1. Rock Ressentiment
Ressentiment and Misogyny: Between Old Resentments and New Configurations
A complicated ressentiment permeates rock music along with misogyny,[1] via what the analytic philosopher, Kate Manne 2017 analyzes as The Logic of Misogyny[2] and others theorize as ‘masculine hegemony’ or the ‘male gaze,’[3] the idea of ‘revolt,’[4] and the ‘energy’ of anger.[5] In addition to patent or overt misogyny,[6] at scholarly issue for decades[7] is a teasing out, more generally, of gender privilege,[8] i.e., but not only: who sings and who does not, as of musical-theoretical presumption and express disabuse.[9] Yet, apart from what has been named ‘postmodern’ musicology, arguably inspired by feminist readings, such readings remain, if abundant, under-received.[10] When it comes to Bob Dylan, perhaps especially when it comes to Bob Dylan, claims of misogyny can lead to pushback among fans, the so-called ‘Dylan bros’, as among scholars.
Here I argue that Bob Dylan’s 1964, “It Ain’t Me Babe” exemplifies ressentiment along with Dylan’s 1965, “Like a Rolling Stone”, once named the ‘iconic rock song’ by Rolling Stone. The pop music critic, Ellen Willis, then teaching at Berkeley, characterizes “It Ain’t Me Babe” as a ‘non-love song,’[11] which I read together with Jim Steinman’s and Meat Loaf’s “Two of Three Ain’t Bad” and “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” from their 1977 album, Bat Out of Hell.
In what follows, I reference Orpheus and Dionysus, particularly foregrounding Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music — Nietzsche and Beethoven being the third part of my book on Leonard Cohen and k.d. lang (and Adorno): The Hallelujah Effect — along with the various Basel University lecture courses Nietzsche gave in the 1870s including his lectures on the Greek divine service.[12] Yet in connection with rock music, any reference to Dionysus seems cliché. Thus Michael Jones’s 1994, Dionysus Rising, focuses on Mick Jagger’s “Sympathy with the Devil”, to counter then ‘counter-cultural’ consequences. Thus, in spite of Jones’s subtitle: The Birth of Rock Music out of the Spirit of Music, Jones’s book is not about either Dionysus or Nietzsche.[13] The devil is at issue for Jones, as we shall see that the devil is key for Dylan.
Concerning Athenian tragedy, Nietzsche argued that the Dionysian be traced to Plato’s cautions contra certain musical modes.[14] After Nietzsche, Jane Harrison (1908) thematized a more complicated context. Today, given material discoveries like the Derveni Krater/Papyrus in 1962 and given the complexities of the Orphic tradition,[15] Dionysus cannot be excluded. Hence Sarah Burgess Watson quotes Nietzsche’s claim that
aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle; but in so far as the fight was directed against the Dionysiac nature of the older art, we may identify Socrates as the opponent of Dionysos, the new Orpheus who rises up against Dionysos and who, although fated to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice, nevertheless forces the great and mighty god himself to flee[16]
Nietzsche remarks, this is perhaps the most esoteric and complicated of his references, on the opposition between Orpheus and Dionysus.[17] Thus The Birth of Tragedy begins with reference to the conjunction of the male and the female, sexuality and conflict, quite as Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion ends, Empedocles-style, whereby everything separated is rejoined, lovers already reconciled in the midst of strife.[18]
Nietzsche has the brother gods, Apollo and Dionysus marry one another in ‘a mysterious wedding bond,’ with a child born from this divine union, the musical artform of tragedy, a religious rite, ‘at once Cassandra and Antigone [das zugleich Antigone und Kassandra ist]’.[19] Pindar’s 4th Pythian Ode gives us Orpheus playing the phorminx, as “father of melodious songs”, just as Dionysus is depicted with a phorminx (Fig. 1) such that from ‘the beginning, the figure of Orpheus arises under the joint signs of Apollo and Dionysus.’[20]
Seeing ‘Satan fall like lightning’ (Luke 10:18): Hell and rock ‘n’ roll
As Orpheus, Dionysus figures in connection with Meat Loaf, including the underworld in Jim Steinman’s and Meat Loaf’s 1977 album, Bat Out of Hell – sirens screaming, fires howling – referring to a vision of hell told on the seducer’s word, threatening (like many pop love songs) that by morning light, the singer will be gone. ‘Gone’ is the word Meat Loaf repeatedly sings, three times over, like Dionysus there again, gone again, engaging/evading Pentheus in the Bacchae. And in 1975, Meat Loaf’s saxophone playing, Rocky Horror Picture Show delivery boy, Eddie, wears a leopard print collar (de rigeur for the bacchant) on his leather motorcycle vest (Fig. 2).
To be ‘gone’ – to be carried away, enraptured, longing or bereft – is key to desire.
Reading Anne Carson’s “Gone” in this light,[21] one may be struck by the force of male eroticism. Carson’s focus in her Eros, the Bittersweet, is Sappho’s word, yet Carson begins with Anacreon, Archilochus, and Catullus.
