The new talking World War III blues
On Bob Dylan's new "Love and Theft," the topical and the timeless merge with maniacal intensity.
By Ellen Willis
Oct. 6, 2001 | Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time I listened to Bob Dylan's new album, "Love and Theft" -- after I'd finished being distracted by all the musical influences and had begun paying attention to the voice and hearing some of the words -- a 30-year-old memory surfaced: In the middle of an LSD trip I had begun to worry that my identity was dissolving or flying apart, and as a test I decided to sign my name. I was relieved to see that my signature was exactly the same as usual. And then it occurred to me how silly my worry had been. The truth was, I realized, that my "signature" was so tenacious it would be quite difficult, perhaps impossible, to get rid of even if I wanted to. After all, how many people (I would become one of them not long afterward) spent years in psychotherapy trying to change their signatures just a little bit?
From the earliest years of his career Bob Dylan has had a passionate impulse to obliterate his personal identity. That passion has, at various times, been reflected in his biographical mythmaking, his allergic reaction to his celebrity, his flirtations with religion, his compulsion to confound the expectations of his audience by constantly transforming his persona. (In the process he has often denied that the previous incarnation ever existed: Who, me? Political? A folksinger? A poet? An outlaw?) And ever since "John Wesley Harding" -- his dramatic 1967 switch to acoustic "folk songs" that sound more like comments on "the folk song" -- much of his work has been defined by an apparent desire to unload the baggage of his own experience and become a vessel, channeling American Music.
Of course, the counterimpulses have also been strong: Dylan has an indelible signature, not to mention an indelible ego. The essential tensions in his music have never been about electric versus acoustic but about personal and idiosyncratic versus collective and generic; topical and profane versus primordial and sacred; transcendence as excess versus transcendence as purgation; "Blonde on Blonde" versus "John Wesley Harding"; "Blood on the Tracks" versus "Time Out of Mind."
I've always had reservations about Dylan's post-"JWH" attempts to get out of his skin, from the homage to country and western of "Nashville Skyline" to the cult of impersonality in the perversely named "Self Portrait" and his hermetic '90s renditions of old folk songs better left to ethnographers. In "Time Out of Mind" -- an album I found virtually unlistenable at the time it came out to near-universal acclaim four years ago and have only now, and grudgingly, come to admire -- it struck me that the self-abnegating impulse had doubled back on itself and become a particularly unpalatable form of megalomania, wherein the listener is buttonholed and forced to become a surrogate for the singer's elusive lover or muse.
"Love and Theft" takes up the quest for anonymity in a quite different way, or so it seems at first. It is mostly pleasant to listen to, yet its self-conscious, let's-give-them-a-tour-of-the-genres schtick is annoying: The first time Dylan did this, in 1970 on "New Morning," there was arguably a real need to nudge parochial rock and folk fans to stretch themselves and listen to other Americas; here it merely feels like an invitation to critics to parade their musical erudition. Sifting through this album's combinations and permutations of blues, country, honky-tonk, swing, r&b, Tin Pan Alley pop, soul, was that a Chuck Berry riff?, etc., etc. -- is certainly a fun game, but the best kind of eclecticism (of which Dylan's corpus is replete with examples) is still the kind that doesn't call attention to itself, that instead creates a whole greater than its parts.
Still, as I said, the game is only temporarily distracting. Soon individual songs begin to break from their generic moorings like Avalon rising out of the mist: the plangent "Mississippi"; the ominous "High Water," punctuated by background rumbles and crashes; "Sugar Baby," with its funereal echoes of "Old Man River" and the traditional "Look Down, Look Down that Lonesome Road." Then Dylan's voice hits me, not pleasant at all. It's beyond raspy, it's laryngitic, maybe consumptive, it sounds some of the time like it's coming from a great distance, through a wind tunnel or something, it's fuzzy. Stuck in the vinyl era, I keep wanting to brush away the lint from an imaginary phonograph needle. It's as impersonal as static or the coughing in a hospital ward, except that every now and then there's an echt-Dylan phrase or inflection to remind us of that signature, scrawled like graffiti into musical concrete.
Next page: Talk about prophetic: "Any minute of the day the bubble could burst"