Bob Dylan's grasp for creative breath with Rough and Rowdy Ways

BOB DYLAN                                ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS (2020)

Putting it kindly, you can call this album elegiac and ruminative and Dylan at the top  of his storytelling game. but really it’s  just boring as hell. The music plods and the lyrics sound like couplets strung together  to make rhymes, a style Dylan has perfected, effectively, since John Wesley Harding (1967) and which sometimes work, as with the best tongs on Blood on the Tracks (1975) or the cinematic tales on Desire (1976), but ultimately becomes tedious.  

Dylan apologists will undoubtedly regard this style as highly poetic as his early lyrics but for me searching for deeper meaning in the words Dylan wrote for Rough and Rowdy Wats is informed only by the expectation that if it’s Dylan the words must have greater significance than  the surface meaning. My belief is that Dylan means what he says and says what he means, and that a lot of it means nothing more than the bland surface. 

Neil Young has also become this kind of songwriter where he apparently prefers being direct, unsubtle and often banal and trite rather than being mystic and poetic.

I’ve listened to almost every album Dylan’s released since 1990 and the two acoustic  records of cover versions Good As I Been to You (1992)and World Gone Wrong (1993) are the best of the bunch if simple listening pleasure is the yardstick. He is obviously gifted at writing couplets and putting together lyrics, though it often seems that he doesn’t quite know where to stop anymore, yet very little of what he’s written over the last 40 years has any emotional or, indeed, intellectual impact. Dylan is clever and experienced, but has become a craftsman, a journeyman, rather than the intuitive artist he once was.

Not only are the lyrics on Rough and Rowdy Ways almost perfunctory and, at best, well written,  but it seems he can’t write melodies anymore and the music is too laidback and soporific to hold the attention. On  a couple of tracks the musicians play a light, sprightly blues bounce yet also nothing as tough as on Modern Times (2006) or Tempest (2012.) The best thing about the performances on this album is that the grating cracked voice of Modern Times and Tempest is gone, almost smoothed over to a gentle rasp.

Bob Dylan is 79 and this record feels like the product of a 79-year old who wants to put out a record but has nothing much of real value to say anymore and has nothing of his youthful vigour and inventiveness left in the tank. So now he just writes endless, glib verses, combining sometimes incongruous images to create a pseudo-artistic mystery, and hums along to a band that mustn’t play too loud because his ears won’t stand it anymore.

“Murder Most Foul,” released as a teaser track, is an excellent case in  point. For a start, it reruns the hoary old story of the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, at excessive length and with a plethora of juxtapositions alternating narrative and pop culture references, which, on the. surface,  seems to give the song a sweeping, epic, wide-screen heft and significance but on closer scrutiny is just a cornucopia of ultimately incoherent couplets that go on and on and on and  on, yet is never as intriguing, exciting, exhilarating and plain enjoyable as other long Dylan compositions like “Desolation Row,”  “Sad Eyed `Lady of the Lowlands” or “Sarah.”  After a couple of minutes, you just want “Murder Most Foul” to end, when you realise it’s as boring as shit and isn’t going to improve anytime soon. 

If you ask me, Dylan shouldn’t have released anything after Desire. The first 15 years of his recording career contains by far the best and mandatory recordings, with some exceptions, whereas the next 45 years has noting that’s mandatory  and the good stuff is the exception. Dylan has coasted on his early reputation and rock critics, especially the older ones who ordained him in the first place, are simply too invested or too wilfully stubborn to change their minds. Once a genius always a genius, regardless of the quality of the output. Allegedly.

There’s nothing rough or rowdy about this album and it’s a glaring lack because there’s nothing else about it to engage the listener or indeed, to make one want to listen to the album more than the obligatory once. If this i8s indeed Dylan’s last album of new material released in his life time, the hagiographers will undoubtedly refer to it as a final masterpiece and a fitting testament to one of the great songwriters of the rock epoch but my opinion is that this might be just Dylan going out on a low, not with a bang but with a wisp of his former brilliance.