Interesting article in the NZ Herald on Dylan and his recent career. Seems the writer basically borrowed his main argument from this critic he mentions at the start, but still a good read.
Bob Dylan: A man out of timeBy Graham Reid
7:00 AM Saturday Apr 16, 2011
In his recent collection of essays Listen to This, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has a provocative piece on Bob Dylan. It opens, "America is no country for old men. Pop culture is a paedophile's delight", then he asks what - in this world of manufactured teen pop - we are to do with "a well-worn, middle-aged songwriter who gravitates towards the melancholy and the absurd".
Calling Dylan - who turns 70 in little more than a month - "middle-aged" is charitable. But Ross also suggests many writers just want Dylan to die "so that his younger self can take its mythic place".
Dylan continues to write and perform, but there's almost an agreed position among critics to treat lightly, if at all, what he's up to these days.
"The achievement is so large and so confusing that the impulse to ignore all that came after his partial disappearance in 1966 is understandable. It's simpler that way - and cheaper. You need only seven discs, instead of 40."
Ross' essay originally appeared in 1999 and although much of it remains relevant, much has also changed.
Given Dylan has barely addressed politics directly in his songs for decades - some would argue he never really did - it seemed odd this past month that there had been media comment about him kowtowing to Chinese authorities by not speaking out about the detention of the artist Ai Weiwei and others, and allowing them to deny him permission to play certain songs.
But that is because some still regard Dylan as a political singer. Yet Dylan's "protest period" lasted just two years in the early 60s, he was conspicuously silent at the height of the Vietnam War (1967-75) and has barely mentioned politics directly, or even in passing, since the early 60s.
Neighbourhood Bully on the Infidels album in 1983 seemed to have a pro-Israel stance, and in 1991 during the first Gulf War he snarled a barely recognisable Masters of War at the Grammys where he was given a Lifetime Achievement award.
But that's been about it. So his silence in China was in keeping with his apolitical stance. And he hasn't been alone in having old songs denied by the Chinese - the Stones accepted similar censorship.
The curious irony about Dylan today is while he goes forward with new albums, there is much more of his past in the present, which is perhaps why some prefer to keep him there. It began with the Bootleg Series in 1991 when he started releasing studio and live performances which had never seen the light, or were only in the realm of the avid collector. The ongoing and non-chronological series - now up to Volume Nine, and which includes demo sessions from before he signed to Columbia (as Sony was then) through to unreleased material from the past decade - sits alongside his 2004 snapshot autobiography Chronicles: Volume One in which he singled out particular periods in his creative life.
There was also Martin Scorsese's in-depth documentary No Direction Home about Dylan and his music up to 66; the recent re-release of the Folksinger's Choice radio session he did in 1962 (not sanctioned by Dylan); and the DVD of his famous and evasively witty 1965 press conference in San Francisco.
Add to that his Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour in which he plays music which influenced or amused him (from the Mississippi Sheiks in the 30s to Gene Vincent in the 50s) and Dylan today appears to exists in a netherworld, a man ever-present due to touring and new albums ... but also ever-past.
No other artist exists in such a way.
In concert he may defiantly render his classic songs unrecognisable (you can get to the chorus before you realise it's Like a Rolling Stone he's croaking out in a country-swing manner) but you could never say he'll do the expected.
However as Ross also notes, Dylan has survived without being a "survivor", that description we reserve for those whose careers play out by rote as they await the inevitable: opprobrium, irrelevance, obscurity or death.
Dylan continues on his wayward path and those still listening count his recent albums - Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001), Modern Times (2006) and Together Through Life (2008) - among his best for their deft assimilation of many styles of American music (blues, folk, Western swing, country, popular ballads) into a singular sound which challenges, and lyrics which enlighten or confound at a turn.
That these albums were interspersed with the Bootleg series and compilations which threw chronology into a mixer just made Dylan's ongoing career as a troubadour on a "Never Ending Tour" even more interesting. He was a man out of time, existing in one of his own making.
Dylan today isn't relevant to most people, but the past two decades deserve more than a footnote in a half century-long career which blew out of the Midwest, took root in Greenwich Village then went global in songs which wrote themselves into people's lives in the 60s and 70s.
Dylan in the late 70s carelessly tossed out uneven but occasionally fascinating albums, but even his "religious" period (haven't they all been?) of the early 80s is being re-evaluated. Few would claim his late 80s or early 90s records were any good, but then he reconnected to something he'd almost forgotten, his roots in American song. He covered old folk and blues on Good As I Been To You in 1992 and World Gone Wrong two years later.
Since then the past - his own, and that old weird American music which existed before him - has been ever-present.
The pleasure of Dylan today - as much as the frustration he causes those who want faithful readings of old hits, or expect he might stand up to the Chinese authorities - is that he's an inconvenient pilgrim wandering between worlds, equally at home in the past or the now.
And that he can, if you let him, take you on that journey.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10719602
Topic: Bob Dylan: his best albums? (Read 2912 times)