Like a Rolling Stone & Heroin

My poem’s epic, and is meant to be

Divided in twelve books; each book containing,

With love, and war, and a heavy gale at sea,

A list of ships, and captains, and kings reigning,

New characters; the episodes are three:

A panorama view of hell’s in training,

After the style of Virgil and of Homer,

So that my name of Epic’s no misnomer.

Lord Bryon is being his smart-assed self with the above passage, placing Don Juan, his work-in-progress, on the shelf with The Odyssey and The Aeneid. He’s correct, though, in that there are specific attributes that make an epic an epic. At least when we’re talking about very old, very long poems.

Even when we use the word more loosely, we still tend to apply it to works or art that are ambitious and expansive—ones that don’t just hint at the tip of the iceberg. Hence, for our purposes here, we’re looking at songs in the six- to seven-minute range.

Length might be the most concrete connection, but I feel like these are songs that dive deep, that exhaust their own subject matter. They can feel a bit formless, but to me that makes them all the more vast. Moreover, these are songs that serve both as a highly personal confession and also as a vivid send-up of an era. (Coincidentally, Reed's send-up includes seas, ships, and a panorama view of hell.)

"Heroin" came out four years after "Like a Rolling Stone," but they were written at just about the same time. When you listen to these back to back… well… How does it feel? To me, it feels like Dylan is taking a walk through Greenwich Village at the height of its hipness, and he dismisses it all with a smirk because he’s already over it. Meanwhile, a block away, Lou Reed raises a pale arm and lowers the blinds.