Usually, you catch feelings when you listen to music. With singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, you do a lot more. You think, analyse, and piece together the lies and manipulations on a macro level.
In a century that seems to have too many wars, forgetting the all-too-recent and awful lessons of the last century, Masters of War, from the breakthrough album of 1963, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, deserves a revisit.
Masters of War isn’t just an anti-war song like Imagine (John Lennon), Give Peace a Chance (Plastic Ono Band), Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan again) or Allah tero naam, Ishwar tero naam (Sahir Ludhianvi), though those are great songs, too. It’s an angry, sledgehammer indictment of war and the “military-industrial complex” that drives too many wars.
In Blowin’ in the Wind, from the same 1963 album, Dylan asks: How many times must the cannonballs fly/ Before they’re forever banned?
In Masters of War, he isn’t asking questions to which the answers are blowin’ in the wind. He’s roaring, calling out the warmongers from the very start.
Come you masters of war/ You that build the big guns/ You that build the death planes/ You that build all the bombs/ You that hide behind walls/ You that hide behind desks/ I just want you to know/ I can see through your masks.
It’s a song that invokes both Jesus and Judas, and you just get why.
In perhaps the most searing, poignant line that sums up the helplessness of the common man caught in a war not of his own making, Dylan says: You play with my world/ Like it’s your little toy....
Who is this “you”? It changes with time and geography.
The last verse wishes that warmongers and those who profit from wars die: And I hope that you die/ And your death will come soon....
Dylan himself says: “I’ve never really written anything like that before. I don’t sing songs that hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it in this one. The song is a sort of striking out, a reaction to the last straw....”
The music is simple, inspired by the folk song Nottamun Town. Dylan keeps it stark and acoustic, with the focus on the lyrics and his raspy, direct delivery.
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in St Louis County, Minnesota, Dylan is still going strong as a musician, painter and sculptor. Barely 20, he moved to New York to pursue a career in music. Massive success came early, and continued. For decades, Dylanologists have delved into his lyrics, their topicality, his diverse musical influences, his name change, his relationships, most famously with Joan Baez.
There’ve been epithets — voice of a generation, the bard, the crown prince of folk — and awards aplenty, even the Pulitzer and the Nobel. And even if you’re not a Dylan buff, you can’t deny that his words have entered everyday language — “the times they are a-changing”, “forever young”, “the answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind”, “money doesn’t talk, it swears”.
But what endures is the image of a lone man with a guitar, singing truth to power. In 2026, it’s probably harder. That’s why Masters of War is more deafening today.
Sulagana Biswas