Bob Dylan

The Tao of Bob: employ maximum inscrutability to garner maximum iconography. And just like the wise hermit on the mountain, the older Dylan gets, the more we trust his ever-folksier koans. Modern Times is the product of age, hindsight and intuition, things Dylan has traded on in various degrees throughout his career. But rather than cranky old-manisms, the album twinkles with a knowing wink a graceful boogie, with blue-collar poetry and a bar room waltz. Imagine Highway 61 Revisited revisited, this time with a less ornery, more intimate form of absurdity.

The new Dylan album starts with the voice of God in the mountains and the sound of pistols
in the streets. Bad things are happening, and the ladies in Washington, D.C., are scrambling
to get out of town. Dylan has ladies on his mind, too-- Alicia Keys, who's forty years
younger than he is yet worth chasing through the Tennessee Hills just the same, but also
good women who do just what you say, and the wicked women who drain your... More >

Neither as existentially bleak as the fabricated folklore of Time Out of Mind nor as waggish and vivacious as "Love and Theft"'s coin of the minstrel-boy realm, he radiates the observant calm of old masters who have seen enough life to be ready for anything--Yeats, Matisse, Sonny Rollins. On a music-first record that leavens blues shuffles with the moderate tempos and politely jazzy beat favored by Dylan hero Bing Crosby in the early '30s, the finest moment is the descending 16-note hook that runs through "Spirit on the Water." Though it belongs on a piano, it's usually stated on an acoustic guitar and then taken up by shifting combinations of standup-sounding bass and Dylan's touring band. Sometimes it fades out early, but it always comes back, and you want it to--for all eight minutes of the song. Nice though it would be for the title to indicate "current events," the likely reference is Charlie Chaplin's 1936 movie masterpiece. In both, a legendary entertainer does what he wants because nobody can stop him, and the world is better for it. (Grade - A PLUS)