"A World of Bars on the Border of Salvation" - Why Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom Is Another Play For Immortality
Way back in 2021, Bob Dylan fans were shocked by a streaming offer. We read that it would be a streaming event called the Shadow King. Many of us who love Bob Dylan’s art assumed it would be a live concert, perhaps a sneak peek at a potential live tour that Fall. It was all that and much more, but it wasn’t a live show.
After I clicked play, what happened on that screen was a revelation that I couldn’t stop thinking about months later. It turns out that Shadow Kingdom was a musical film directed by Alma Har’el (Honey Boy), shot in Santa Monica earlier that year. It was recorded over the course of a week and edited quickly for our hungry eyes and ears at home.
Bob Dylan entered a social chrysalis like many of us when The Never-Ending Tour paused in December 2019. I was blessed to see him and his band play in Columbus, Ohio, the month before this tour ended. I was very interested to see what the pandemic had done to Bob’s many moods he sings about in Rough & Rowdy Ways.
Reflecting on the Shadow Kingdom, it’s clear that time has been piling up on us all. One morbidly questions how many more shows Bob Dylan has left to play on the stages of this world. I don’t like to think about this because a world without Bob Dylan making new music is something I’ve never known in my 46 years. I had lived under the penumbra of his art since long before I knew who he was or how to pronounce his name, and I never want to say goodbye.
The Shadow Kingdom? What could that possibly mean? Shadow intones darkness, which requires light for contrast to manifest. Bob Dylan has been writing about death for more than sixty years, and death is the ultimate darkness, but still requires light to retain an identifiable form. But the most interesting of the two words is kingdom. Bob Dylan doesn’t throw around the word kingdom easily. Anyone who has experienced Dylan’s early 80s explosion of faith through music understands that his view of a kingdom lies beyond this temporal world. For me, his music presupposes that we are luminous beings trapped in the material worlds of our bodies, our homes, and our weaknesses, sins, and trauma. What happens when light is cast into the shadows of a world beyond our pain? What would the border between our world and that one look like? Feel like? Most importantly, what would it sound like?
This edge of the world we know, where beyond may lie nothin’, is The Shadow Kingdom. For me, it’s become a world of never-ending smoky bars and silent patrons who drink and smoke and revel in the pain they are about to leave behind when they cross over to the great nothin’ beyond. And who steps on stage to strike the tune for these dark ruminations? The immortal crooner grabs the microphone to take this world's sins onto his shoulders and exorcise them through song.
Bob Dylan has created an avatar of immortality in The Shadow Kingdom. Every song he has ever sung will forever be blasting from the unlimited bars at the borders of our realities of mind. Even when his physical body passes on, he has constructed a spiritual watering hole on the way to salvation, where we can finally leave our darkness behind by bathing in the depth of art he created in life. All this audience will cost us is the price of a drink, a smoke, and the penitent humility to lay down our burdens before the master of music in the tower of song that will forever stand sentinel over our collective trauma in the Shadow Kingdom.
