Still blowin’ in the wind
The mood of Bob Dylan’s new album is laid-back; the sentiments are not
It’s been eight years since Bob Dylan released an album of original songs. And there were times when we wondered if he had anything left to say, as he croaked out Frank Sinatra cover versions and performed live shows that rendered his own classics almost unrecognisable.
But the 79-year-old Nobel Prizewinning troubadour is back, to remind us 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, in dense, allusive, cryptic couplets.
“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 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”.
Dylan’s fans may yearn to know his views on our modern crises, but instead he proceeds to offer up songs referring to historic presidential assassinations (William McKinley on Key West and John F Kennedy on Murder Most Foul). On Crossing the Rubicon, he compares himself with Julius Caesar, a figure as divisive in his time as President Donald Trump.
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.
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.
Couplets are delivered with wonkily inspired timing in a croaking voice so torn it is a wonder Dylan can make himself heard at all. That he comes through loud and clear is a testament to his production skills and his band’s delicate arrangements.
The mood is laid-back, yet the sentiments are anything but. The album title seems indicative of Dylan’s engagement with the bloody stuff of life at a time when he might be expected to be slipping towards retirement.
In Dylan songs, the past is permanently present. In epic finale Murder Most Foul, Dylan turns an elegy for 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.