For sheer offense, Anacreon is hard to match and Nietzsche helps us read Archilochus (more excessive than most misogyny, ancient or modern).[22] Read in this lineage, Jim Steinman’s is a metaphoric hell on earth: evil in the air, thunder in the sky and the damage done to the innocent – I swear I saw a young boy, eerily underscored in Steinman’s lyric of a glimpse of horror and Meat Loaf singing on the screen, playing a saxophone, and emerging from the hell-freeze of a meat locker, bless my soul. Channeling the film’s lyrics 50 years later, the poet of the lyric word, riffing metonymy, the poet and classics professor, Anne Carson muses,
…Rock ’n’ roll don’t help me.
Alas, O my soul!
Rock ’n’ roll don’t help anyone anymore.[23]
In radio retrospect, one commentator reflects on Dylan’s self-accounting in his 2022 The Philosophy of Modern Music: writing ‘Dylan is the radio’, featured ‘in many of his own songs, (not to mention his satellite radio show).’[24] ‘On the radio’, reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘without introduction’, Aidan Day’s ‘Satan Whispers’ cites Dylan citing Milton:
Him the almighty power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Day cites Dylan’s ‘We’re talking about the Devil’, as
Dylan advised his listeners, ‘you might know him better as Beelzebub, Satan, Lucifer, Mephistophilis, Old Scratch, the Monarch of Hell, Leviathan, the Prince of Darkness, the Anti-Christ or, as they call him in Spain, El Diablo’.[27]
One should add Dylan’s seemingly gnostic description of Satan qua ‘prince of the power of the air’[28] if Day’s “Satan Whispers” is overdetermined with respect to gender, given the complexities woven into Milton’s language on Satan and Eve.[29] For Day, Dylan hears, quite as Milton also follows, the language of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians.
The precision is an academic one: Dylan adopts Alistair Fowler’s editorial gloss in his 1968 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost,
‘Satan has presented himself to the sleeping Eve in the guise of a good angel and, when telling her dream to Adam, Eve relates Satan’s words:
be henceforth among the gods
Thy self a goddess, not to earth confined,
But sometimes in the air, as we, sometimes
Ascend to heaven …
(Y. 77-80)’[30]
The 1965, “Like a Rolling Stone” ‘transfers’ the artist’s ‘contract with the devil’ by writing to an unnamed subject (i.e., not Dylan) on her own, ‘like a rolling stone’, asking, with no little misogyny (for Willis this is ‘the most scurrilous and – with its powerful beat – the most dramatic in a long line of non-love songs’, recalling ‘Dylan’s characteristic bohemian contempt for women’),[31] as Day quotes ‘how does it feel?’, explaining that the ‘rhyme pattern in the second stanza invokes the sleeve-note pun on I/eye’.[32]
Willis begins her 1967 essay on Dylan, by uncovering Dylan’s ‘masks hidden by other masks’ (and see on Dylan’s labile appearance, casting “six different people” in the biopic on Dylan, including Cate Blanchette),[33] we recall that the devil is a trickster – C.S. Lewis calls Satan a ‘liar’[34] – where such a multifarious aspect belongs to Dionysus (to recall Euripides), as Willis highlights the
original disparity between [Dylan’s] public pose as rootless wanderer with southwestern drawl and the private facts of home and middle class Jewish family and high school diploma in Hibbing, Minnesota, was a commonplace subterfuge, the kind that ‘pays reporters’ salaries.[35]
Day’s citation from Dylan parallels the ‘mystery tramp’ – again: the devil:
You said you’d never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes (Day 2010, 261)
There are parallels with Ernest McClain’s musicological analysis of the devil, specifically the tritone, called diabolus in musica which he also analyses in esoterica terms (read: Gematria) in The Pythagorean Plato.[36]
Arguably, it might have advanced Jones’s analysis in his Dionysus Rising (cited above) had Jones read McClain (as he manifestly had not) given that McClain later explains the Pythagorean spiral as the ‘The “Great Serpent” Spiral of Musical Fifths And Fourths’,[37] articulating the numeric equivalent of ‘Satan’s comma’ here referenced, iconically, with Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 Purple Haze, etc.
And Dionysus? This is more complex as Nietzsche notes. More popularly, René Girard reflects on Heraclitus, connecting Dionysus with Satan:
‘Dionysos is the same thing as Hades’. Dionysos, in other words, is the same thing as Satan, the same thing as death, the same thing as the lynch mob. Dionysos is the destructiveness at the heart of violent contagion.[38]
Orpheus, Dionysus, and Ressentiment
ὡυτὸς ‘Αίδης καὶ Διόνυσος [One and the same are Hades and Dionysus]
— Heraclitus, Diels Kranz 155, Fr. 15.
