may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
What’s going on here? Everything.
“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Such was the straightfaced definition given by the seventeenth-century ambassador Sir Henry Wotton. An ambassador is a servant of his country (as a minister is supposed to be), and the word “ambassador” is from ambactus, a servant. To England or France: old sparring partners, and – in their European culture – constituting a rival to the United States of America as to who should be the heavyweight champion of the world.
So to the second line, where at once we can’t help wondering whether the move has immediately been to two other very different worlds and Yous, or whether there aren’t mischievous intimations that the second line has not lost touch with the first.
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
Being an ambassador is a bit of a gamble, for you and for your country, and it often asks a poker face. Moreover, you had better like to dance all right, not just because of all those social occasions at the Embassy but because the diplomatic soft-shoe shuffle is one name of the game. Anyway, “gamble” makes its way smilingly across to “dance” on the arm of gambol. “You may like to gamble, you might like to dance”: one “You” after another, presumably, and yet the two halves of the line are perfectly happy either to be dancing partners or to form a onesome. The world of the song is socially gathering:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
England and France have become the world – but then these are the two countries that were (formerly) the ones most in danger of supposing that they were the world. Not just the social world, although the social world is there as the string that connects the ambassador and the long string of pearls. The heavyweight with a long string of successes117 turns into the socialite with a long string of pearls, lite on her feet. The long string of pearls helps to reinforce, with a glint, the point that she is a socialite, not a socialist.118 She is a lightweight champion of her world, not with a towel but with pearls around her neck.
Dancing, whether on the international ambassadorial stage or in the ring, turns now to prancing, bringing on some more of the worldly successes who keep forgetting something:
May be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage
Money, drugs at your command, women in a cage
The initiating ambassador has given way to a rock ’n’ roll performer, but then a performer – like a heavyweight champion – is often presented as an ambassador of a kind. (Never forget that you are an ambassador for our way of life, representing your country abroad . . .) The “rock ’n’ roll addict” is apparently addicted to his own rock ’n’ roll (the fans are another story), though not only to rock ’n’ roll: “Money, drugs at your command”. Is it truly the case that, thanks to money, the drugs are at his command, or is he at theirs? As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, the next line was straightforward, “You may be a business man or some high degree thief ”, but I hear what he sings as askew and buttonholing: “You may be in business, man”, with a sudden addressing of “You”, and with the further suggestion that things are proceeding apace, you’re in business, that’s for sure, man, you’re not just some business man.
You may be in business, man, or some high degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
The high degree is wittily succeeded by “They may call you Doctor” – now, there’s a higher degree for you, not just a high degree (of whatever). “If I were a master thief”, Dylan had sung in Positively 4th Street. But even a Master thief would have to yield to a Doctor thief.
You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk
May be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
May be living in another country under another name
From England or France, things have dwindled (or not, given states’ rights) to a state trooper, with the geographical allocations then receiving a comic twist from “a young Turk”. (You might be an ambassador to Turkey or France? Or even to “another country”?) Meanwhile, the state trooper is keeping communications open with both the ambassador and the rock ’n’ roller addict prancing on a stage, each of whom is a trouper in his way.
May be a construction worker working on a home
Might be living in a mansion, you might live in a dome
You may own guns and you may even own tanks
You may be somebody’s landlord, you may even own banks
This starts by coming a long way down the social ladder from that ambassador (slumming?), with the two successive work-words here establishing the daily grind: “May be a construction worker working on a home”. “Worker working”: that is what it feels like (work, work, work), with the redundancy not being of the luxurious kind, simply repetitive and a bit blank. But up the scale again, at once, into that “mansion” and into “you might live in a dome”. Living in a dome is a combination of the grand and the offhand. The usual thought is that it is very nice to have a dome over one’s head again.
Perhaps this verse seems for a moment tamed, compared with its predecessors, but not for long, for it swings into a different kind of action as it makes a place for the word that until now has exerted its energies only within the refrain, the word “somebody”. The power here is felt in the momentum from the verse into the refrain:
You may own guns and you may even own tanks
You may be somebody’s landlord, you may even own banks
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes you are
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Every somebody is a nobody in the eyes of the Lord, or of the devil, come to that.
You may be a preacher, Mr Dylan, and it may be necessary to take this bull, whether papal or not, by the horns.
You may be a preacher preaching spiritual pride
May be a city councilman taking bribes on the side
May be working in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, it was “You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride”, but what Dylan
