Bob Dylan- Modern Times

Note: I originally published this on October 16, 2006, on my old blog. The one other review from that blog will be up here shortly.

Intensely creative composers who have perfected their craft, when they age, tend towards the expansive, the encyclopaedic. The formal elements are allowed to breathe with quiet confidence. The demands for immediate aesthetic appeal, the white-hot fury of composition, is replaced with a focus on stately perfection of form and detail. Witness, for example, the difference between Bach's two Well-Tempered Claviers, written over twenty years apart. The first, in the same approximate period as the Brandenburg Concerti, is filled with incredibly imaginitive, not to mention tuneful and memorable, preludes and fugues. It is difficult to forget the harmonic perfection of the opening arpeggiated prelude in C major, or the French overture theme of the D major fugue. While the second has nothing as immediately ear-catching, it lengthens the preludes and fugues somewhat, trading efficiency for all-encompassing displays of contrapuntal virtuosity. Beethoven's early string quartets, examples of brusque classicality, give way to the exploration of chromatic musings in his last opera.

We find a much different Bob Dylan at age 66 than the micro-analyzed don't-call-him-folk-rocker of his mid-twenties. His songs of the mid 1960s are Romantic flashes of stream of consciousness poetry set to skewed blues forms. The first half of Bringing It All Back Home, his first foray into electric music since his Minnesota days, sounds like a kid desiring to sing the mad, spinning world in twenty minutes, crystallizing protest songs, dreamscapes, abstract beat poetry, and the end of his relationship with Joan Baez in Biblical metaphor, surrealist humor, and spitfire rhymes. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" is a torrent of allusion and resistance tidied up in just over two minutes; even the longer tracks, like "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" are entire absurdist novels coalesced into six-and-a-half minute romps. Not until the final tracks of Blonde On Blonde do we find songs, such as "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" that lack any undercurrent of tortured anxiety; even then, the stately tempos are tinged with melancholy brought on by weariness, that most human side effect of celebrity.

Fast-forward 40 years. Having been relieved of the nasty connotations of Voice of the Young Generation for 35 or so years has relaxed Dylan. Dylan's oeuvre has passed through exploring country roots, Christian music, and, perhaps in reaction to the popularity come-on that was his folk period, creating down home blues with comparatively direct lyrics. Songs like "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," "Sara," and "Things Have Changed" are devastatingly sincere, and show the power Dylan's words have even when stripped of the absurdism of his mid-sixties period. His recent songs, no longer Schumann-esque bursts of passion, portray a wise man thoroughly in control of his compositional form (in his case blues mixed with poetry), no longer needing to rely on stylistic crutches, commercial concerns, and esotericism.

Modern Times, Dylan's most recent studio recording, contains ten songs, which alternate uptempo blues and ballads. Each song, except for one near miss, pass the five minute mark with ease. In fact, it has been a bit of a fallacy for this reviewer to focus on time markers, because these songs couldn't be concerned less with temporal matters. Dylan allows these songs to take all the time and space they need; there is no need to rush. Blues songs like "Rollin' and Tumblin'," whose fast tempo would be propelling to a younger songwriter, are allowed to roll but never tumble. Ballads like "Spirit On The Water" and "When The Deal Goes Down" are sung and performed with eloquent confidence by a man who has no need for oversinging to elicit appreciation, instead focusing on singing solid songs. "The Levee's Gonna Break" is stripped of the Gesamtkunstwerk of Led Zeppelin's bombast, instead sung with the eloquent melancholy of what Bessie Smith would evoke if stripped out of the recording limitations of her time.

Like the composers mentioned in the opening paragraph, the aged Dylan is no longer interested in anxiously striving to capture the world in a lyric, crystallizing philosophies in a verse, or exploding meaningful sentiments in melodically-highlighted allusion. The collection of songs on Modern Times, much like the eponymous Chaplin silent, confidentally perfect an art form whose heyday has passed in quiet sincerity. Dylan, unlike Chaplin, is none too concerned about making an innovative exclamation point (which is why the reviewer only briefly touched upon the connection between the two works), rather in letting his music breathe without presumptions and pretensions, writing great blues without needing to speak for anyone but himself.