I read the myth of Orpheus in terms of Nietzschean ressentiment,[39] or, better, via Max Scheler’s (1972 [1912]) reading of Nietzschean ressentiment given that it is Scheler and not Nietzsche[40] who informs current scholarship.[41] Complicated in Greek antiquity, Orpheus is synonymous with music and the mystery tradition.[42] But as is commonly observed, Dionysus is cliché: a metonymic signifier popularly associated with Jim Morrison,[43] reborn, like Dylan, in filmic imaginaries in Morrison’s case as embodied by Val Kilmer (1959-2025) (Fig. 4) in Oliver Stone’s 1991, The Doors.[44]
Scholarship on the figures of Orpheus and Dionysus can be contentious, reflecting rises and falls in the styles of Ancient Philology as Nietzsche already argued in his 1869 inaugural lecture on the historical person/personality of Homer.
The Nietzsche who teaches us ancient Greek prosody, underlining the ‘spirit’ as he says in his first book on lyric and tragic poetry, that is, the articulated sound of music, is essential in reading ancient Greek.[45]
Writing on Dionysus, Nietzsche highlights ‘genealogy’ as the philological method for Nietzsche’s teacher, Friedrich Ritschl as adopted from Karl Lachmann [1793-1851] read via ‘style’,[46] citing Heraclitus: “Dionysus ist Hades”.[47] Thus genealogically, Nietzsche tracks:
Ζόννυξος (= Διόν σος im Lesbisch-aeolischen Dialekt.
Ursprünglich wohl Διόν σος).
Dies führt auf einen Stamm νεκ also νεκύς, νεκρός usw — neco. …
Kuretenkult des Zeus ursprünglich.
Ζόννυξος ist der todte Zeus: oder der „tödtende Zeus“ — Zeusjäger = Ζαγρεύς und ὠμηρτής.
[Ζόννυξος (= Διόν σος in the Lesbian-Aeolian dialect / Originally likely Διόν σος / This leads to a stem νεκ thus νεκύς, νεκρός etc. — neco. / Originally the Curetes cult of Zeus. / Ζόννυξος is the dead Zeus: or the “killing Zeus” — Zeus-hunter = Ζαγρεύς and ὠμηρτής.][48]
The notes are unpublished but Nietzsche publishes his etymological reflections on ‘words and roots’ in The Genealogy of Morals,[49] following Ritschl ‘across the disciplines’ as philology also worked to establish ‘“method”’.[50] Here, archaeological hermeneutics makes all the difference[51] and discoveries like the Orphic gold tablets (which Nietzsche would have known), along with the more recent discovery of the Derveni Krater and Papyrus, have galvanized interest in Orphism.[52]
The Orphic connection concerns Dionysus and Ariadne after she perishes on Naxos: Dionysus marrying and restoring her to life (see Fig. 5), thereby, as Britt-Mari Näsström observes, illustrating
the experience of physical death by the individual who had been initiated into the mysteries. For this reason, Dionysus’s wedding on Naxos is represented on many sarcophagi, which represent him as the lord of nature and nature’s reviving power.[53]
Qua barred from the rites of Orpheus, women would be excluded from the benefits of the Orphic initiate in the underworld. Thus the Maenad’s anger may be read as ressentiment following their exclusion from Orphic mysteries.[54]
At the close of the Republic, Plato tells his readers that the Orpheus who failed to retrieve Eurydice, his wife, from the underworld also refuses rebirth as human but instead as a swan, precluding contact with woman (Rep., 620a) . For Ovid, following Plato, this is due to the Maenad’s savage treatment who fell upon and dismembered him (Met. 11: 1-43).[55] Along with others, Ovid inspires Milton, here to cite Lycidas,[56] as we recall[57]
What could the Muse herself,
that Orpheus bore
Milton repeats, this is music, this is lyric form,
The Muse herself, for her enchanting son,
Whom universal nature did lament,
When, by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?
Popularly, James Sale tells us by way of (a silenced) allusion to Joseph Campbell (among others also uncited), that the myth of Orpheus ‘crystalizes’ all myths as Eliade[58] emphasized that the Orphic tradition maps the landscape of perdition, significant for Dante as for Milton, as for the lyrics of teen rock songs and the popular comic book backgrounds of Richard Corben [1940-2020] famous for, as Steinman once noted, the ‘prodigiously sexually endowed’ (to cite Wikipedia) male underground comic figure Den [1968, 1973]) and the album cover for Bat Out of Hell.
Otto Kern, as Mircea Eliade critically recalls,
goes so far as to say that Orphism was the first creator of Hell. In fact, Orpheus’ katabasis in search of Eurydice justified all kinds of descriptions of the infernal world. Again we come upon the shamanic element, a dominating feature of the myth of Orpheus; it is well known that, throughout central and northern Asia, it is the shamans who, telling in infinite detail of their ecstatic descents to the underworld, have elaborated and popularized a vast and spectacular infernal geography.[59]
Although more concerned with the classical music tradition, Vladimir Jankélévitch agrees with Nietzsche aligning Orpheus and Apollo, recalling Jules Michelet’s Bible de l’humanité (1864), expounding on
the battle of the lyre and the flute together with Aristotle’s Politics: set against the Dionysian flute – the instrument chosen by the satyr Marsyas, the orgiastic flute of disgraceful intoxication – are Orpheus’s phorminx and Apollo’s kithara, arrayed in opposition. And just as the flute that tames rats and charms snakes is the suspect instrument, the languid, impudent instrument of the Thyrsian bearers, Orpheus antibarbarian constitutes the civilization of the lyre incarnate.[60]
Here, I note that Steinman’s/Meat Loaf’s 1977 Bat Out of Hell, like the single ‘From the Underworld’, from the British rock band, The Herd’s 1967, Paradise Lost, echoes, were we to ignore the drama of the Bat out of Hell music video, the Orpheus myth.
