The Post-Rockist

Bob Dylan
Modern Times
[Columbia Records; 2006]

This is the first time I have ever attempted to write about Mr. Bob Dylan.  He has always been one of the most important people in my life and has gotten me through numerous hard times, but I have never been able to come up with the words to describe my sincere appreciation and gratitude.  Add that to the fact that there are far too many people already writing about Dylan and not even getting close to describing the depth of his power and influence.  I never would have even considered writing about him in the past, but after watching him exist in the 21st century, I feel that I can now attempt to see if my words do him justice. 

It’s true that Dylan has always been accessible in that he is able to appeal to the masses, but in a spiritual way that prophets like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. have been able to do.  There is an enormous myth that surrounds him and has been ever since he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the early sixties.  However, it seems like the myth has become even more exaggerated among the younger generations, who see Dylan as a sort of father figure of the twentieth century.  When Dylan was just a baby-faced kid performing folk songs in Greenwich Village, other people could sense his importance, but he was still thought of as being just a kid.  To the younger generations today, it is nearly impossible to imagine him in this way, since we see him as a holy paternal figure, instead of just as a gifted artist.  Jack White was recently quoted saying, “I have three fathers: God, my biological father, and Bob Dylan.”  This mentality is prevalent among the X and Y Generations, who grew up listening to their parents’ records while hearing a mystical quality in Dylan’s artistic voice.   Young people are finally getting the opportunity to hear Dylan’s new records at the time in which they are made, instead of hearing them decades after they’ve been released.  This has allowed me to see Dylan as a human being for the very first time.  I have suddenly realized that this person actually exists on earth, in the present, along with me and everybody else.

It is amazing that Dylan’s music is so human and accessible to people of all different ages, yet he still maintains this aura of divinity.  In that way I guess he could be considered Christ-like, being 100 percent divine and 100 percent human at the same time.  His music reaches deep into the spiritual realm and the nature of existence, while his songs take and ache and make love and break just like a little girl.  In recent years it seems like he has attempted to shed some of his mystery and present himself in a more mortal way.  There have been several projects that Dylan has been involved with in the new century that are different from anything he’s done in the past.  Every week for the last few months he has been playing DJ and hosting “Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan” on XM Radio, in which he seems to be having the time of his life.  On this program you can hear his great sense of humor shine through, with lines like “I bumped into Charlie Sheen last weekend and he had this to say about fathers.”  It is quite bizarre to hear Dylan talk so much while he raves about the music that is nearest and dearest to him.  On this show he plays a lot of the music that had inspired him in his younger years, along with artists of today that he seems to appreciate like Beck and The Streets.  By hearing him talk about his tremendous love of music, it reminds us listeners that he is a music fanatic just like you and me.  We also got to see the human Dylan in last year’s Martin Scorsese-directed documentary No Direction Home, which portrayed Dylan as a kid being exploited by the people around him during his formative years as an artist.  It featured a surprisingly frank Dylan of today looking back on this difficult time when the role of “spokesman of a generation” was thrust upon him.  The film allowed us to see from his perspective and removed our fixation on the mythic Dylan of the sixties and forced us to focus on the young artist who frequently felt used and abused during this period.  The year before that he released part one of his autobiography, Chronicles, which also offered a glimpse into how he felt during different eras of his career.  He wrote about the time in the seventies when obsessed fans would stalk him and go through his trash and look in the windows of his house.  After hearing him talk about the toll this took on him and his family, you can’t help but feel awful for ever putting him up on a pedestal. 

In 2003, Dylan co-wrote and acted in the film Masked And Anonymous, in which he played a character that is expected to save the world.  The story takes place in a decaying futuristic society in which Dylan’s character Jack Fate gets sprung from prison in order to put on a concert.  The film was full of unusual characters and situations in a world gone wrong, and the best part was seeing Dylan play an exaggeration of himself who was regarded as some mythical hero.  Dylan has also managed to shock his fans by making bizarre television appearances over the last several years: he was a guest star in an episode in the sitcom Dharma & Greg, he was featured in a Victoria’s Secret commercial, and most recently he performed in an iPod commercial.  Judging from these strange appearances, it is clear that Dylan does not take his messianic stature too seriously and has no intention of maintaining his mystique.  In fact, Dylan has spent his entire career trying to convince people that he is not God or any other ridiculous role that has been thrust upon him.  He’s always just wanted to be an artist and a musician that had no responsibility or obligation to try and save the world.  On one of his early albums he sang, “Ain’t no use a-talking to me, it’s just the same as talking to you.”  Since the beginning of his career, Dylan had a humility about him that people chose to ignore while they made him their personal savior.

