In defense of “Wiggle, Wiggle”

Did you think “Wiggle Wiggle” is a bad song? Hallvard Østrem urges you to think again!

In the first issue in the series about Dylan’s Nobel Prize, I used “Wiggle Wiggle” as an example of a song “everybody” agrees is Dylan’s worst song.

As it turns out, my cousin, Hallvard Østrem, does not agree. As a matter of fact, he thinks that, in my attempt at a defense of the song, I did not at all dig deeply enough into its depths. He therefore wrote this full-blown treatise to shatter any doubts about its merits.

Happy reading!

Eyolf Østrem

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(Here’s my take, should you have forgotten:)

Why Dylan Should Not Have Received the Nobel Prize (Dylanology 26)

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“Wiggle, Wiggle” might not be Dylan’s best song, but the self-reinforcing consensus that the song is nothing but a dorky, laughable flop, needs to be challenged. The screwy elusiveness of the song may be better seen as a cunning device than the result of a bard’s momentary loss of abilities.

Most reviewers gave the Under The Red Sky album a thumbs down when it was released back in 1990. Among them were Paul Evans, who delivered a harsh review in Rolling Stone: “The record’s trusty blues rock sounds strong,” he wrote, but “Dylan doesn’t have much to say – or a really memorable way to say it”. Evans didn’t find what he hoped for in the lyrics and may have fallen into the trap of expecting the new Dylan album to be a continuation of the acclaimed predecessor Oh Mercy. It never is. There were a couple of songs left over from the Oh Mercy sessions on the album (“Born In Time” and “God Knows”), but by and large the songs on Under The Red Sky are of a different kind.

Despite the overall negative review, Evans singled out “Unbelievable”, “T.V. Talkin’ Song”, “Born In Time” and “God Knows” as commendable highlights on the album. Apparently he did not care much for “Cat’s In The Well”, “Under The Red Sky”, “Wiggle, Wiggle” or the rest. In my opinion “Handy Dandy”, “2 X 2”, “T.V. Talking Song” and “10 000 Men” are the weaker, more or less unfulfilled tracks on the album, although none of them deserves to be written off as plain failures. As far as I’m concerned, the album is better than its reputation.

Despite what we know was a short and difficult studio production, I think it is worth pointing out that Dylan himself found several of the songs on Under The Red Sky good enough for the stage, four of them performed more than a hundred times. The alleged epitome of a bad song “Wiggle, Wiggle” was in fact found worthy of 105 performances in the early 1990s. The other three live hits from the album are “Under the Red Sky” (148), “God Knows” (188) and “Cat’s In The Well” (299). For what it is worth, those four songs apparently worked more or less as intended for Dylan.

By comparison, only four songs from Oh Mercy have reached the stage more than a hundred times. The rest of the songs on both albums have been performed around twenty or thirty times (“Born In Time” 56 times) with the striking exception of three songs from Under The Red Sky: “10,000 Men” (1), “Handy Dandy” (1), “2 X 2” (4). Dylan gave “T.V. Talkin’ Song” a shot twenty times in October/November 1990, but left it there.

Lost in Robotic Translation

The album’s low esteem does of course have a lot to do with these half-failed songs – above all the supposedly embarrassing «Wiggle, Wiggle» – but maybe also with what seems to be a common underappreciation of the concept of dressing dark, apocalyptic messages in frisky nursery rhyme, an idea Dylan carries out throughout most of the album. The songs may be simple in form, but Dylan gives them a dire twist, most successfully executed in “Cat’s In The Well” and “Under The Red Sky”. It may be worth noting the relationship to T.S. Eliot’s nursery rhyme poem “The Hollow Men”:

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
[...]
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

I’m really not sure where the strong collective dislike for “Wiggle, Wiggle” began – I always liked the song myself – but a few important reviewers and connoisseurs may have planted the seed. Nevertheless, there are clearly many who genuinely dislike the song for its lyrics, although the reasoning is often shallow. An example is the frequent ridicule of the many repetitions of the word “wiggle”, which really is a silly “too many notes” argument. Does the many repetitions of the word “broken” in “Everything Is Broken” make it a bad song? Of course not. Repetition is a common technique in song lyrics. If “Wiggle, Wiggle” is a bad song, it is not because of the use of repetitions.

