6

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.

Read more at michigandaily.com

