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Dylan as makeout artist
9.5.06
Bob Dylan's Make-Out Album
The romantic—and spectacular—Modern Times
By Jody Rosen
From SLATE
Updated Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006, at 7:37 AM ET
If Bob Dylan's 31 studio albums have taught us anything, it's not to take his words at face value. The title of album No. 32, Modern Times, is a typically mischievous Dylanism. For one thing, it's a joke. Since the early '90s, Dylan has been in revolt against musical modernity, forsaking contemporary production values, singing traditional folk ballads, and steeping his own songs in old-timey sounds. In an interview in the latest Rolling Stone, Dylan calls digital recordings "worthless" and "atrocious." ("I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years," he says.) Of course, the album title also alludes to Charlie Chaplin's classic 1936 film. And there is something Chaplinesque about the impish Dylan of 2006, with his funny mustache and old hat. The tragicomic hero who trudges through Dylan's recent songs is a lot like the Little Tramp—a spiritual hobo, battered by cruel fate and heartless women, wandering, as he sings on the new album, down a "long and lonesome road."
Dylan nearly died from a heart infection in 1997 and became a senior citizen this past May. Recently, he's been busy with legacy management, publishing his autobiography and collaborating with Martin Scorsese on a worshipful documentary. But the real achievement of the last decade is his magnificently rejuvenated career as barnstorming live performer and recording artist. On Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love and Theft (2001), Dylan reconnected to his songwriting muse. Among other things, these albums showed that Dylan's famous conversion to rock 'n' roll—when he "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—was a big fake-out. Whether shouting above the supercharged rock on his classic mid-'60s albums or singing these raggedy blues-soaked tunes in his time-ravaged voice, he's always been a folkie, or more precisely, a folklorist. Hardscrabble blues, 19th-century parlor ballads, gospel testimonies, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and other songs as old as the hills, and as immovable—Dylan's music has carried these echoes from the start, but never with such a sense of mission as in his recent work. If there is an extra hint of fatigue in his rasp these days, it may be because he's weary from bearing that heavy load. It's not easy being America's living, breathing musical unconscious.
Modern Times is a better album than Time Out of Mind and even than the majestic Love and Theft, which by my lights makes it Dylan's finest since Blood on the Tracks (1975). As usual, it's verbose. Dylan pours out verse after verse—aphorisms and parables, jokes and laments, valentines and metaphysical musings—over loose-limbed vamps from his excellent touring band. In the opening boogie blues, "Play MediaThunder on the Mountain," Dylan sings about God, the apocalypse, vengeance, war, and more earthy matters: "I got the pork chops, she got the pie/ She ain't no angel and neither am I." The songs are full of such jarring segues, moving in a line or two from grand spiritual yearnings to yearning for Alicia Keys. It's a great songwriting technique, and it's also a worldview—the idea, consecrated in the blues and, for that matter, in 40 years' worth of Bob Dylan songs, that the sacred and the fleshly exist on the same plane.
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