The AI robot ChatGPT summed up the disconcerting discussions around the song quite well, I think (as referred by user vangoghdjango on Reddit):

The song suggests that Dylan is an absurdist who embraces the absurdity of life and existence. He uses the word ‘wiggle’ to represent his attitude of rejecting any rational or conventional explanation for his actions or words. […] The song is a paradox, a contradiction, and a mystery. The song is a wiggle.

According to the robot, the lyrics lack any trace of coherent meaning. Nevertheless, ChatGPT is more benevolent about it than dylanologist Michael Gray, who in his book Song & Dance Man III dismisses “Wiggle, Wiggle” as a “retro, stale, guarded and uninventive” version of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”.

But in the end, the song and its recording are failures: a lyric anyone could write (the problem would be wanting to) and the sort of weary rockism you might hope to avoid in the back room of your local pub. (p. 676)

Gray doesn’t like the old rockabilly style, he thinks that the production of the song is failed, and he deems the lyric sloppy and amateurish. There’s nothing to it at all. (On the other hand, Gray hails “Handy Dandy” as the most successful song on the album. That’s another debate.)

Shaken Bowls and Tossed Pails

Many have put forward the line “Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a bowl of soup” as the final proof that Dylan had lost it when he wrote it. However, nonsensical lines like that are very well in keeping with the nursery rhyme style. The line is also an allusion to the Sam Cooke song “Shake” (1965):

Shake it like a bowl of soup
Make your body loop de loop
Put your hands on your hip
You kinda let your back bone slip

Dylan’s song is loosely based on Cooke’ song, a kind of reworking of it, and the line is as such an important reference in the song. “Shake” is about dancing and letting go, and Dylan copies the imperative form with the verb “wiggle” – to move to and fro with small, quick motions. The motions can be of a sensual kind, but are also easily associated with something more childish or animalistic: “wiggle ones toes”, “wiggle like a snake” and so on. Dylan’s lyric is intentionally ambiguous, quirky, childish, potentially ironic.

The word “wiggle” is of course suitable in a nursery rhyme, as it was in the Frank Sinatra version of the children’s song “Ol’ MacDonald”. In the Sinatra song the wiggling animal is a “chick”, meaning girl, woman, the object of the song, “the prettiest chick I know”.

And oh this chick she had to walk, e-i-e-i-o
And how this walk would drive ’em wild swinging to and fro
With a little wiggle here and a little wiggle there
Man this chick had wiggles to spare
Ol’ Macdonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o

The poor girl is objectified to a fault, but the singer finally marries the farmer’s daughter with all her curves and wiggles. The sexy wiggle walk is the typical context for the word in song lyrics for adults.

Dylan’s paraphrase of the “bowl of soup” line from “Shake” leaves out the word “it” which makes it even more surreal, more like W.H. Auden’s poem “Nonsense Song”:

Her nose is like an Irish jig,
Her mouth is like a ’bus,
Her chin is like a bowl of soup
Shared between all of us.

The nonsense meaning fits the nursery rhyme like a glove. For Dylan the reference itself may have been the important thing. It sounds like the Cooke song.

Another line that has been pointed out as overly foolish is “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a pail of milk”. Like the “bowl of soup” line, it is nonsensical, but it is also an allusion to one of Aesop’s fables. In the fable a woman carries a pail of milk on her head and dreams about all the riches she is going to get when she sells it. When she gets the money, all the young men would want to dance with her, but she will toss her head and say no to everyone until the prince himself asks her for a dance. The story ends when she tosses her head and spills all the milk.

