Jeg innrømmer det gjerne, Bob Dylan har aldri grepet tak i meg for alvor. Jeg skjønner godt fascinasjonen, men det blir litt som med golf og en venn av meg; han holder seg bevisst unna fordi han vet at han blir hektet om han starter...
Men, Modern Times liker jeg kjempegodt. Den er lettere tilgjengelig, mer iørefallende og mer up-beat enn mye av de andre tingene jeg har hørt av gubben. Sikkert derfor nettopp den plata er min favoritt, mens du tviler Asbjørn...
Anyhow, det står stor respekt av ditt committment.
flynn
Noe jeg liker ved
platene til Bob'ern for tiden, er at de er ajourført med stemmen hans. Det føles riktig. Dylan live for tiden blir i mine ører mye "grøt" på det gamle stoffet (jaja, unntakene er plenty, "storkonserter" rapporteres det over i fleng, men sånn jevnt over altså), mens det nye stoffet blir "riktig jamf. dagens Dylan-stemme. Sånn sett er jeg enig, Flynn. Men selve melodiene på
Modern Times er ikke så veldig originale i mine ører (de tilhører mer "tradisjonen", dette er jo musikk fra Dylans yndlingstider, 30-50-tallet... )
Men over til en artikkel:
Bob Dylan's Modern Timesby Bob Hill
Bob Dylan
Modern Times
(Columbia Records, 2006)No one’s ever been able to nail down who or what Bob Dylan is, and there’s really no need to start trying now.
Over the years Dylan’s been called a pop poet, a prophet, a visionary, a reactionary, and a revolutionary. He’s been called the voice of a generation. Yet, Dylan has denied being any of these things, as if accepting them as fact would cause us to stop believing; to deconstruct the Dylan myth, as it were.In the ’60s and ’70s, critics seemed intent upon debunking that myth, while simultaneously lauding Dylan’s records as contemporary masterpieces. This was back in the days of free-form journalism, when capsule reviews spiraled out into full-blown theses, when there was no rush to be pithy or clever; no need to sum up a musician’s entire existence in 100 words or less.
It was a time when Jon Landau wrote, “
Blood on the Tracks will only sound like a great album for a while. Like most of Dylan, it is impermanent.†It was a time when Paul Nelson declared that
The Basement Tapes were “
either King Lear or nothing.â€
It was a time when neither critic could make up his mind about Dylan’s music anymore than he could about the man himself. But that didn’t stop either one from trying, nor did it stop them from giving both records a stellar review.
A few Dylan records received
Rolling Stone’s five-star stamp of approval:
Biograph (a five-disc box set),
Love and Theft, and (most recently)
Modern Times. And while
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
Highway 61 Revisited,
Bringing It All Back Home, and
Blonde on Blonde predate the birth of
Rolling Stone Magazine, each is ranked among its' top 100 albums of all time.
That, of course, raises the question of whether or not
Love and Theft and
Modern Times are on par with the iconoclastic Dylan records of old.
I mean, sure, there’s more than one type of masterpiece. And using Rolling Stone as the scale by which to measure all-things-Dylan may mean there are some serious calibration issues that need to be addressed. But the point seems to be that Dylan has not withered with age; that the same way Jordan developed his fade away jumper to compensate for aging legs, and Ali developed the rope-a-dope to outsmart opponents he could no longer outbox, Dylan reinvented his voice and his style when the old tools weren’t working anymore.
In a 2004 interview with Ed Bradley, when asked whether he can still write songs like “
Blowin in the Wind†or “
It’s Alright, Ma†Dylan responded by saying, “
I can do other things now. But I can’t do that.â€
Those other things include morphing in and out of genres, shapeshifting brilliantly in order to match the mood and tone of each composition. They also include maintaining the razor-sharp focus necessary to still produce stellar albums more than 40 years after Dylan originally announced himself on the scene.
In his review of
Modern Times, Joe Levy writes, “
There is no precedent in rock ‘n’ roll for the territory Dylan is now opening with albums that stand alongside the accomplishments of his wild youth.â€
While that may be true, it’s mostly because there’s never been anyone like Dylan before, and if each of us were to live another hundred years or more, it’s entirely possible we may not see the likes of him again. He was born out of a time and a place that needed him as much as he needed it. Had Dylan come along today with the same fire and vigor, would he even be Bob Dylan? Could he be Bob Dylan? There’d be no vast counterculture, no draft, no Newport Folk Festival for him to electrify, no Medgar Evers or Hattie Carroll, no generation for him to be the voice of.
These are modern times, and Dylan is a bygone voice who still has plenty left to say. The difference now is that the critics are convinced of his genius. It’s a foregone conclusion that what Dylan says is gospel, that most of any Dylan review should be about acknowledging the contributions of a man who’s put out more gold records than most artists have singles.
And although the modern Dylan sounds like more of a road-weary traveler—still on a journey, but much closer to its destination—the parallels to his early work emerge time and again, like hapless wanderers along the trail. The man who was once “
stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again†now finds (on
Love and Theft) that he “
stayed in Mississippi a day too longâ€; the same man who once sang “
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more†now claims “
I ain’t nobody’s house boy, I ain’t nobody’s well trained maid.â€
But the lines are more straightforward, the allusions more direct. In almost every case on
Modern Times, Dylan’s voice is in the forefront; a voice so nasal and piercing it can’t be ignored, sincere without care or concern, fear, or prejudice. And, as with the Dylan albums of old, each song inhabits a universe all its own.
Where the young Dylan was slick and elusive, the elder Dylan is calculated and forthright. And in many ways,
Modern Times is as autobiographical as it is sociopolitical.
Dylan sings, “
We live and we die / We know not why / But I’ll be with you when the deal goes downâ€â€”a line that seems to hint at Dylan’s ongoing legacy and the ever-present mortality that will eventually secure it. During “
Workingman’s Blues #2†he writes: “
My cruel weapons have been put on the shelfâ€â€”words that are as much a piece of the song’s fabric as they are a window into how Dylan views himself at this late stage of the game.
Modern Times is filled with tales of hard livin’ (and even harder dyin’). And it’s a brilliant piece of work. But the question still remains whether it can (or should) be compared to the five-star Dylan albums of old. Ten years from now, would a teenager sifting through the local dustbin be just as well-served by
Modern Times as he would be by
Blonde on Blonde? Would he get the same sense of whom and what Dylan was from “
Thunder on the Mountain†as he would from “
Visions of Johanna�
I think we all know the answer to that, just as sure as we know that Landau was wrong when he claimed “
Blood on the Tracks will only sound like a great album for a while. Like most of Dylan, it is impermanent.â€
Dylan as man, myth, and music will be marveled at for generations to come. And you somehow get the feeling that Mr. Dylan, in his infinite wisdom, might have planned it that way. Decades from now, when the world at large debates whether Bob Dylan was a pop poet, a prophet, a visionary, a reactionary, a revolutionary, or the voice of a generation, he’ll be face-up in the dirt, cheating us all with that same catch-all grin, still claiming he always thought of himself as more of a song-and-dance man.
Apropo det siste, det sies at "midt i en engelsktime på skolen sendte Robert (som han het da) en papirlapp til en klassekamerat: "Arnie, I'm going to make it big. I know it for sure, and when I do, you bring this piece of paper and for two months, you can stay with me, no matter where I'm at". (Los Angeles Times, 9.feb. 1992) Arnie har papirlappen ennå" 
