If the innovation talk the advertisements seriously or in the Pop-journalism totgefloskelte equivalent of the constant new finding would have to collaborate with Bob Dylan today, with cloud rappers, and his voice in Autotune baden. But nope, what we get instead? “A red Cadillac and a black mustache”, and then he sings, that he had to apologize for nothing. “Rough and Rowdy Ways” is the name of his new Album. An old white Cowboy who rides off into the sunset?
Jan Wiele
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
Perhaps this next week coming Album, is said in advance, that’s great, even certain parodic trains. But, by and Large, to Dylan it seems to be very serious with the elegiac look back that far on their own work and their own time. With seventy-nine of the perhaps the greatest innovator of the song form in the twentieth century, in good company: The slightly older Leonard Cohen had a short leave before his death with, “You Want it Darker” a musical Testament, and the slightly younger Neil Young has just said in the face of a from the archive of published album of 1974 funny: “Follow us to 2020, so that we can bring you the past.”
This principle could as well be about Dylan’s first Album with his own Material since “Tempest” (2012). Even more: It is the evidence that Dylan has devoted his late work, Collecting and Preserving compaction for the past two decades. The songs for the Album “Time Out of Mind” (1997), as well as on the radio show “Theme Time Radio Hour,” which has moderated Dylan in over a hundred one-hour episodes.
it represents an encyclopedia of American pop music, in particular, of the early and middle twentieth century. The recordings from the “Great American Songbook”, which Dylan released on the collection album “Triplicate” (2017), were the same, now he himself sung. His Nobel prize speech: the Canon of the Modern, didactic manner.
he Will also play Chopin?
And then the sixteen-minute-long song “Murder Most Foul”: a Canon came a few weeks ago, is now in bad Form, and a harbinger to the new Album, filling on the said song is now the second CD. The first begins with a kind of twin piece, the title of Walt Whitman quotes and reveals what we knew of Dylan, of course, long ago: “I Contain Multitudes.” The key phrase from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, the polyphony is at the beginning of literary Modernism, with its characteristic, also stands for the cataloging train in Dylan’s late work, with the he literary and song title, sealing the names and verses are integrated into a lyrical Suada, which appears on this Album on song boundaries, reset: “Got a tell tale heart like Mr. Poe / Got skeletons in the closet of the people you know”, he sings at the beginning and at the end: “I played gumbo limbo spirituals / I know all the Hindu rituals”. In a Song, the lyrical I learn Sanskrit, in another it is trying to understand Shakespeare. Also on the piano and in painting it is committed to the life-long Learning: “I play Beethoven Sonatas and Chopin Pre-ludes”. That Dylan is actually start this yet, we do not hope necessarily. Prior to that, the self-irony: “I paint landscapes and I paint nudes / I contain multitudes protects him, maybe.”
Also, musically, the Album contains a lot of wrinkles: Dylan’s big late work-tape mixes for a while, Blues, Country and Zydeco influences, as safe as in my sleep or steal the Barcarole from Offenbach’s “the tales of Hoffmann”, to make it the basic melody of the very catchy love ballad, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”. It is indicated that Dylan joins us now, at last, as he self, without a mask? You can assume for a Moment, but it is also the same guy who complains in the deep black of the ‘Black Rider’: “You been on the job too long”, same of soon the joke blue mode: “Three miles north of purgatory, one step from the grave beyond / I prayed to the cross, I kissed the girls and I crossed the Rubicon”? It is the same one who is calling but then again be very conciliatory to the “Mother of Muses” and a lot of other musicians and poets the honor of en passant is, including Ginsberg, Kerouac and the Blues-man Jimmy Reed ? To a common denominator of these figures, at least in their invocation of the canons: Bob Dylan as Harold Bloom’s the pop music?