The Aesop story could throw a sidelight on the “bowl of soup” simile as well. A “bowl of soup” is, just like a “pail of milk”, a container where you most likely will spill the contents if you wiggle it. The line could have a reckless ring to it. Both of these “meaningless” lines are in each their own way central to the song.

Here are a few ideas on what the song could be about.

Dressed in Green, Feeling Blue

Dylan sets the theme from the start: To “wiggle like a gypsy queen” could lead our thoughts to songs like “Gypsy Queen” by Van Morrison, a celebration of a sensual dancing beauty. But Dylan may also have a more particular and famous gypsy queen in mind: the beautiful and seductive Egyptian pharaoh Cleopatra. In Shakespeare’s works, the queen is more than once described as a “gipsy”, which in Shakespeare’s days meant “of Egyptian origin” in addition to the current meaning. It could also mean “whore”, which seems to be Shakespeare’s primary meaning. In the play Antony and Cleopatra, the Roman general Antony is presented as a man who “is become the bellows and the fan / To cool a gipsy’s lust”. When Antony realizes Cleopatra’s betrayal, he finds that she has betrayed him “like a right gipsy”. The wiggling gypsy queen can be seen as a femme fatale, an alluring, treacherous, whorish persona.

Cleopatra (1963) with Elizabeth Taylor all dressed in green.

The second line elaborates on the love theme by linking the wiggle to green clothing: “wiggle all dressed in green”. The color green can represent hope, rebirth and good luck as well as envy, jealousy and poison. For the Romans, green was linked to love and the goddess Venus, an idea often reflected in the literary romance. In the Decameron, Boccaccio dressed his fair and lovesick women in green; F. Scott Fitzgerald used the famous green lantern in The Great Gatsby as a symbol of Gatsby’s unachievable dreams of love and status; Shakespeare’s Juliet longed for Romeo because she was “sick and green”, and in Love’s Labour Lost Don Adriano de Armado establishes that “green is indeed the colour of lovers”. The tragic romance and lovesickness goes well with Cleopatra as the prototype seductive gypsy queen.

Even the moon, which takes central stage in the final two lines of the verse, is often associated with romance, grief and lovesickness. The blue moon drives the meaning further in that direction, like in the Elvis/Sinatra evergreen “Blue Moon”, or in Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky”: “Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue”. Sooner or later the lover will experience pain and grief.

Appropriate for a nursery rhyme the moon has eyes and can “see you” – just like it does in another Shakespeare play, A Midsummer’s Night Dream. There it is the fairy queen Titania who gives the moon such attributes:

The moon methinks looks with a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.

The enforced chastity creates sadness, just like in “Blue Moon of Kentucky”. There’s more to learn about the perception-altering qualities of love in the play.

“Wiggle, Wiggle” is, like “Shake”, a song about indulging in a kind of enthusiastic dance. But when we scratch the surface, Dylan’s song puts love and romance in a discomforting frame right from the start, with associations to allurement and treachery, lovesickness and the promise of a broken heart. The enthusiasm for the wiggle dance is ironic.

Don’t Be a Fool

Dylan had written several songs with similar messages prior to “Wiggle Wiggle”, most notably “Watered-Down Love” (1981), “Heart of Mine” (1981) and “Most of the Time” (1989). In “Watered-Down Love” Dylan defines romantic love as a subversive force as opposed to a love that’s pure, meaning love as it is described in the Bible: selfless, kind, enduring.

Love that’s pure hopes all things
Believes all things, won’t pull no strings
Won’t sneak up into your room, tall, dark and handsome
Capture your heart and hold it for ransom

You don’t want a love that’s pure
You wanna drown love
You want a watered-down love

In the song, the watered-down love is associated with deceit, restriction, perversion, envy and more. Nevertheless, the “you” in the song prefers to drown in the misery it brings, and by doing so drowning the pure love as well – a clever Dylanesque double meaning. “Heart of Mine” explores the Buddhist notion that romantic love is best avoided since it invariably brings nothing but betrayal, suffering and pain. In “Most of the Time”, Dylan takes the viewpoint of a (“part-time”) lovesick, languished, abandoned lover. That song turned out to be a modest foretaste of the Gothic darkness that was to come on Time Out Of Mind. The songs show how Dylan through the 80s develops new ideas about romantic love as an alluring, befuddling, distracting and devastating force in human life. “Wiggle, Wiggle” is a new take on the subject.

