You got a lot of nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning.

These lines are from Bob Dylan’s early protest-era songwriting, specifically the lyric to “Positively 4th Street.” Released as a stand-alone single in 1965 during Dylan’s contentious shift from acoustic folk to electric rock, the song is widely read as a caustic address to former allies in the Greenwich Village folk scene who criticized or resented his success and changing style. Rather than a general statement about friendship, the lyric functions as a pointed, second-person rebuke—capturing the bitterness of feeling publicly judged and privately abandoned at a moment of vulnerability.

The speaker accuses the addressee of performative loyalty: claiming friendship while taking pleasure in the speaker’s hardship. The sting comes from the contrast between the expected ethics of friendship (support when someone is “down”) and the observed reality (standing by, “grinning”). Dylan’s plain diction and conversational cadence sharpen the moral indictment, turning the lyric into a portrait of hypocrisy and schadenfreude. More broadly, it reflects Dylan’s recurring theme of betrayal by communities that demand conformity—suggesting that social approval can be conditional, and that success or change exposes the fragility of proclaimed solidarity.