Which Dionysus? Which Orpheus?
What is a ‘god’?
We philosophers, we classical philologists, we theologians, should ask. Or perhaps, for the sake of pluralism, we need to leave it to the anthropologists/ethnologists.
There is monotheism (or what Nietzsche calls ‘monotono-theism’)[61] as the Judeo-Christian tradition excludes all other gods. In our day, even for those who do not themselves or personally believe in God, it is (as Jean-Paul Sartre observes) the one God they do not ‘believe in’. Dionysus does not fit the Judeo-Christian tradition, although there are long-standing (and recent)[62] claims to the contrary. To this extent, Hölderlin’s syncretism requires the Syrian Jesus and Herakles along with Dionysus.
My focus on ressentiment joins two singers not routinely conjoined, Bob Dylan and Meat Loaf, via Orpheus — classically, the lyric figure par excellence, charming beasts and even rocks (Fig. 6, and note, as it matters, the rabbits, a typical love gift between an older male and a youth).
Recent scholars foreground conflicting accounts given today’s assumptions concerning the exclusivity of erotic attraction. In the modern mode of ‘coming out’, it is argued that Orpheus favored men all along.[63]
Compare too, the profile of Franz von Stuck’s 1891 Orpheus und die Tiere (Fig. 7), if Brush’s rabbits (see, again, Fig. 6 above ) may also remind one of the fox hats of the Thracian Bassarai, fitting Orpheus’s exclusion (across birth and rebirth) of contact with women together with (there is a fairly extensive literature) Orpheus’s express condemnation of heterosexual love.[64]
It’s more than that.
As Jankélévitch reflects, here, again, with reference to Michelet, although we may also think, of Meat Loaf, given the thematic of Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell and Rocky Horror’s flash-frozen Eddie, qua quasi- or rock Orpheus,
the work of Orpheus completes the labors of Hercules, and that they are, both of them, heroes of culture and the supernatural: because just as the athlete colonizes and reclaims the desert by means of strength, the magician humanizes the inhuman by means of art’s harmonious and melodius grace: the former exterminates evil, as much as the latter, architect-kitharist, converts the evil into the human.[65]
Misogyny cannot be overlooked.
And yet it is.
This is the reflective conundrum for de Beavoir reflecting on the research turns she uncovered in writing her two volume, Le Deuxième Sexe [The Second Sex] in 1949.
Orpheus, like Dionysus, is associated with mystery and death cults, differing from locale to locale, cult to cult, culture to culture, certainly between Greece and Rome (and Christianity).[66] Thus Plato at the end of the Republic emphasises that Orpheus opts for a swan as vehicle for rebirth,[67] associating Orpheus with music in the Myth of Er and so the muses gathered, as Milton’s Lycidas also tells us, fragments of Orpheus’ body (Fig. 8), as Apollo gathered the morsels of the dismembered Zagreus (proto-Dionysus), inspiring poetry and opera.
The musicologist and composer, Wilfrid Mellers, who writes on continuities between British and American folk[68] and who analyses Dylan,[69] also traces Orpheus throughout the history of Western music in his The Masks of Orpheus.[70]
The focus is Orpheus’ katabasis, key to mystery access and opposition to Hades: descending into and returning from (like Sisyphus, Ovid, Met. 10, 40) the underworld (the return highlighted by contemporary scholars and already, mockingly, by the second century CE Lucian in connection with ‘the disciples of Zoraster’).[71]
The ‘bat’ in Steinman’s/Meat Loaf’s 1977, “Bat Out of Hell” (Fig. 9) echoes Orpheus’ descent (and return), via Little Steven (Steven van Zandt), Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 “Born to Run”, with its ‘suicide’ machines, though one cannot fail to hear Steppenwolf’s 1966: “Born to be Wild”. To this extent, tracing Orpheus, “Bat Out of Hell” is a motorcycle album, evidenced by the album cover, the music video, and the line ‘Get your motor runnin’ which Steinman sets, like a chrome outline around a car radio dial, into the soft misogynist lyrics for “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”.
