An eternal voice of genius
Protest singer Dylan still composing anthems for today’s changing times
Rough and Rowdy Ways Bob Dylan Columbia Records
It has been eight years since Bob Dylan released an album of original songs. And there were times when we wondered if the revered singer-songwriter had anything left to say, as he croaked out endless Frank Sinatra cover versions.
But the 79-year-old Nobel Prize-winning troubadour is back, to remind everyone why he is regarded as one of the geniuses of the rock ’n’ roll age.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s 39th studio album. It was preceded by three epic, wordy singles, Murder Most Foul, I Contain Multitudes and False Prophet, which suggested he had a lot on his mind. And he pours it out here, in dense, allusive, cryptic couplets that suggest he is not exactly going gently into that good night. Over 10 songs, spanning 70 minutes, not a moment is wasted.
“After midnight, if you still want to meet / I’ll be at the Black Horse tavern on Armageddon street,” Dylan promises on the darkly amusing My Own Version of You, a steamy Frankenstein blues about creating life from spare body parts. It starts out as a jokey Screamin’ Jay Hawkins riff but winds up with a long, philosophical passage evincing one of Dylan’s core themes, that we are but tiny particles in the immensity of history, where the story of the whole human race is “all right in there, it’s carved into your face.”
By opening the album with the Walt Whitman-referencing
I Contain Multitudes, Dylan declares his freedom to embrace contradiction. This is the liberating power of songs that can go anywhere, filled with non sequiturs and unspooling almost as free association.
Couplets are delivered with wonkily inspired timing in a croaking voice. His language is drawn from a familiar mix of the Old Testament, Roman poetry, Greek philosophy, Shakespeare, Homer and the Beat poets, with quotes from folk, blues, pop songs and B-movies, high and low culture mixed up, dosed with jokes, ribaldry, epigrammatic phrases and surrealist juxtapositions. The mood is laid back yet the sentiments are anything but.
The album title — from a song by country pioneer Jimmie Rodgers — seems indicative of Dylan’s engagement with the bloody stuff of life at a time when he might be expected to be slipping toward retirement.
In Dylan songs, the past is permanently present, lending even greater resonance to the 17-minute epic finale Murder Most Foul, in which Dylan turns an elegy for John F. Kennedy into a lament for the death of American idealism and rise of political gangsterism. Almost 60 years since we first heard from him, the old protest singer is still composing extraordinary anthems for our changing times.