Romance has of course been a recurring theme in Dylan’s work right from the beginning, but his attitude towards it has evolved in what looks like a dialectic pattern over the years, from the cynical anti-romanticism of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “To Ramona” in the early 60s; via the antithetical hyper-romanticism of “Sara” and “Wedding Song” in the 70s; to a Tolstoyan, moral anti-romanticism in his post-gospel years: Ramona’s feelings of love and sadness was not just “a vacuum, a scheme” after all, but nonetheless perturbed by altered perception and bloated idealism. Mankind is naturally attracted to love and romance, but pays a heavy price for the illusions, confusion, distraction, sexism, conflict, violence and suffering it entails. It’s also relevant to think of romance in a wider sense here, including ambitions and dreams of success and wealth – all bolstered by capitalism and consumerism.

The lovesickness continues in the second verse with what could be an allusion to Blind Boy Fuller’s blues song “Boots and Shoes” (1937).

Now it’s a mean old engine, took my gal and left me standing here
Hey, hey mama, left me standing here
Have no one to love me, have no one to care

It is a common motif in the American folk song tradition, the abandoned, lovesick man who finds his boots and shoes and takes to the road, the tramp.

Furthermore, the line “wiggle, you got nothing to lose” is an obvious reference to Dylan’s own megalith, “Like A Rolling Stone”: “when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose”. That song is about a certain Miss Lonely, a former high society girl who has fallen from grace and has to live hand-to-mouth on the street like a “rolling stone”, a homeless vagrant.

A “swarm of bees” could be seen as homeless as well, since swarming bees usually are on their way to find a new home. Swarming bees are also busy and noisy and the swarm chaotic and erratic, so that might be the way to wiggle. On the other hand, the bees can represent the promise of good things to come: milk and honey.

The “swarm of bees” simile could be an allusion to the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton. Milton compares the fallen angels rebelling against God to a swarm of bees. Led by Satan, Milton’s angels become aware of their free will and want to break free from God’s laws and are therefore thrown out of Heaven. Milton describes the angels’ nine day long fall like autumn leaves into Hell, as well as the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent.

Milton’s swarm of bees simile is in turn an allusion to Homer. In the Iliad, Homer compares the Greek army on its way to destroy Troy to a swarm of bees, a destructive force born out of petty jealousy. In that story the lovesick, abandoned man was a king with an army.

“On your hands and knees” means literally to crawl on the floor, but it can also be a sign of submission, humility or supplication. The dog-like position is animalistic, primitive, and it could be related to the vagabond motif, “having to be scrounging for your next meal”. However, Urban dictionary explains it as a sexual position.

Where the first verse of the song establishes romance as enthralling green and melancholy blue, the second verse is all about the fall, losing everything, going down, going to war or hell or nowhere.

In the first bridge of the song the wiggling romance consumes all space and time. It is all over the place and to the bitter end. It doesn’t matter if it hurts, if it “bites” or “cuts”. The line “Wiggle ’til you wiggle right out of here” plays on the idiom “to wiggle out of something”, to eel away, avoiding responsibility or accountability.

Striving for the Unachievable

The next verse starts off with the aforementioned reference to the Sam Cooke song “Shake” and continues with a “rolling hoop” instead of Cooke’s “loop de loop”. The rolling hoop simile has also been ridiculed, although a rolling hoop certainly wiggles as it rolls and even more as it lose its speed. The rolling hoop has a kind of perpetual quality, it demands continuous effort to keep it rolling, like in the poem “The Retort Discourteous” (1920) by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét:

You marshal a steel-and-silken troop,
Your cressets are fed with spices,
And you batter the world like a rolling hoop
To the goal of your proud devices.