Vladimir Jankélévich draws on the classical music tradition which illuminates Steinman’s musing on the past, ‘As if it happened only yesterday’, which Jankélévitch argues as advanced via duet, dialogue and punctuation and seemingly non-music sounds, here including the Phil Rizzuto excerpt, highlighting time, ‘praying for the end of time’, repeated three times, ‘to hurry up and arrive’. In the classical music cannon, Jankélévitch compares other sounds, explaining Musorgsky’s ‘truth at point-blank range’,[72] such as
the cannon shots in Shostakovich’s Symphony XI or the horns of the cars in Gerschwin. As one hears the roar of motors in Mosolov’s The Foundry. The atonal racket of the machines resounds as it is in these precursors of true ‘musique concrète’.[73]
Referring to Ravel, Jankélévitch’s reflections also illuminate the phantom operatic dimensionality of the music video for “Bat out of Hell”, with its make-up, candelabras, gothic interiors, its detectives (in the video: its police cars) and its promise of redemptive transfiguration: there is a ‘celestial “enchantment” that breaks the evil curse put on the prince … and changes the Beast into a Prince.’[74]
The dark dimensionality of Orpheus’ realm requires transfiguration: as if Jankélévitch were describing (he is not) “Bat Out of Hell”, if one needs further reflection on the stakes of redemption (whose?):
Love the enchanter exorcises the sorcery of Love the magician. Candelas – transfixed by black magic and intoxicated by all those magical brews – receives the consolamentum of truth and leaves the magic circle that held him in thrall.[75]
Mixing ‘black magic’ with ‘philosophical and alchemical transmutations’, Jankélévitch is writing, just as Steinman is writing about (homosexual/heterosexual) love.
The musical issue is voice and metonymic resonance adds to the myth of Orpheus (Nietzsche adds Musaeus to Orpheus as the very ‘picture of the philosopher’).[76]
Orpheus, the husband of Eurydice, was disinclined (nor, among husbands, is this so very rare, especially in ancient Athens)[77] to the company of woman. What is not to be disputed, and this is part of Plato’s critique, is that Orpheus loses Eurydice not once but twice: first in death and again in his failed effort (Fig. 10) to retrieve her from death to life, whereupon he is beset on his return (Fig. 11).
There is a need for disambiguation: are these Bassarai, are these ‘Maenads,’ or are they only, like Hades and Dionysus as Heraclitus says, different ways to say the same?
Or, disenchanted, are these ordinary women, expressing their anger on all-too-human grounds, for reasons of disenfranchisement?
Drawing on an earlier research traditions, Watson contends that rather than Maenadic dismemberment, then-extant depictions show ordinary women attacking Orpheus ‘with traditional weapons and household tools’.[78]
Barred from the Orphic cult, women faced the transition from life to the afterlife without access to Orphic initiation,[79] there were also separate rituals — if just this is archaeologically beyond the scope of this discussion given that one would need to reference (and to date, as Nietzsche argues that dating is challenging for the historian)[80] the Eleusian mysteries, along with Demeter and other cults. And separate cults for men and women, like separate roles, are still exclusions.
The plaintive question in the exchange in the 1993 “I Would Do Anything for Love”, shows Steinman’s Meat Loaf (still) channelling Orpheus — ‘Will you get me right out of this god forsaken town?’
For Meat Loaf, that is: for a man, that’d be easy: ‘O I can do that’.
If the reference to the ‘god-forsaken’ is a gnostic reference to life on earth, exclusion attends the complicated theological question of the place of women in paradise. Is there — and one may reference Augustine’s City of God — sex (or gender) in paradise?
Where are the women? Are angels sexed? McClain tells us, and for McClain, musicologically, kabbalistically, it is only about the numbers, the rapture features ‘144,000 male virgins “singing a new song”’.[81]
Leonard Cohen seems to suppose that women, by nature, are angelic.[82]
Or would they not have to be, as Augustine implies, transfigured, as men?
Again: are women included in the afterlife? There are, in different mythic traditions, different answers in religious culture.
Given the limitation of the Orphic mystery tradition to male initiates alone, the Maenads would be inspired by their singular impotence, just as Max Scheler argues, varying Nietzsche, emphasizing lack of power, injury, as origin of ressentiment.
At issue is the spiritual occlusion of women.
[1] Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press. 1987); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2009), Jody Rosen, “Bob Dylan’s New Book is Revealing, Misogynistic and a Special Kind of Bonkers.” LA Times. October 27, 2022. John. 2022; John Encarnacao “Review of Bob Dylan – The Philosophy of Modern Song,” Global Media Journal, Australian Edition. Vol. 16, Issue 1. 1-8. 2022; Evan Sennett, “Dylan Bob, 2022, The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Cahiers de littérature orale. Bob Dylan, le pluriel des voix. No. 94. 209-213.2023, 213.
[2] Although her arguments parallel, Kate Manne, writing in the analytic tradition, does not advert to continental arguments such as those already offered by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. For her part, de Beauvoir was accused of misogyny by later-wave feminists. At stake is projection and entitlement, leading Manne to write a separate study: Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (New York: Crown, 2020) developing points likewise also found in Beauvoir’s preface. Cf., too, the issue of anger and logic in Andrea Nye, Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (New York: Routledge, 1990).
