Jody Rosen of Slate gives the new Dylan album
favorable press and hits all the expected marks when he declares Modern
Times to be his best album since Blood on the Tracks. This implies
clearly that he thinks Dylan has been producing crap during most of those
thirty-one years. I find it ironic that thirty-one years ago I reviewed Blood
for the San Diego Reader and gave it a bad review. My grievances were
Dylan's straying from the kind of blues-informed surrealism that typified what
I still think is his best period—Another Side of Bob Dylan through John
Wesley Harding—in favor of a more conversational, chattier, looser, more
cliché-bound lyric style that cast Dylan's persona as a wandering stranger.
Our hero would go from town to town, from job to job,
meeting interesting men, having affairs with alluring, cryptic women, and then
would be off again after some minor incident, some unsaid faux pas, walking up
the road, sticking his thumb out, the sun setting, the lights of the next town
in the next state glowing over the hillside, dreaming up vague strands of
philosophy to assuage an even vaguer heartache he was feeling. He was Joe
Christmas always intersecting with Lena Grove in some desolate, anonymous
America, an angle interesting enough to work once or twice, but this was a
field that was over-tilled. It sounded constructed and contrived to me at the
time, toned up on the energy and ramped up on the bullshit, and to this day I'm
of the opinion that Dylan is a miserable storyteller and someone who has a
difficult time creating narrators with personalities that don't seem to be
recreations of how he spends his weeks. But I've softened my position
considerably and now find much that I was too impatient to appreciate all those
decades ago, and yet I can't bring myself around to say that it's one of his
best albums. It isn't. My review ventured the guess that Dylan had run out of
things to say, and had lost his knack for saying the obvious in interesting language
and locutions—Paul Simon and John Updike could show him something in that
regard—but he maintains his need to talk, to write, to prate continually as if
the production of songs, albums, and tours in his late career were another
shoring brick in his reputation and a hedge against death.
There are a couple of stacks of meandering and mumbled music
between Blood on the Tracks and Modern Times, and truthfully I
think it's only within the last decade that Dylan has gotten his mojo back. Oh
Mercy, Time Out of Mind, and Love and Theft are strong music
from an artist whose persona finally fits the gathered texture of his years.
There are finally things he has to say before he offers his last guitar strum,
and I suspect Modern Times will only add to what seems like a long and
robust third act in this remarkable man's life.
