Dylan’s work transcends time
By: Hank Kalet
Bob Dylan’s music exists on a different plain, a time past, a different world.
Whereas most of contemporary pop music feels plastic and prepackaged like much of the food we eat, it is all gloss and empty calories Dylan’s music comes from a different place, from somewhere in the stars, from that murky, menacing place of myth and wonder, the dream world, perhaps, or that "Old Weird America" of the blues and rural folk music that rock critic Greil Marcus has identified as the well from which Dylan’s muse is drawn.
Dylan’s musical world is one in which the old and the new collide, in which there are dangers on the horizon, there is "Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be / Mean old twister bearing down on me / All the ladies in Washington scrambling to get out of town / Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down."
Dylan’s latest, "Modern Times," opens with storm clouds and darkness, with a sense of foreboding that carries throughout, through the tender moments and the violence, through the easy shuffles and the rockabilly and spitfire blues. It is a sense of foreboding that comes from age, from an understanding that the end could be near, that death is not as far off as one might like.
"The night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom / I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs," he sings in "Rollin’ and Tumblin’."
"It’s dark and it’s dreary / I’ve been pleading in vain / I’m wounded, I’m weary / My repentance is plain," he adds later, in "Beyond the Horizon."
"Modern Times" hit the stores late last month to critical praise amid a surprising ad push from Sony a level of hype not attached to Dylan in years. There were years when this didn’t seem possible, when the release of a new Dylan album was met less with hope than with resignation, with a sense that maybe Dylan would awake from his musical slumber and once again make music that mattered but that the chances were slim. There were 20 years of uninspired music that had damaged his reputation, recasting rock’s first bard as a hokey has-been, a caricature of the man who changed both rock ‘n’ roll and folk music with a trio of explosive rock records 40 years ago.
Then, unexpectedly, "Time Out of Mind" appeared, Dylan’s weary ode to anger and remorse. The disc scuffed up with unnecessary studio effects, but nevertheless brilliant won a Grammy. Then came a remarkable, rocking single "Things Have Changed" from the soundtrack to the film, "The Wonderboys" followed by his late-career masterpiece, "Love and Theft," a mélange of rockabilly, blues, shuffling jazz and easy two-steps, of sly jokes, torrents of acerbic wit and lacerating laments.
"Modern Times" was advertised as a continuation of this late-career rebirth, the third disc in what Sony has billed as a trilogy, and it definitely sounds like an extension of "Love and Theft," though a little softer and not quite as manicly surreal and funny.
"Modern Times" alternates fast-paced blues with slower meditations. It is thoughtful, considered, almost sweet, but with a definite edge (listen to the lilting "Spirit on the Water") and written in a more direct lyrical style.
Dylan riffs on paradise, Alicia Keys and the deep darkness, sweeping across American musical history like the wandering minstrel ghost he always has been. "Thunder on the Mountain" (where the Alicia Keys reference shows up) is a fitting, rocking opener, and "Rollin’ and Tumblin’" is spitfire blues.
Dylan makes use of the familiar echoes of Merle Haggard’s vocal style infuse "Workingman’s Blues #2"; snatches of Slim Harpo, Muddy Waters, even Michael Bloomfield’s guitar lines from an earlier Dylan era weave their way through.
Call it a pastiche, if you will, a musical mosaic built as the best of Dylan’s work has always been on the foundation of the past.
But "Those who think Dylan merely plagiarizes miss the point," writes Thom Jurek on All Music.
"Dylan is a folk musician; he uses American folk forms such as blues, rock, gospel, and R&B as well as lyrics, licks, and/or whatever else he can to get a song across. This tradition of borrowing and retelling goes back to the beginning of song and story. Even the title of ‘Modern Times’ is a wink-eye reference to a film by Charlie Chaplin. It doesn’t make Dylan less; it makes him more, because he contains all of these songs within himself. By his use of them, he adds to their secret histories and labyrinthine legends."
As with "Love and Theft," Dylan’s worn voice seems to come from another time and ties all this together. Dylan has always been a synthesizer back in the mid-1960s, his concoctions resulted in a shape-changing swirl that changed the direction of both rock and folk. In the ’70s, his best work fused an angry, biting wit with a sometimes softer musical streak (this may not be completely accurate; the mid-’70s music from "Blood on the Tracks" and "Desire" may have lacked the explosive quality of "Highway 61 Revisited," but still burned with energy).
The new music, with its odd and ancient sounding references, both musical and lyrical, presents us with something equally unusual in popular music a record about growing older, about regrets and the settling of scores.
Dylan is considering the end, but in doing so he is taking us back to the beginnings.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail, or through his weblog, Channel Surfing.