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Thursday, June 25 , 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS
ALBUM REVIEW
ALBUM REVIEW
Bob Dylan reckons
with the apocalypse
On Dec. 13, 1963, Bob Dylan was given the
“Tom Paine Award” by the Emergency Civil
Liberties Committee for his political activism.
A visibly shaken, and likely drunk, Dylan said he
accepted the award on behalf of “everybody that
went down to Cuba,” then unleashed a doozy:
“I got to admit that the man who shot President
Kennedy, Lee Oswald … I saw some of myself in
him.” The crowd booed him off the stage.
A few days later, Dylan released a statement
that read, in part, “If there’s violence in the
times, then there must be violence in me.”
It’s 2020, and the times are more violent than
ever. They have been for a while. Where has
Bob Dylan been in the era of Donald Trump,
mass shootings, climate crisis and COVID-19?
Where’s the singer who marched on Washing-
ton with Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote sear-
ing political anthems like “The Times They Are
a-Changin’,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie
Carroll” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game?” He
was releasing Sinatra cover albums — three, to
be exact — from 2015-2017. It seemed, for those
who hoped for a guiding message from rock’s
poet laureate, that Dylan had decided to sit this
one out.
Yet, in June 2020, Bob Dylan is back with his
first album of original music in almost a decade
— Rough and Rowdy Ways. It’s a career-defin-
ing masterpiece, an album both bracingly cur-
rent yet timeless in its compositional breadth,
pulling from the best of Dylan’s work through
the decades. Rough and Rowdy Ways has the
enthralling auditory grit of 1997’s Grammy-
winning Time Out of Mind, the socio-political
layers of Highway 61 Revisited and the personal
revelations of Blood on the Tracks.
“Today and tomorrow, and yesterday too,”
Dylan begins the album’s first song, “I Contain
Multitudes.” “The flowers are dyin’, like all
things do.” Dylan’s message is clear from the
start: These are the end times. Yet after this
apocalyptic pronouncement, he implores an
unnamed woman to “Follow me close … I’ll lose
my mind if you don’t come with me.” In Dylan’s
world, where “Everything’s flowing, all at the
same time,” one can “sleep with life and death in
the same bed.” Basically, even if everyone’s going
to die, they don’t have to die alone.
In a whimsical, almost snide cadence, Dylan
throws in a myriad of other personal complexi-
ties, but one line stands out: “I’m just like Anne
Frank, like Indiana Jones and them British bad
boys the Rolling Stones.” The lyric bristles at the
ear, mainly because it’s so impenetrable. How
is the 79-year-old Dylan, while a rock star like
the Rolling Stones, like Anne Frank or Indiana
Jones?
Right from the start, Rough and Rowdy Ways
is sonically striking. Dylan’s last original album,
2012’s Tempest, was chock-full of crashing
drums, out-of-control guitars and a voice that
sounded like Dylan had swallowed a gallon of
rocks. Dylan has self-produced every one of his
albums since 1997, and generally favors a raw,
unfiltered performance by both himself and his
tour band. This time, though, he’s meticulously
crafted every aspect of the album. The instru-
mentation and his voice transform to reflect the
subject matter of each song. “I Contain Multi-
tudes” is almost completely acoustic, intimately
shading the confessional lyrics as the listener is
drawn in by Dylan’s soft voice.
This comfort is ripped away on the second
track, “False Prophet.” Amid crashing drums and
smarmy guitar, Dylan continues the dark lamen-
tations in a Tempest-style bark — “I know how
it happened, I saw it begin. I opened my heart
to the world, and the world caved in.” While he
doesn’t yet reveal what caused this apocalypse,
Dylan asserts with haggard surety “I’m no false
prophet, I just know what I know.”
Things get weirder in “My Own Version of
ANDREW WARRICK
Daily Arts Writer
You,” a song backed by a mournful steel gui-
tar straight out of a retro horror flick. Dylan
details his plan to dig up “limbs and livers and
brains and hearts” and “bring someone to life …
someone who feels the way that I feel.” Again,
love and death are bedmates. While Dylan, par-
roting Victor Frankenstein, swears to act with
“decency and common sense … for the benefit
of all mankind” with his creation, he also asks
“What would Julius Caesar do?” Like Cae-
sar, and all authoritarians, Dylan considers his
actions, however inhumane, permissible since
he believes himself to be working for the com-
mon good. Adding to this prescient commentary,
Dylan invites the listener to “Step right into the
burning hell, where some of the best-known
enemies of mankind dwell.”
In these flames, Dylan somehow finds a way
to sing a masterful love song, “I’ve Made Up My
Mind to Give Myself to You.”
