All Bob ever wanted is for us to not forget the past. Not to excuse its crimes or stop moving forward, but to simply remember what we once were, how we once felt. Every Dylan record since 1992’s Good as I Been to You serves this kind of conservatism—the best kind of conservatism, one interested in connections between past, present, and future instead of dreaming of a mythical golden age when everyone else was oppressed. Two albums of blues covers; the stunning traditionalist trilogy Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and Modern Times; the Robert Hunter collaboration Together Through Life; the probably-tongue-in-cheek Christmas album; the Sinatra standards. It’s all about what used to be. Rough and Rowdy Ways not only doesn’t hide its debt to the past, it flaunts it from beginning to end. The opening track, “I Contain Multitudes,” calls out literary giants like a sixth-grade poem, and it would sound like one too if Dylan’s voice were not so damn sincere. He really loves this stuff. The finale “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute recap of JFK’s assassination, is equally guileless, somehow managing to land just on the right side of hypnotic and utterly unnecessary. Notwithstanding a couple of undeniable gems (the devotional “Mother of Muses,” the grave-robber anthem “My Own Version of You”), this is not one of Dylan’s great albums, but it’s also better than mediocre. It’s perhaps most like Tempest, a record that manages to evoke nothing so much as uneasy waiting, fuzzy boundaries, posthumous art that mysteriously slipped into life. 7
Dylan, Bob. Rough and Rowdy Ways. Columbia, 2020. Reviewed September 28, 2024. Notable tracks: “My Own Version of You,” “Mother of Muses.””