[3] Simone Krüger, “Gendering Music in Popular Culture.” In: Karen Ross, et al., eds., The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication (Oxford: Wiley, 2020 and cf. Marion Leonard Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007).
[4] Simon Reynolds and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’roll (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
[5] Niel Nehring, Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997).
[6] See Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 121, at times violently owned: 235.
[7] Marion Meade, “Does Rock Degrade Women?” New York Times (March 14, 1971): 13-14.
[8] Barbara O’Dair, “Bob Dylan and Gender Politics” in: Kevin J. H. Dettmar, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (Cambridge Companions to American Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 80-86.
[9] As Kim Kelly reflects in her “Men Explain Music to Me” 2016 Vice. 7 November. Online: https://www.vice.com/en/article/men-explain-music-to-me/. cf. Paula Higgins, “Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics,” 19th-Century Music, Vol. XVII/2 (Fall 1993): 174-192. Kembrew McLeod, 2001. “One and a Half Stars: A Critique of Rock Criticism in North America,” Popular Music, Vol. 20/1 (2001): 47-60, etc.
[10] Cf. Susan McClary, “Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, Women’s Bodies and the State (Summer 1993): 399-423 with Stefano Marino, “Popular Music, Feminism and the ‘Power of the Body’ in the Performance: Some Remarks on Adorno, Shusterman and Pearl Jam,” Popular Inquiry. The Journal of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture. Vol. 2 (2020): 48-69 as well as Robin James, “Music and Feminism in the 21st Century,” Music Research Annual, Vol. 1 (2020): 1-25.
[11] Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), Willis 1967 “Dylan.” Cheetah. Online: https://musichistorian-blog.tumblr.com/post/23707148115/dylan-by-ellen-willis but Leland A. Poague, “Performance Variables: Some Versions of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Jul. 1979): 79-97 argues for Dylan’s ‘empathy’, here: 81.
[12] This has been translated, not perhaps accurately, Nietzsche, The Greek Worship of the Gods, Elisabeth L. Thomas, trans. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2026) and is invaluable, drawing on the source scholarship of the original Italian translation, to show the range of Nietzsche’s classically indebted scholarship.
[13] But, cf. John Carvalho, “Dance of Dionysus: The Body in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Music,” International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 35/3 (2003): 101-116.
[14] See Christoph Stroux, “Plato’s Republic and the Concept of the Control of Music,” Revista de Musicología. Del XV Congreso de la Sociedad Internacional de Musicología: Culturas Musicales Del Mediterráneo y sus Ramificaciones, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1993): 1323-1330; J.F. Montford, “The Musical Scales of Plato’s Republic.” The Classical Quarterly. Vol. 17, No. 3/4 (Jul.-Oct. 1923): 125-136 and Ernest McClain, The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music, From Ṛg Veda to Plato (York Beach, Maine: Nicolas Hays, 1976) and The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself (York Beach, Maine: Nicolas Hays, 1978).
[15] As Mircea Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology” in A History of Religious Ideas. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 180-209 and others like Isler-Kerényi 2009, Alberto Bernabé, “Orphics and Pythagoreans: The Greek Perspective” in: Gabriele Cornelli, Richard McKirahan, Constantinos Macris, eds., On Pythagoreanism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 117-151 (all loci), and, in connection with Nietzsche, as Benjamin Biebuyck, Danny Praet, and Isabelle Vanden Poel. 2005. “The Eternal Dionysus,” Philologus. Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihre Rezeption/A Journal for Ancient Literature and its Reception, Vol. 149 (2005): 52-77 argue.
[16] Nietzsche as cited in Sarah Burges Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries: Plato, Pederasty, and the Zagreus Myth in Phanocles,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 57, No. 2 (December 2014): 47-71 and cf. Ivan Mortimer Linforth, The Arts of Orpheus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1941 [1931]) and François Lissargues, “Orphée mis à mort,” Musica e storia, Vol. II (1994): 269-307.
[17] Nietzsche, Kristische Studienausgabe. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), Vol. 1, 626.
[18] „Wie der Zwist der Liebenden, sind die Dissonanzen der Welt. Versöhnung ist mitten im Streit und allses Getrennte findet sich wieder.“ Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion. Stuttgarter Ausgabe. Bd. 3. Friedrich Beissner, ed. (Stuttgart: L W. Kohlhammer, 1958), Vol. 3, 166.
[19] Nietzsche, KSA 1, 41.
[20] Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” 184.
[21] Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet (Princeton: Dalkey, 1986), 10.
[22] See Babich, “Who is Nietzsche’s Archilochus? Rhythm and the Problem of the Subject” in: Charles Bambach and Theodore George, eds., Philosophers and their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy since Kant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 85-114.
[23] Carson, “Whatever Happened to New York,” The New Yorker, May 12-19, 2025.
[24] Sennett, “Dylan Bob, 2022, The Philosophy of Modern Song,” 210.
[25] Aidan Day, “Satan Whispers,” The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3 (September 2010): 260-280. here: 261.