“I’m sitting on my terrace, lost in the stars,” he
begins. The Sinatra phase has paid off — Dylan’s
voice hasn’t sounded this sharp in decades, a
cavernous croon that soars with genuine affec-
tion. The soft instrumentation builds to a sub-
lime electric guitar solo that’s one of the best
moments on the album. There are also faint,
almost imperceptible backing singers, one of
which just might be Fiona Apple, whose soft
choral drone gives the song a sense of deep mel-
ancholy. When Dylan sings, almost tearfully, “I
don’t think I could bear to live my life alone,” it’s
as moving as anything from his love-sick opus
Blood on The Tracks. Thankfully Dylan meets
someone, telling this unnamed lover “I’ll lay
down beside you when everyone’s gone.” In a
time when reality itself seems to be falling apart,
Dylan’s honesty is piercing.
Then comes “Black Rider.” To the tune of a
slithering acoustic guitar, Dylan criticizes an
unnamed man for womanizing, violence and
arrogance (all of which Dylan has displayed
thus far in the album, making one wonder if the
song is a soliloquy, critiquing Dylan’s own dark,
masculine shades). Whoever the black rider is,
Dylan tells the guy “You’ve been on the job too
long,” before giving one the album’s most brutal,
and unexpected, lines: “The size of your cock
will get you nowhere.” Dylan’s lambasting of
this predatory, arrogant mystery-man brings the
album’s apocalypse a step closer to 2020.
“Goodbye Jimmy Reed” adds another politi-
cal layer, with Dylan deciding “That old time
religion is just what I need” and promising to
“thump on the Bible, proclaim the creed.” Right
after this declaration, however, Dylan tells a
woman he will “break open your grapes, suck
out the juice,” while admitting “I need you like
my head needs a noose.” The fusion of funda-
mentalist religion with hypocritical lust and
punishing violence adds another shade of rel-
evance. After all, the tear-gassing, psychopathic
president who swore to “grab them by the” you-
know-what got 81 percent of the evangelical
vote.
Subject matter aside, “
Jimmy Reed” is a sonic
escape to a time gone by, with rollicking guitar
and harmonica straight out of Dylan’s 1966 clas-
sic Blonde on Blonde. Again, Dylan shows his
multitudes and proves that, even in the end of
days, one can still have a little fun.
In “Mother of Muses,” Dylan is back to grap-
pling with apocalypse. Like Dante, he implores
the muses to “show me your wisdom” and guide
him through the hell-fire. Then Dylan gives a list
of muses much like the idiosyncratic roster in “I
Contain Multitudes,” naming William Sherman,
Bernard Montgomery, Winfield Scott, Georgy
Zhukov, George Patton, Elvis Presley and Mar-
tin Luther King Jr. Again, one is befuddled.
What do Union and World War II Allied gener-
als, a rock star and Martin Luther King Jr. have
to do with one another?
Regardless, Dylan seems comforted by these
muses in the next track, “Crossing the Rubicon.”
He regards the “red river” that lays before him,
“one step from the great beyond.” With a rolling
guitar-lick, Dylan declares “I embrace my love,
put down my head and I cross the Rubicon.” He
has leapt over the river of blood and has passed
into the afterworld.
Dylan explores the afterlife in the master-
piece “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” It’s the
most musically complex song of the album, a
masterful blend of guitar, ghostly background
singing and accordion riffs that lap at Dylan’s
lyrics like waves on a midnight beach.
Key West, according to Dylan, is “the place
to be if you’re looking for immortality,” a neth-
erworld that radiates from a “pirate radio sta-
tion.” Bob Dylan, the only songwriter thus far to
win the Nobel Prize, spending his afterlife in the
sound waves is more than fitting.
“I was born on the wrong side of the railroad
track,” he says, referencing his childhood in the
barren mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota.
“Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac.” While at
79, Dylan still appears healthy, it isn’t hard
to interpret the song as a meditation on both
death and an eternity as a literary icon. He’ll be
remembered as one of the best, but what will
happen to his soul?
Key West is “innocence and purity … para-
dise divine” yet also unrelentingly hot and “at
the bottom,” full of “blossoms of a toxic plant.”
Even in the afterlife there are multitudes; love
and horror are intimately intertwined. Is this
Heaven, Hell or somewhere in between?
Either way, for this grizzled pirate in the
throes of eternity, the heart still wants what it
wants. “I’m so deep in love I can hardly see,”
he proclaims. Yet his muse is gone: “I heard the
news, I heard your last request. Fly around, my
pretty little miss.” At Dylan’s age, it’s likely he’s
seen many lovers come and go, and the accor-
dion’s soft swell makes his sorrow all the more
potent. This close to the end, even love can’t ease
the pain.
While Dylan has grappled with death
throughout the album, this song is crushing
because it is no mythological, apocalyptic mus-
ing. It’s tied to Dylan’s own life and career.
The song ends with Dylan giving the haunting
admission that for him too, Key West is “on the
horizon line.”
Through the past nine songs, Dylan has
detailed intimate secrets, unpacked toxic mas-
culinity, religious hypocrisy, impending mass
death and his own legacy. Yet he isn’t done.
There’s a final, devastating epic to, paraphrasing
one of Dylan’s classics, bring it all back home.
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