In Benét’s poem, the rolling hoop represents a rich man’s everlasting ambition, always following “the rising star”, whereas the poem’s “I” will rather “follow the star that’s sinking”. Benét puts the fleeting decadence of a wealthy nobleman against the humble idealism of the “I” character:

Your poets roar of your golden feats –
I have herded the stars like cattle.
And you may die in the perfumed sheets,
But I shall die in battle.

The rolling hoop may feel somewhat anachronistic, but it is a classic toy; children and athletes have used it since antiquity. As a toy the rolling hoop certainly fits the nursery rhyme style.

The hoop could also be associated with a snake biting its own tail, like the myth of the hoop snake, a snake who bites its tail and rolls along like a rolling hoop after its prey. In ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology, a serpent or dragon biting its own tail is known as the Ouroboros, a symbol of the circle or life. The wiggling could be seen as timeless. It has been going on forever, time out of mind.

A “ton of lead” is not easy to wiggle – it is impossible. It would quickly exhaust you if you tried. The lead simile resembles the “lead balloon” in the song “Unbelievable” on the same album: “It’s unbelievable like a lead balloon”. The wiggle could be seen as deceptive, clouding the mind, making you believe you can achieve the unachievable.

In “Wiggle, Wiggle” the simile is also an allusion to Chuck Berry and his classic hit “Maybellene”, another song about despair over lost love (and about chasing cars):

The Cadillac a-sittin’ like a ton of lead
a hundred and ten a half a mile ahead.

Maybellene’s Cadillac Coupé De Ville is waiting as an entrancing, evasive lure in the distance. The sad refrain: “Oh, Maybellene, why can’t you be true?”

A good car to drive after the war.

The verse is rounded off with a powerful statement: “Wiggle – You can raise the dead”. Figuratively speaking, the wigglers can wake the dead just by being noisy and disruptive, but the line is also a reference to the legend of necromancer Dr. Faustus, the man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power. One of Faustus’ grandiose ambitions was to raise the dead. In Christopher Marlowe’s play, The Tragicall History of D. Faustus, the Doctor says, speaking of himself in the second person:

Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
Wouldst thou make man to live eternally?
Or, being dead, raise them to life again?
Then this profession were to be esteemed.

In Marlowe’s play, the Doctor’s endeavours turns out to be just as futile as it is to wiggle a ton of lead. He ends up in hell. There’s of course more to the famous story.

In the second bridge, the wiggles lead to some sort of elevation building up to a climax. To get high and higher could be seen as working up excitement or euphoria, maybe with the help of substances. In the song it leads to vomiting fire, like a volcano. The fire-vomit could be seen as a sexual metaphor, an ejaculation, orgasm. The buildup to a climax is mirrored in the next lines where “it” whispers, then hums, then answers and finally comes.

Figuratively, to vomit fire mean to rant, scold or quarrel, to spew fire and brimstone. Anger and violence could be the outcome of failed romance. In the Iliad, king Menelaus went to war.

Vomiting fire can also be connected to the mythical dragon. It adds to a monstrous, animalistic quality, like there’s something deeply evil going on. A famous beast who used to vomit fire “in terrible blasts of burning flame”, is the Chimera, a creature who had the head and chest of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon or serpent, as described by Ovid, Homer and Hesiod. Today the word chimera usually refers to an imaginary monster, an illusion, or an urealizable dream. It still vomits fire.

The Chimera

Rattle and Snake

The last verse starts off with a reference to satin and silk, soft and smooth fabrics often used in high fashion and luxury garments, like women’s lingerie. There was a time when this kind of garments primarily was associated with hostesses and prostitutes.

The line could be an allusion to the song “Satin and silk” in the Cole Porter musical “Silk Stockings” (1955), sung by the character Peggy Dayton:

Since my trips have been extensive everywhere,
I’ve become a much wiser gal,
For I’ve noticed that expensive underwear,
Can improve a gal’s morale.