[26] In Day “Satan Whispers,” 261, Day cites the Alistair Fowler, 1968 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Cf., in this general vein, Christopher B. Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco, 2004) and Gilbert B. Rodman Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend (London: Routledge, 1996).
[27] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 261.
[28] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 263.
[29] See, classically as Day also cites, Empson 1960 but there is a fairly immense literature, difficult to track given the spontaneous metonymy of the allusion and its breadth but see, for just one overview account: Shannon Miller, “Serpentine Eve: Milton and the Seventeenth-Century Debate Over Women,” Milton Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (March 2008): 44-68.
[30] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 261.
[31] Willis, “Dylan.”
[32] Day, “Satan Whispers,” 261. More than three decades earlier, Ellen Willis was less restrained, writing of Dylan’s “horrendous grammar, tangled phrases, silly metaphors, embarrassing clichés, muddled thought; at times he seems to believe one good image deserves five others, and he relies too much on rhyme.” Willis, “Dylan.”
[33] David Muldoon, “The Postmodern Gender Divide in the Bob Dylan Biopic I’m Not There,” miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 46 (2012): 53-70, here: 55.
[34] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, The Centennial Press, 1942), i.
[35] Willis, “Dylan.” But see Dylan, Chronicles. Volume One (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 229ff.
[36] McClain, The Pythagorean Plato and cf. The Myth of Invariance.
[37] McClain, “A Priestly View of Biblical Arithmetic” in: Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, van Gogh’s Eyes, and God (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 429-443, here: 432 and 438.
[38] René Girard, I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, James G. Williams, trans. (Ossining: Orbis, 2001), 120.
[39] See Babich, “The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic” in: Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 177-190; 183-185.
[40] Babich 2025, 81-82.
[41] Didier Vassin, „On Resentment and Ressentiment,” Current Anthropology. Vol. 54, No. 3 (June 2013): 249-267, Brown 2017, Tomelleri 2018, van Tuinen, 2024.
[42] Cf. Jane Harrison Jane, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), citing Apollodorus who claimed ‘that Orpheus ‘invented the mysteries of Dionysos’, 454ff and Albert Henrichs, in: Alberto Bernabé, Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Raquel Martín Hernández, Redefining Dionysos. Mythos Eikon Poiesis, Bd 5 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), referencing Nietzsche, 572-573, and Henrichs, “Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 88 (1984): 205-240 and Gabor Betegh, “Pythagoreans, Orphism and Greek Religion” in: Carl A. Huffman, ed., A History of Pythagoreanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 149-166, Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” 180, and Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries.”
[43] Aleks Wansbrough, “The Tragic Artist on Screen as an Aesthetic Theodicy: A Dionysian reading of Mishima, The Doors and Black Swan” in Ann Ward, ed., Socrates and Dionysus (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 241-259.
[44] Cf. Simões Valério, João Paulo. 2025. “‘He Took a Face from the Ancient Gallery’: Jim Morrison and Dionysus from the Beginnings of the Doors to Oliver Stone’s Biopic.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition. Online: https://www.academia.edu/126111460/He_took_a_face_from_the_ancient_gallery_Jim_Morrison_and_Dionysus_from_the_beginnings_of_The_Doors_to_Oliver_Stone_s_Biopic and Bundrick 2009.
[45] See, in general, Babich 2016 and, as already noted, via Archilochus, Babich 2019.
[46] See Sebastiano. Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn Most (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1963]). Cf. GherardoUgolini, “Nietzsche and Philology as a ‘Style of Thinking’,” Rivista di filosofia, Issue 2 (August 2023): 225-246.
[47] Nietzsche, KSA 7, 82.
[48] Nietzsche, KSA 7, 82.
[49] Nietzsche KSA, 5, 262.
[50] Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Understanding of his Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles E. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (South Bend, Indiana: Regnery [1965. German original: 1936]), 30.
[51] See, in connection with women and death cults and funerary rites in antiquity, Babich, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death.”
[52] See, once again, Isler-Kerényi 2009 along with Bernabé, “The Commentary of the Derveni Papyrus: The Last Of Presocratic Cosmogonies.” Littera Antiqua, Vol. 7. (2013): 4-31.
[53] Näsström 2003, 142; cf. Babich “Dionysian Redemption, Ariadne’s Death, Asses’s Ears—and Nietzsche’s Debts,” New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Spring 2021/2022): 99-130.
[54] Babich, “Dionysian Redemption, Ariadne’s Death, Asses’s Ears—and Nietzsche’s Debts.” See for further discussion and references to the literature on these misogynistic currents in antiquity, Babich, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death” in Valery Vinogradovs, ed., Art and Aging, Symposia: Slovak Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 12, No. 1 ( 2023): 56-86.
[55] Cf., by contrast, Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries” who echoes Linforth’s 1941, The Arts of Orpheus.
[56] Cf. Stanley Fish, “With Mortal Voice: Milton Defends against the Muse.” ELH, Vol. 62, No. 3 (Fall 1995): 509-527.
[57] Reference to the maenads and quite metonymically to the muse is the thematic focus, from the sense of the title and sustained throughout Fish, “With Mortal Voice.”
