Bob Dylan

When I first heard it, Shot of Love sounded like Bob Dylan's most interesting record in a
long time. Interesting, not good. Though many of the songs seemed wretchedly written,
the artist's churning mixture of ultimate love (God's) and ultimate hate (Dylan's),
positiveness and paranoia, missilery and martyrdom, struck me as perhaps deliberate–as if
he were laying out all the contradictions in a line, creating a fractured but unde... More >

Dylan's abandonment of Muscle Shoals for the fleshpots of El Lay--Benmont Tench! Ron Wood! Ringo Starr on tom tom!--has a reassuring aura of apostasy, which may be why I think this year's born-again boilerplate "sounds better" than last year's. But two songs that belong in the lower reaches of his canon don't hurt. "Property of Jesus," about how bad it is to mock born-againers, has Staple Singers written all over it. "Lenny Bruce" is apostasy down to its reverent setting. (Grade: B-)