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September 01, 2006
Modern Times are Not a Changin'
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
-Langston Hughes “The Weary Blues”
Photograph by Matthew Rolston from Rolling Stone
I wonder how many musicians have been proclaimed by overzealous music critics that they are to be the next Bob Dylan. Turns out there is another one around, his name is Bob Dylan. He looks just like Bob Dylan but as a preemptive strike against subway graffiti artists, this one already wears a pencil thin mustache. The last time a box of new Dylan albums arrived by truckload into the shipping rooms of our favorite record stores it was five long years ago, the album was Love and Theft its release date was September 11, 2001.
Some would say the world has changed a bit since Dylan’s last release. As a result one would think an album called Modern Times would directly reflect this current world and would be an album full of Desolation Rows and Blowin in the Winds. Yet, Dylan strangely does the complete opposite. He stays the course and follows up on the album trilogy just as he had done before, crooning backward with a beautifully raucous sound, pairing songs full of driving rockabilly rhythms with mellow twilight strolls.
With the album being released on the date marking the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina it is certainly not far fetched to judge an album called Modern Times with a song called “The Levee’s Gonna Break” within this context.
There is no doubt that Dylan could have wrote a song about New Orleans that was so emotional, so gut retching that the radio couldn’t play it because the DJ 's tears made the electrical wires malfunction. Throughout his life Dylan has never made an attempt to hide his love affair with New Orleans. The city is even a main character of sorts in his autobiography Chronicles. In the book Dylan goes into great detail describing how New Orleans bled into his psyche while he struggled to record his 1989 album Oh Mercy within the city limits. If anyone understands the mysteries of the Crescent City it is Dylan. In a book where major events like his motorcycle accident barely get a fragment of a sentence, New Orleans gets a full chapter. Dylan doesn't even think twice before announcing that “There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans’s better.”
Just take a look at some of my favorite Dylanisms on New Orleans from his autobiography:
-The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time….
-Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you…
-A lazy rhythm looms in the dreary air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance…you can’t see it but you know it’s there.
-The city is one very long poem.
-Everything in New Orleans is a good idea.
-After a while you feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you’re in a wax museum below crimson clouds
Yet when Dylan sat down to write a song about one of the most horrific periods of the city, the result is an upbeat blues progression highlighted by dancing guitar riffs and a shuffling snare drum.
If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break
If it keep on rainin', the levee gonna break
Some of these people don't know which road to take
Dylan’s half of a wink response to the events of the last five years is even more telling than an album full of calls to revolution. He clearly chose to reflect on modern times with the same half-crooked smile, deep voice, and weary grin he noticed on the likes of Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and most recently, Alicia Keys (Dylan immediatley makes mention of Keys in the first song of the album). Perhaps the greatest clue to the way he understands “Modern Times” comes again from the way he describes New Orleans in Chronicles:
“New Orleans doesn’t have the psychic current of holy places. That’s a cold, frozen fact. It takes you a while to figure that out. In a lot of places you have to change with the times. It’s not necessary here.”
Some would say that a lot has changed since 2001. Certainly this administration has made much use of the “drastic times call for drastic measures” cliché. Everyday a politician makes the public aware that the post Sept. 11 world is unlike any that we have known. Yet, among all of this I find it amazing that the 22 year old kid who once announced “the times they are a-changin” now makes an album called Modern Times and instead of announcing anything modern he digs back into the great well of blues and rockabilly. Instead of signalling any change, Dylan takes a look at Modern Times and responds with the same contagious rhythmic blues shuffle, the same tales of heartbreak and devious lust, the same rolling rhyme scheme, and the same eerily somber yet undeniably comforting vocals. Dylan takes modern times with half a wink and brings us again to our feet by once again lighting the rug on fire. Modern Times
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
Posted by Yonah Korngold at September 1, 2006 01:38 PM
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