[58] Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” also not cited by the popular-minded, James Sale, “Orpheus and Eurydice: The Myth That Explains Myths.” 3 Jan 2019. https://www.inspiredoriginal.org/post/orpheus-and-eurydice-the-myth-that-explains-myths.
[59] Eliade, “Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the New Eschatology,” 191. Eliade also cites Franz Cumont’s posthumously published Lux perpetua (1949), identifying Orphism as the source of such visionary literature that via “Plutarch and the Apocalypse of Peter, leads to Dante,” 191. See for a recent discussion focusing on Ovid, Kevin R. West “Dante as Orpheus: ‘Georgics’ 4 and ‘Inferno’,” Bibliotheca Dantesca, Vol. 4 (2021): 189-198 and for literature in the last century, Daniel Puskás, “Orpheus in the Underground: Descents to the Underworld in 20th-Century and Contemporary Literature,” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2015): 45-54 and raves and rock music: François Gauthier, “Orpheus and the Underground: Raves and Implicit Religion – From Interpretation to Critique,” Implicit Religion, Vol. 8/3 (April 2007): 235-283.
[60] Vladimir Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, Carolyn Abbate, trans. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1961]), 2003, 5.
[61] Nietzsche, KSA, 6, 75.
[62] See David Hernández de la Fuente, “Parallels between Dionysos and Christ in Late Antiquity: Miraculous Healings in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca” in: Alberto Bernabé, M. Herrero de Jáuregui, A. Jiménez San Cristóbal, R. Martín Hernández, eds., Redefining Dionysos, (Mythos eikon poiesis, 5) (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 464-487.
[63] Jan N. Bremmer, “Orpheus from Guru to Gay” in: Ph. Borgeaud, ed., Orphisme et Orphée (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 13-30; John F. Makowski, “Bisexual Orpheus: Pederasty and Parody in Ovid.” The Classical Journal, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Oct.-Nov. 1996): 25-38; Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries” and see the artist’s remarks: George de Forest Brush, “An Artist Among the Indians,” The Century Magazine (May 1885): 54-57, here: 55.
[64] See Jourdan 2008 and Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries.” See too Ingleheart 2015, and earlier, splitting the difference as in antiquity this would be a difference that would make less difference perhaps than it does today – thus Socrates could protest his love to Alcibiades and there would still be Xanthippe, which makes all the difference one could argue for Socrates supposedly Stoic resistance when they slept together as Alcibiades tells the tale – John F. Makowski, “Bisexual Orpheus: Pederasty and Parody in Ovid,” The Classical Journal, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Oct.-Nov. 1996): 25-38 1996 as well as, again, Bremmer, “Orpheus from Guru to Gay.” And see in addition to François Lissarrague, “Orphée mis à mort,” Musica e storia, Vol. II (1994): 269-307. 1994, Marcel Detienne, The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context, Janet Lloyd, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and Detienne, “Les chemins de la déviance: orphisme, dionysisme et pythagorisme” in: Orfismo in Magna Grecia: Atti del quattordicesimo Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia (Naples: Arte Tipografica, 1975), 49-79 and, with a different focus, Yidy Páez Casadiegos, “Orpheus or the Soteriological Reform of the Dionysian Mysteries,” American Journal of Sociological Research, Vol. 2/3 (2012): 38-51.
[65] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 4-5.
[66] I try to indicate some of these differences, along with references in Babich, “Dionysian Redemption, Ariadne’s Death, Asses’s Ears—and Nietzsche’s Debts,” and see too, already cited above, with reference to Greek funerary cult-tradition and myth, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death.”
[67] Cf. Luc Brisson, “Women in Plato’s Republic,” Michael Chase, trans. Etudes Platoniciennes, Vol. 9 (2012): 129-136.
[68] Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (New York: Knopf, 1965).
[69] Mellers, Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (London: Travis & Emery, 1984), “God, Modality and Meaning in Some Recent Songs of Bob Dylan.” Popular Music, Vol. 1, Folk or Popular? Distinctions, Influences, Continuities (1981): 142-157.
[70] Mellers, The Masks of Orpheus: Seven Stages in the Story of European Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
[71] Lucian 2021, 17.
[72] Cited as “Letter to Stasov, 7 (19) August 1875.” Jankélévich, music and the ineffable, 162.
[73] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 33.
[74] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 129.
[75] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 129.
[76] Nietzsche, KSA, 7, 386.
[77] See William J. O’Neal, “The Status of Women in Ancient Athens,” International Social Science Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Summer 1993): 115-121.
[78] Watson, “Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries,” 461.
[79] See on the importance of initiation, once again: Bernabé, “Orphics and Pythagoreans.”
[80] See Babich, “Ageing, Aura, and Vanitas in Art: Greek Laughter and Death.”
[81] McClain, “A Priestly View of Biblical Arithmetic,” 430.
[82] Babich, “Hallelujah and Atonement.” In: Jason Holt, ed., Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2014), 123-134, here: 127.