Year: 2008

Dylan At His Very Best

When is Dylan at his best these days? When he pulls out his guitar once and again? Or perhaps delivers a blistering harp solo? Or when he soars to the top of his vocal register in a beautifully raw rendition of an old warhorse? Or is it on his albums, the three great artistic and commercial achievements Time Out Of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and Modern Times?

Neither. No matter how great his studio albums are, his greatest artistic achievement during the 2000s comes from a different kind of studio. A small one, by the sound of it. I recently became the proud owner of a true gem: the complete recordings of the first season of his wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour.

Continue reading Dylan At His Very Best

Correction

I’ve always maintained that Tangled Up in Blue or Brownsville Girl is Dylan’s greatest song. Well, I’ve been wrong, and I’ve known it all the time — I’ve just not been able to shake off the social pressure that his best song just had to be either something from Blood on the Tracks, wildly exploiting the Dylanesque shifts of perspective, storylines, and pronouns, or the greatest epic since Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

But of course: it has to be a seemingly simple song, loaded with one-liners, a song which floats on a light, humorous mood all the way to the end, where everything is suddenly turned upside down — not in any way discarding what has been said before, on the contrary: confirming it and drawing the humour and lightness into the serious perspective where it (also!) belongs.

Talkin’ World War III Blues it is. “The boy’s obviously insane.” “Hey man, you crazy or sumpin’, You see what happened last time they started.” The hilarious “[all|some|half] the [people|time]” lines, credited to Abe Lincoln, Carl Sandburg, and, in England, T. S. Eliot.

And then, the best two lines in Dylan’s oeuve:

I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.
I said that.

Cocky as only a 22-year-old can be. And, by the way, isn’t that just about all we all want?

The Uneven Heart — Bob Dylan The Musician

Most of my posts begin “it’s been a while”, it seems, and so does this one. This time, it’s been a self-imposed silence, because I’ve been busy finishing a book on lauda singing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — perhaps not your cup of tea, but it’s what I do for a living.

Anyway, my real book is coming along as well — my collected writings about Dylan and his music — and I’ve wrapped up another article, this time an extended translation of the article I wrote for the Norwegian philosophical journal Agora last spring. It’s a survey of some traits of Dylan’s musical carreer, seen as a pulse of phases of appropriation, internalization, and moving on, almost like a heartbeat, hence the title “The Uneven Heart”.

The article is available as a separate pdf file or as part of the full book, Things Twice. There is also a plain HTML version, without the typographical niceties of the book version.

As always, I welcome comments. As always, too, there may be typos, errors, inconsistencies, the odd word in Norwegian which I’ve overlooked in the translation, etc. If you spot any such things, please let me know.