing Dylan does, the media and even his fans tend not to say, ‘this is what Dylan’s doing now’, but ‘this is what Dylan is.’  This may have made sense when it was a game he played consciously with the media, but now, when he’s pretty much explicated this philosophy directly, still we can’t accept the idea that he doesn’t identify himself as what he is doing.  That he sees himself as a changing thing.

It drives us a little crazy.  But we love him for it at the same time.  It satisfies some need, this artist who found a way to, instead of making definitive declarations of meaning, evoke a malleable meaning that can change when viewed from different perspectives and that can change over time.  In essence, something more like life as we experience it than life as we see it in our minds.

He wrote this song called “Maggie’s Farm,” based on an old folk song, depicting his sense of oppression regarding an attempt by the folk scene to claim ownership of his identity.  Rather than singing about the folk song, he found a metaphoric representation that could apply just to his feeling, his defiance, and thus could be applied to anything.  (Politics, family, an actual job)  We searched for a clear meaning in it, and created one:  Dylan doesn’t want to be a part of the folk scene.  So, at the industry celebration of music at a time when manufactured pop seems to be at a near historical peak, he recasts Maggie from folk to music industry by singing this song with the rising stars of the current folk scene.

And rather than taking this meaning, literally on the opposite side of the literal battleground we placed his abstract statement, as an expression of a perspective that believes in an impossibility to place clear definitions of black and white, folk is good/folk is bad, onto the world, we try to figure out his current meaning.

Maybe it’s just the nature of people — we need life to fit the meanings we create for it.  Unless you’re Bob Dylan, I guess.

Of course, the irony at the end as he glares out with a hunched, sullen expression that can almost looks menacing to the wild applause of Maggie and all her best farm animals is pretty priceless.