Showing posts with label Rough and Rowdy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rough and Rowdy. Show all posts

Saturday 25 July 2020

Rough and Rowdy, Bob Dylan


'Considered, elegiac and richly allusive, this austere gem may be Dylan’s best album in 40 years' Bryan Applyard , Sunday Times july 2020
This is his first album since Tempest 2012. I read a wonderful review – “So Bob, you’re 80 next year; what have you to say for yourself?“ the overall effect is austere, serious and pared down. It is a mesmeric and magnificent piece of work. 
"The songs vary from romantic to surreal. His rhyming is as ingenious, playful and varied as ever.” Lyrically Dylan is operating at a peak not seen since his albums Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde. 
SONGS:   Key West (Philosopher Pilot)/ Black Rider/  Crossing the Rubicon/  I sing of love/  I sing of betrayal,/ I Contain multitudes/  False Prophet/ My Own Version of You. And the Lovely romantic ballad – I have made up my mind to give myself to you. Dylan writes, “Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be.’
Another link – the assassination of John F Kennedy at the center of Murder most foul, and in a sense of the center of entire album, suggesting, as it does, a dark cloud, which may be death or may be Trump, from which there is no escape.
On the Lyrics on Murder most Foul - “Visiting morgues and monasteries/ looking for the necessary body part” with Freud and Marx looking on. Plus others -   Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, the bluesman jimmy reed, Elvis, Presley, Allen Ginsberg, jack Kerouac, Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Tom Dooley. This is an assertion that culture comes first, history is a footnote; a long one, but a footnote nonetheless. Culture, like the individual, contains everything, right or wrong, good or bad. Everything is double-edged. 
"Whitman was similarly obsesses with the assignations of his friend Abraham Lincoln. His two most famous poems – ‘Oh Captain! My Captain! – “When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomd” – are about the terrible moment.. 
"The album celebrated the noble conviction – Whitman’s conviction – that you can’t sing about anything without singing about everything. With this album Dylan announces himself as Whitman’s child.  As a way of saying we contain, like Whitman all contradictory possibilities. 
“I’m not what I was; things aren’t what they were.” Back to when he told journalists, you cant put me in a box.”  The backing is sparse but precise,  and beautifully exact in its evocation of genres – ballad, blues and so on.. also a kind of list of American musical forms.” Whitman’s attempted to contain the entire country.