Our Modernist : A Review of
Bob Dylan's Modern Times

September 1/2, 2006

The title of Dylan's newest album is not the "modern times" one might assume.. nothing to do with the present. The album cover is a detail from a photo that looks as if it were a semi-finalist for the cover of Dylan's 2004 autobiography Chronicles:

Both pictures call up a nostalgic view of the city.. the lush black and white photography recalling classic films. In Chronicles the image made sense, as a large portion of the book was spent recalling New York in the early 60s. The reason for the image on the new CD is more mysterious.

Dylan's previous album, Love and Theft (2001), was resolutely southern and rural in its song settings. Listeners were treated to rebel rivers, tobacco fields, and moonlight on the water. Besides the references and allusions to lines from old blues songs, the album as a whole could be interpreted as a song cycle of themes developed by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. In Chronicles Dylan sketches an image of his younger self sitting in a library reading through old newspapers:

...I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald and Cincinnati Enquirer. It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency. [84]

I find it hard to believe that this describes Dylan's reading in the 60s, but it would be the perfect way to pick up the American milieu evoked by Love and Theft, especially in its southern details.

Modern Times inherits much of the sound and feel of its predecessor. Both were produced by Jack Frost, a pseudonym for Dylan. The new CD is also steeped in the language of the past. His song "Nettie Moore" builds lyrically upon a 19th century song (see here). The challenge of tracking down all Dylan's references will be a serious piece of work for critics of the future. How tricky it can be was handily illustrated by an early review of the CD in Slate by Jody Rosen, in which she writes:

"Rollin' and Tumblin'" is a rewrite of a Muddy Waters number. But Dylan surrounds these borrowings with his own brilliant and uncanny poetry: "I'm walking with a toothache in my heel"...

On our first listen to Modern Times Emily had caught that strange line about the "toothache in my heel" and recognized it as a borrowing from "Old Dan Tucker" (recorded recently by Bruce Springsteen on Seeger Sessions). This serves as a warning that before you cite a line as an instance of Dylan's poetry, you better Google it! This kind of allusive density we are more ready to study in the work of modernist poets.. but here it is in a popular music CD.

There is a curious form of nostalgia at work here in this kind of language work. It is even present in the above quotation from Chronicles, in which he states that in reading these newspapers he was not "so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and the rhetoric of the times." His is not a nostalgia for a bygone period and its social mores or political values, it is a nostalgia for language.. a way of talking and expressing the world.

For pre-ordering the Dylan album we got a complimentary CD featuring one of Dylan's hour-long radio broadcasts on XM Satellite Radio. This sample broadcast was on the topic of Baseball.. and Dylan's approach to the topic was revealing. There was none of the relish of the baseball fan for actual moments.. pennant winning hits or beautiful catches. Dylan's appreciation centered on the rhetorical world of the game, and at one point he rattles out a string of nicknames: the Sultan of Swat, the Splendid Splinter, the Georgia Peach, Joltin' Joe Dimaggio.. The choice of songs also tended to highlight baseball as a language code for talking about life.

This kind of language nostalgia has left Dylan in an unusually good position to thrive commercially. He may complain about the poor sound of modern recording studios (as he did recently to Rolling Stone), but he evidently does not feel compelled to privilege vinyl albums.. or even to cumbersome 78s. The physical form has no real pull on him.. it is the language of that bygone time that stirs his feelings. So he releases his music in all the latest digital forms and broadcasts by means of satellite, but gets to praise and imitate all things old.. all things that remind him of that great linguistic America, the land of Mississippi, Catfish Hunter, and ol' Dan Tucker.

This allusive and modernist approach can be off-putting, despite the strength of the songs. Certainly it lacks the immediacy of an album such as Neil Young's passionate Living with War.. which pointedly brings up "listening to Bob Dylan in 1963.." If one is looking for an unambiguous political or personal statement, then Dylan is not the place to come.

The closest Dylan comes to saying something about our current situation seems to come from "Workingman's Blues #2" when he says: "They say low wages are a reality, if we want to compete abroad." It is only a shadow of the protectionist sentiment in the 80's with "Union Sundown" (on Infidels), but a hint that Dylan has some opinions on national events. At one point on Workingman's Blues #2 Dylan seems to step back and address the common man:

In you, my friend, I find no blame

Want to look in my eyes, please do.

No one can ever claim
that I took up arms against you.

So Dylan has been on the side of the workingman all along? Maybe we should allow that to pass as a statement of principle..

Dylan does not really address the modern world, at least as we encounter it in the daily newspaper. A sample of his likely defense for this is outlined in the passage above from Chronicles. Defending the continuing power of an old way of speaking that he found in the 19th century newspapers, he writes: "It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency." Underlying most everything that Dylan produces these days is a faith that an old way of talking can address with power the contemporary world. The metaphors and bone-felt values of the past continue to speak to us in a fundamental way.

I am not sure how to argue with that.. maybe he is right. I wonder: how will some thoughtful person look at this album in 200 years? Will it be a refreshing statement of great human themes recorded at a time when others were preoccupied with transient things? Or will it be an example of the kind of inward-looking half-intentional blindness that swears fealty to the American past at a time when that past was becoming more and more untenable. Perhaps Love and Theft (released on 9/11/2001) was the last true statement of that kind of postwar faith in Americana.. an artistic creed which perhaps began with the publication of The Adventures of Augie March in 1953.

Dylan is at the top of his game.. a real pop-music cleanup hitter. His albums since Time Out of Mind have been strong, and he has skillfully expanded and re-contextualized the public view of his earlier years. One has to switch over to English literature to find a model for this kind of expansive artistic development. Dylan is an artist who has a masterful "late period".. like William Butler Yeats. But like Yeats, one is also tempted to wonder whether there is something deceptive and empty about this late mastery. In Dylan's case, that mastery may come at the price of ignoring our true modern times.