FEATURE:
Rough and Rowdy, Yet Utterly Sublime
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in 2012/PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Polk/Getty Images
The Ageless Brilliance of Bob Dylan
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I wanted to pen a few words…
to reflect on the new Bob Dylan album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. The album is out on Friday (19th June), but I have been reacting to a review that came out recently in The Guardian - there is also one from NME that I want to quote from. It seems that Dylan is enjoying a new peak right now. At the age of seventy-nine, one might forgive the songwriting genius if he slowed down a bit and produced an album that was sort of okay. As it seems, he has put out one of his best albums in years! I have heard the singles from the album, and Dylan has lost none of his sharpness, observational brilliance and humour. I am a big fan of albums like Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home and, on those albums, he put our shorter songs together with longer ones that were epic and hugely engrossing in terms of their detail and story. Rough and Rowdy Ways confirms that Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters who has ever lived, and I wonder whether the divisions of the current time have been influential. He clearly does not have a lot of time for President Donald Trump, and he spoke out against the death of George Floyd – how he was sickened and horrified by what we all saw. Some have written Dylan off when it comes to his very best work and whether he will ever be able to get anywhere near these days. His last album of mainly original compositions, 2013’s Tempest, is brilliant, but I did see some reviews that were dismissive or were comparing it unfavourably to his best work.
I think that Dylan has had some uneven patches, and albums that did not hit the mark – that is going to happen when you have put out so many records! I am seeing a lot of huge reviews for Rough and Rowdy Ways. Here is an extract from The Guardian’s review:
“This is obviously humour of a dark hue: if Tempest’s prevalent mood was one of murderous fury, then here it’s brooding menace and imminent doom. It’s there in the music – the weird tension in Crossing the Rubicon’s muted R&B shuffle and the way the backing on Black Rider keeps lapsing into ominous silence. You lose count of the lyrical references to judgment day and Armageddon, of the mysterious characters that keep cropping up with malevolence on their minds: “I can feel the bones beneath my skin and they’re trembling with rage, I’ll make your wife a widow, you’ll never see middle age,” he sings on Crossing the Rubicon. Of course, grouchily informing the world that everything is turning to shit has been one of Dylan’s prevalent songwriting modes for a quarter of a century – it’s the thread that binds Not Dark Yet, Things Have Changed, Ain’t Talkin’ and Early Roman Kings, among others – but this time the message seems to have shifted slightly: if you think everything has turned to shit now, Rough and Rowdy Ways keeps insisting, just you wait.
This isn’t perhaps the most comforting communique to issue in the middle of a global pandemic, but then the man behind it has seldom dealt in soothing reassurance. And besides, it doesn’t matter. For all its bleakness, Rough and Rowdy Ways might well be Bob Dylan’s most consistently brilliant set of songs in years: the die-hards can spend months unravelling the knottier lyrics, but you don’t need a PhD in Dylanology to appreciate its singular quality and power”.
Look at iconic and decades-enduring songwriters like Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney, and I am always amazed how they are putting out work after so long – though Mitchell has not released an album for a while –, and how they are able to give the world such brilliance! I urge people to buy Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, as one is in for a real treat! His voice sounds incredible and moving, and I think his lyrics are as staggering as ever. This is a sort of love letter to a master of music, and one who many have sort of overlooked and assumed his best is far behind him – and those who just aren’t interested anymore. I think Dylan is one of those people who can take what is happening around him, craft this incredible song, and make sure that it speaks to everyone. In their five-star, this is what NME had to say:
“The roots of the erosion of US democracy plays out against a backdrop of counter-culture revolution. Between flickering scenes from Dealey Plaza and Parkland hospital, Dylan widens the shot to take in the birth of rock’n’roll, The Beatles, Woodstock and Altamont, before unleashed a bombardment of musical, cinematic and social references stretching the entire 20th Century, like ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ grew up and got a degree. Bluesmen, silent movie clowns, soul queens, jazz greats, rockers, hippies and pin-ups – Dylan revels in a hundred years of creative progress as if in accusation of America’s immutable ideological savagery. JFK, he’s saying, was just the highest profile, on-camera bloodstain to be splashed across the stars and stripes.
“The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close,” Dylan recently told The New York Times, “the individual pieces are just part of a whole.” As such, it’s a vision of which DeLillo, Picasso or Eliot would be proud, and serves as a fitting close on a record that aspires to be the musical equivalent of the Great American Novel. It would be foolish indeed to assume that ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’ is Dylan’s last word, but it’s certainly a historic address”.
I do hope that we see Dylan release many more albums, as I feel he is going through one of the most productive and impressive stages of his illustrious career. He recently gave a rare interview to The New York Times, and he was asked about his new album and various tracks from it. He was asked about the strangeness and tense of 2020:
“There is a lot of apocalyptic sentiment in “Murder Most Foul.” Are you worried that in 2020 we’re past the point of no return? That technology and hyper-industrialization are going to work against human life on Earth?
Sure, there’s a lot of reasons to be apprehensive about that. There’s definitely a lot more anxiety and nervousness around now than there used to be. But that only applies to people of a certain age like me and you, Doug. We have a tendency to live in the past, but that’s only us. Youngsters don’t have that tendency. They have no past, so all they know is what they see and hear, and they’ll believe anything. In 20 or 30 years from now, they’ll be at the forefront. When you see somebody that is 10 years old, he’s going to be in control in 20 or 30 years, and he won’t have a clue about the world we knew. Young people who are in their teens now have no memory lane to remember. So it’s probably best to get into that mind-set as soon as we can, because that’s going to be the reality.
As far as technology goes, it makes everybody vulnerable. But young people don’t think like that. They could care less. Telecommunications and advanced technology is the world they were born into. Our world is already obsolete.
“I Contain Multitudes” is surprisingly autobiographical in parts. The last two verses exude a take-no-prisoners stoicism while the rest of the song is a humorous confessional. Did you have fun grappling with contradictory impulses of yourself and human nature in general?
I didn’t really have to grapple much. It’s the kind of thing where you pile up stream-of-consciousness verses and then leave it alone and come pull things out. In that particular song, the last few verses came first. So that’s where the song was going all along. Obviously, the catalyst for the song is the title line. It’s one of those where you write it on instinct. Kind of in a trance state. Most of my recent songs are like that. The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors. The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them”.
Robert Zimmerman is a genius, and I do think that, if you can, go and check out his new album. It is frightening to think that, when he turns eighty next year, he will be in his seventh decade as a recording artist – although he would have been recording music before his eponymous album came out in 1962! To listen to a Bob Dylan album is an experience like no other. I remember when Murder Most Foul came out, and just being blown away by his peerless wordplay and gravitas-filled vocal. Bob Dylan is one of the greatest poets and voices who has ever lived and, when it comes to turning out these unbelievable albums, I…
IN THIS PHOTO: Bob Dylan in the 1960s
HOPE that does not stop anytime soon.