Bob Dylan: Modern Times
Who would have thought that the latter days of Dylan’s career would see him emerge as primarily a great vocalist? His voice, always a triumph of manner over means, seems pretty well ruined as far as anything that would normally be thought of as singing is concerned. But he’s achieved a kind of expression with it that’s far richer than that of many a gifted singer.
And Dylan the songwriter, like Dylan the singer, is down to a few basic mannerisms. The days when he wrote songs that were covered by dozens of other performers are long past and not likely to return. His writing even at its very best has usually seemed rough and hasty, something delivered by a force of nature, full of both verbal and musical energy, but unpolished. Now the brilliance is gone, for the most part. You don’t find many memorable tunes or striking verbal turns in his work these days. What used to be a torrent of striking imagery is more like a series of remarks, some memorable and some not. His lyrics have always had their very sloppy moments, sometimes in the middle of otherwise great songs (e.g. the business about the fishtruck in “Visions of Johanna”). Now the clinkers are still there, but the contrast between them and their context is not as great. And musically his songs are almost like riff songs in hard rock, inseparable from their accompaniment.
Yet he has achieved the ambition he expressed early in his career: “I don't carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they're older people.” Now he’s older—sixty-five, I think—and his work carries the same sort of rich, deep individuality, transcending technique, as that of his heroes.
How does it work? Why does it work? Consider the vocalist first: the magic lives in his tone and phrasing, and their relationship to speech. Specifically, to American speech; more specifically, to the verbal rhythms of the American folk music, both white and black, that permeates Dylan’s art like the rum in my wife’s rum cake. These tones and rhythms play in and among the rhythms of the music, often overflowing the bounds of the musical phrase, in a way that can give a mysterious and powerful resonance to what’s being said. I’m not going to waste any more time trying to describe it: you can listen for yourself, and you’ll either get it or you won’t.
Then there are the songs. Joseph Shipman, in a comment on Dawn Eden’s blog, summed up Dylan’s current practice so well that I asked him for permission to quote him: “In his last three albums [Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times], Dylan has achieved a timelessness in which all eras of American music are simultaneously present.” (You can read his Amazon.com review of Modern Times and other things here. I had a similar thought when Time Out of Mind came out. Many years ago I read—and now I’m not sure where, but I think the author was George Steiner—an observation on the allusive techniques of Eliot, Pound, and some of the other high Modernists: that in the twilight of Western civilization they were making “a last run through the stacks before the library closes.” That’s what Dylan is doing with the American folk and popular music of roughly the first half of the 20th century. A substantial number of the songs on these three albums are in the blues form. Others seem, in an unspecifiable way, out of some mythic Tin Pan Alley. I know enough old-time music to pick up a lot of verbal borrowings and references from old songs, and I probably miss a good many more. The effect, to anyone with any knowledge of the old stuff, is very much like that of some of Eliot’s work: you don’t hear the songs as isolated units, but as linked to other nodes in a network of tradition.
None of this would work without the perfect and perfectly appropriate skills of the musicians he’s assembled for his last few albums. There was the brilliant Daniel Lanois on Time Out of Mind, and on the last two albums a varying lineup of some of the best players in the world. They provide the essential musical flesh for the spare bones of these songs; they create the deeply American atmosphere, or water—choose your metaphor—in which the songs can breathe, or swim.
Finally, there is something in Dylan’s work that can’t be described in terms of any sort of musical or verbal technique, something which keeps it interesting in spite of its many flaws. And the flaws are many: I can’t listen to Modern Times or any of these last three albums without many moments of frustration and disappointment when a good song founders on some unfortunate lyrical turn (exhibit A: “Lonesome Day Blues” on Love and Theft, which goes belly-up on the very last line). I can only call it something in the man’s soul, a sense that at bottom he is always talking about what matters and what’s true. I’ve sometimes said that Dylan is not so much a poet as a Hebrew prophet who never quite got the message straight. Except for his brief sojourn as an evangelical Christian, Dylan has kept his specific religious views fairly quiet. In fact, I doubt that he has very specific views. In an interview around the release of Time Out of Mind, he directed an interviewer who asked about his faith to the old songs. That’s good enough for me. Whatever definite views he may or may not hold, I’m convinced that he has a God-fearing, truth-telling heart. And that’s where the music comes from, and why it still strikes home so often.
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