It is strange how lovely lingerie,
Can affect a gal’s false modesty,
If she’s wearing silk and satin,
Satin and silk.

Though she knows that boys are evil imps,
Yet she yearns to give those boys a glimpse,
If she’s wearing silk and satin,
Satin and silk …

The satin and silk lingerie gives Peggy the confidence to court the composer Peter Boroff. The romance theme continues.

I have already mentioned the “pail of milk” line as an allusion to Aesop’s fables, a simple story warning against getting carried away by dreams and ambition. The optimistic woman spilling her milk ends up as another Miss Lonely.

The “rattle and shake” that follows is of course a good old rock ’n’ roll allusion. Bill Haley’s “Shake, rattle and roll” (written by by Jesse Stone) is about a “warm” looking girl whose “heart is cold as ice”. Once again, “Wiggle, Wiggle” returns to the theme of yearning and lovesickness.

The final punch line is of course reminiscent of the ending of Dylan’s own nursery rhyme song “Man Gave Names To All The Animals” (1979), where Dylan leaves out the obvious last line, “Ah, think I call it a snake” – the end of paradise. In “Wiggle, Wiggle” the ending of the song is complete: “Wiggle like a big fat snake”. The reference to the biblical symbol of evil and temptation is hard to escape, but the wording “big fat snake” is also an allusion to the nursery rhyme “Froggie Went A-Courting”, a song Dylan later included on his album Good As I Been To You (1992). The song tells the story of a romance between a frog and a mouse who never get married because they get eaten by predators. In Dylan’s version a “big black snake” eats the wedding cake, while the more common version ends with the whole wedding party being swallowed by a “big fat snake”:

And they all went sailing across the lake,
And they all went sailing across the lake,
And they all went sailing across the lake,
And they got swallowed up by a big fat snake.

The moral of the song is along the lines of Aesop’s pail-of-milk fable: Everything can be lost in an instant. We are mortal.

A Fiery Mock-Song

We can gather the threads: Dylan wraps the real message of the song in what looks like a funny nursery rhyme. He models the song after an old hit from his younger years, “Shake”, a song about letting go and losing yourself in a kind of free dance. Then he relates the optimistic message to the Aesop fable about the girl carrying a pail of milk on her head. Her big dreams of wealth and romance are crushed to pieces because she gets carried away by them. The ironic juxtaposition of joyful dance and fateful loss over dreams is the essence of the song.

The quirky, “bad” form of the nursery rhyme underlines the irony; the symbolic wiggle as a foolish and heedless activity. Like the dance (romance) itself the nonsense form distracts from the momentous pitfalls involved: “for love is blind all day, and may not see” (Geoffrey Chaucer).

To the image of the wiggle dance as an allegory for unhealthy romance and ambition, Dylan adds new layers through the use of similes, symbols and allusions to songs and literature, from Chuck Berry to William Shakespeare. The many references tell stories about failed romance and unrealizable dreams, yearning and lovesickness, loss and suffering.

The possible allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost together with the snake symbol and the legend of Dr. Faustus, may add a religious end-of-days layer to the song, where the “wiggling” swarm of men is seen as fallen angels, destined for hell. We may also sense the contours of a ferocious, imaginary beast lurking in the shadows, and the whole romance dance can be associated with John’s vision of the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation, if you’d like.

As it turns out, “Wiggle, Wiggle” is not sloppy gibberish at all, but a cleverly crafted song rich in imagery and with a coherent theme and message. On one level the song is indeed a silly, nonsensical nursery rhyme, on the other it is an ironic song about the dangers of romantic love and ambition in life, well in accordance with similarly themed songs in Dylan’s work. It can be conceived as an exploration of sad and bad romance, seasoned with nods to songs in Bob’s record collection, but more interestingly as a fiery mock-song aimed at a world consumed with romance, sex and ambition. It goes against the grain. If the irony is lost on people, it might even strengthen the underlying satire and confirm the premise of the song.