With his latest album Modern Times, Dylan has again managed to write terribly moving songs about the human condition while questioning the spiritual world around him.  The songs offer tremendous insight into what it is like to be a living, breathing human being existing in a world that seems like it is falling apart.  The album is full of imagery of impending doom, but it also offers redemption somewhere along the line.  This is a reccurring theme that is evident from the beginning of the album. The first two songs are given the titles “Thunder On The Mountain” and “Spirit On The Water,” which include classic spiritual terms that depict the presence of God in the physical world.  Dylan begins by predicting the coming apocalypse in “Thunder On The Mountain” while he searches for a way out.  The song is filled with fear and chaos over reeling and rocking Chuck Berry-guitars while Dylan plays the prophet and also the drunk who finds it funny that the world is ending.  By the end of the song you feel overwhelmed with the madness of the world, but you manage to have a smirk on your face.  Dylan cools it down with the next track “Spirit On The Water” where he plays the heartbroken romantic who thinks love, or at least sex, is the answer, while the music swings to a charming beat.  Early on he sings, “When you’re near it’s just as plain as it can be. I’m wild about you gal, you ought to be a fool about me.”  But just when you think Dylan is writing a simple love/lust song, he plunges deep into the darkness.  Later on he sings “I wanna be with you in paradise and it seems so unfair.  I can’t go to paradise no more, I killed a man back there.”  This is just the type of image Dylan loves to use and this album is filled with all sorts of these lines.  These opening songs set the pace for the entire album, which goes back and forth between love and death and mystery and murder and God and the Devil and innocence and corruption and the spiritual and the physical and humor and heartbreak.   

The rest of the album features some of Dylan’s liveliest and most satisfying blues numbers like “Rollin’ And Tumblin’,” “Someday Baby,” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” where his guitar players make the case that they could be Dylan’s best ever sidemen.  Throughout the album, the band sounds incredibly rehearsed and confident, while making each of their respective parts quite interesting without drawing attention away from Dylan. The heavy material that Dylan came up with could have caused a sense of urgency in the songs, but instead the songs take their time as the band plays with a strong sense of patience.  “Nettie Moore,” moves along to the sound of a steady heartbeat, but never manages to speed up and get out of control, even as its power progresses.  It’s amazing how much restraint the band shows with the way they approach these songs.  Their subdued playing allows Dylan to achieve some of his most beautiful performances in the deeply emotional songs “When The Deal Goes Down” and “Workingman’s Blues #2.”  Modern Times ends with another one of Dylan’s great epics, but “Ain’t Talkin’” sounds more mysterious and dark than his other classic album closers.  When Dylan repeats “Ain’t talkin, just walkin,” it sounds like he has hellhounds on his trail.  It is a frightening way to end an album and it suits the themes of Modern Times just perfectly. 

Modern Times continues on the path started by 2001’s Love And Theft with its contemporary twist on American Roots music such as blues, rockabilly, and ragtime.  The ten tracks on Modern Times seem to have more weight to them than the ones on Love And Theft, probably due to Dylan’s mastery of the different musical genres and the darker subject matter.  On Love And Theft he seemed to be having a lot of fun trying out archaic musical genres, while coming up with new ways to approach his lyrics.  That album featured so many great lyrical moments, full of creative, playful phrases and even a knock knock joke at one point.  On Modern Times he uses much more traditional rhyme schemes while writing in a more direct way.  During several songs, you get the impression that Dylan is writing some of his most heartfelt and sincere lyrics, but he always manages to bring in the darkness just before he gets overly sentimental.  He still seems to be having some fun with Modern Times, but the apocalyptic feel running throughout it gives for a much heavier listening.  It’s almost like he combined the musicality of Love And Theft with the darker, introspective lyrics of 1997’s Time Out Of Mind.  However, of the three albums, this is his masterpiece.  Modern Times has an epic feel to it with almost every song running at least five or six minutes long with a total running time of over an hour.  Instead of feeling overblown like a lot of longer songs tend to do, the songs on Modern Times feel like there is absolutely no fat or filler.  The album gives the impression that Dylan really edited himself during the writing process and only put in what was absolutely essential, even if he did have quite a bit to say.  Like most of Dylan’s albums, there is a stream of consciousness vibe to it, although the editing and execution of each individual song implies that he put a lot of thought into making this album.  By serving as producer for the second time in his career, Dylan has figured out exactly how he should sound.  These combined factors have made Modern Times one of Dylan’s all-time best pieces of work.    

This album represents a sort of breakthrough for me since I value it as a brilliant piece of art, with a deep spiritual resonance, but I no longer think of Dylan as God.  There is way too much humanity in Modern Times for it to be thought of as the word of God.  As I’ve watched Dylan over the last few years, I’ve finally realized where he has been coming from as a person living in this world.  His power and importance, as always, is staggering, but the reason he is this way is because he is able to express exactly what it feels like to be human.  

[Preview Modern Times and purchase it here.]

-Posted by Daniel