Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, by Greil Marcus

Pop music turned out not to be quite as disposable as was first thought. Not only is it still going, in modulated, increasingly moribund form, but an awful lot of the old stuff is still with us too: the stuff we were meant to bin along with the polythene headscarves and paper pants which also distinguished the consumer boom of the Sixties.

Pop music turned out not to be quite as disposable as was first thought. Not only is it still going, in modulated, increasingly moribund form, but an awful lot of the old stuff is still with us too: the stuff we were meant to bin along with the polythene headscarves and paper pants which also distinguished the consumer boom of the Sixties. In fact, contrary to the expectations of most mums and dads of that period, pop has proved to be one of the least disposable products post-war capitalism ever devised. You just can't get rid of it. It's everywhere. And the better pop music gets, the harder it is to remove the stain. Here's the proof: Greil Marcus's latest chin-stroker on the subject of American popular music - 225 pages of it, excluding copious appendices, on the subject of just one song: Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone".

"Like a Rolling Stone" came out in pop's annus mirabilis, 1965. And it's pretty hard to think of anything else from that year which has stayed half as lively. Warhol's "Kiss"? Soyinka's The Interpreters? The Sound of Music? The Ford Cortina? Jimmy Greaves? Actually, about the only serious rivals "Rolling Stone" has as a one-stop index of this most elusively pungent of years are "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'", "Day Tripper" and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Pop music, eh? Here today, still here the day after tomorrow. (As Marcus observes, it's likely that "Rolling Stone" has already copped more radio airplay in 2005 than it got in the whole of 1966, on the grounds that there is nothing quite so disposable as last year's hit.)

But Marcus wants you to grasp a sheaf of ideas rather more complex than a song's capacity to make a barnacle of itself on the passage of time. He is keen on the notion of unmapped territory and the way that pioneer psychology has never been confined to men who sit in wagons. He is enraptured by the thought that "Rolling Stone" is part of an unconscious creative continuum, which can be mapped in a multiplicity of dimensions. In fact, Marcus is wedded to the divine thought that great song, like great art, isn't an index of history; it is history, and like history is therefore limitlessly readable. This is a prairie he's lugged his wagon over several times before. (Try reading his brilliant Mystery Train, which was written in the mid-1970s in an early, as-it-happens attempt to take deep historical stock of how popular music had managed to arrive at Elvis, The Band and Sly Stone.)

The upshot is a dense, busy, electrified book which radiates ideas much as Dylan's scalp used to radiate hair. The book is not really about Bob Dylan at all. The songwriter functions as the largely passive centre of the narrative, which circulates around the events taking place in Columbia Studio A on 15 June 1965, in order to scarf up anything it can tie in to its vortex of allusions, references, connections, streams and poetry of the soul.

Such as Mrs Sarah L Winchester, the widow of the man who invented the repeating rifle that "won the West". Mrs Winchester was convinced by a spiritualist - presumably one with links to the building trade - that "so long as she continued building her house in San Jose, she would never die". So over the next 38 years, the Winchester pad expanded on a daily basis, eventually to number 160 rooms, until 1922 when one imagines a plumber threw a sickie and Mrs Winchester dropped dead. You'll have to read the book to find out precisely why she's in it. (She does at least achieve a measure of immortality as part of the apparatus of a metaphor.)

The book also has much to say about how context works on pop and vice versa. But never more so than in Marcus's penultimate rave, on the subject of the Pet Shop Boys' interpretation of the Village People's "Go West". To the author, "Go West" evangelises a very specific drive for new territory. "'Now,' Tennant sang, following in the footsteps of millions, from Sir Walter Raleigh to Daniel Boone, Calamity Jane to Long Island-born Harvey Milk himself, 'if we make our stand, we'll find ... our promised land.' And then the song took off, over mountains, through valleys, across rivers, across oceans, each line more expansive, more triumphant, heroic and modest than the last, for the singers were claiming no more than what anyone else could take as a birthright."

Round our way, of course, "Go West" has adapted to a new, equally principled, terrain. "One-niiiil to the Ar-sen-al" is how the chorus now goes and as often as not, it's sung lustily in the stands of Highbury stadium by Chris Lowe, the musical half of the Pet Shop Boys, who is doubtless proudly feeling "as London as fog and gas lights" as he does it. But hey: that's intertextuality, that's pop music.

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