Bob Dylan's new album Rough and Rowdy Ways is an

exceptionally unified work. It has an internal logic, which unfolds

as it goes. It is about the role of spirit and imagination in a
landscape where history and myth have failed. To understand
how this works, we need to look, not only at what the songs say,
but, as I will do here, at what they do.

In recent years, Dylan's persona seems to have fallen into

place. Whereas earlier in his career he changed looks every
several years, his performances in the past decade or have
featured him with the same flat brimmed hat, moustache, and
Hank Williams suit. Having beaten his critics into submission,
Dylan gives an impression in these songs that he grasps the fact
that most of his listeners are actually on his side, and welcome
what he is doing. This means that the "ways" of the album title
are at once events (things I've done), manners (ways of living),
and directions for life (roadmaps). Gone is the fragmented vision
of much of Dylan's turn-of-the-century work (Time Out of
Mind (1997), "Love and Theft" (2001), and Modern
Times (2006)), in which we seemed to be stuck in the ruins of a
national culture, suffering the consequences of decades of
economic warfare, racist violence, and historical amnesia. The
songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways are about working out
approaches—to living, being, seeing. In this sense, it is a
strangely optimistic and even spiritual record.

The poetic possibilities made available by this approach are

evident from the opening songs. He starts with Walt Whitman's
famous line, "I contain multitudes." The multiplicity of the self is
a long-standing Dylan preoccupation. After all, his 1970
album Self-Portrait was not autobiographical, but featured a set
of songs by other people--a multitude of alter egos. Here, he
makes the idea of a capacious self the main theme. He opens
Whitman up, applying his famous line to the dignities and
indignities of everyday life: "I drive fast cars, I eat fast
foods." The sublime and the ridiculous come together in ways
that Whitman, living in a pre-MacDonald's world, could not have
imagined. The opening exploration of the question of selfhood is
expanded in the second cut, "False Prophet," a blues about the
self as a tool of power. The narrator is an impressive character--
part con-man, part boaster, part magician. But no matter how
threatening or exaggerated the claims of this persona, the song
traces out an ethical path (a "rowdy way") through a world of
thieves. Instead of condemning or preaching at the corrupt
figures around him ("false-hearted judges," "masters of war"), as
a younger Dylan might have done, he simply knocks them into
line with his own power: "I'll marry you to a ball and chain."

Several of the songs are built on the conceit of taking a metaphor

or a cliché image literally. "My Own Version of You" might seem
to suggest some songwriting cliché about love and
fantasy: "Venus, make her fair/A lovely girl with sunlight in her
hair," sang Frankie Avalon in 1959. "Got a lock of hair and a
piece of bone/And made a walkin', talkin', honeycomb," sang
Jimmie Rodgers in 1957. Yet here, as in "Multitudes," the conceit
is literalized. "My Own Version of You" is not an erotic fantasy
about a dream girl. He really does want to construct someone;
the narrator claims to be a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, who is going
to make a human being from scratch. That design makes it
possible for him to evoke both the wonders and dangers of our
fallen life. The song ends with Dylan's narrator releasing his new
invention into the world, a world of "laughter. . .and tears."

If I place an ellipsis in the middle of the cited lyric here, it is

because moments of hesitation, where the singer stops,
are important in these songs. Dylan frequently uses short
phrases that alternate with musical interludes. The interludes
break up semantic units or pairs of lines. He draws on sets of
phrases or loaded words that are often paired in conversational
speech or more conventional songwriting. When he says, "I'm
first among equals," the listener knows that he's going to follow it
with, "second to none." When he says, "I don't care what I
drink," you know he's going to follow it with "I don't care what I
eat." These lyrics are composed of brief phrases, punctuated by
pauses in which the musical accompaniment takes over: "I've
looked at nothing here/or there/Looked at nothing near/. . .
.(pause) or far."

This ellipitical approach generates a game of tension and

release. A phrase is begun and set of terms is hinted at. Then
Dylan falls silent as the music plays, before he finishes the
thought. In many cases this technique is built on rhyme
effects. So, for example, in "Goodbye Jimmy Reed," we
hear: "For thine is the kingdom/The power and the glory/Go tell
it on the mountain/Go tell the real story." No one paying
attention can fail to realize, long before we get there, that "glory"
(followed by "tell it on the mountain," for heaven's sake) is going
be rhymed with "story." In other words, Dylan is telegraphing his
rhymes, letting us know before we get to them how they will
stack up. He's not confounding us, as he might have done earlier
in his career ("he just smoked my eyelids/and punched my
cigarette"); he's releasing the tension and bringing things to a
temporary moment of closure through rhyme and diction.

The effect of this lyrical and performative approach is a sense of

open composition. In many of Dylan's earlier songs words pour
out and over the listener with rapidity that is often surprising and
exhilarating. Here, by contrast, Dylan is playing with banal
everyday expressions ("I just know what I know"; "It is what it
is") which let his listeners into the space of the song. He sings a
part of a rhyming couplet, then we wait, along with him, as the
band plays a phrase, and we anticipate the obvious and
prepared-for rhyme that will close the couplet. We know when
we hear "glory" that "story" can't be far behind; "stars" will
certainly generate "guitars." When we hear, "turn your back," we
wait for "look back." We sense that "Got a mind to ramble" will
be followed by "Got a mind to roam."

My point here is that the openness in the diction and delivery of

the songs is of a piece with their thematic content. These are
songs about making worlds, about inventing oneself, about
righting oneself, about making a world out of bits of found
material. Dylan is doing just that with language and sound: "I
paint landscapes/I paint nudes/I contain multitudes." And he
includes us in the process by giving us bits of information in short
phrases, waiting a bit, then satisfying or influencing our
expectation, sometimes with obvious words, sometimes with less
obvious words. Either way, the songs breathe as Dylan breathes,
and as we breathe with him. "What are you looking at?" he
writes, "There's nothing here to see/ just a cool breeze that's
encircling me."

Thus the songs are characterized by two interesting

features. The first, as I've noted, is the way they take metaphors
about selfhood and power and make them literal: "You wonder
what Walt Whitman means by 'I contain multitudes'? Well, listen
and I'll explain through a list of examples." This makes it possible
for Dylan to study the relationship between the violent world of
physical desire and power, on the one hand, and the world of
imagination and spirit, on the other. The second feature I would
underline is the way he deploys a kind of loose diction--brief
lines, interspersed with pauses, common phrases that follow
easily from each other. Like the singer, the songs stop to
"breathe." The rhythms of breath that are the stuff of life
(especially in pandemic times) are built into their very structure.

In this way the album unfolds logically, from self to society, from
individual breath to collective spirit. It takes us from the self-
focused "I Contain Multitudes" to the grand finale, the magisterial
collective vision of "Murder Most Foul" that ends the
record. Dylan prepares us for the final song with the lovely
prayer, "Mother of Muses," and the beautiful fantasy, "Key West
(Philosopher Pirate)." This last song reworks ideas set forward in
1997's "Highlands," about a man imagining an escape from this
world. Yet the new song expands the conceit by interweaving the
fantasy of escape with a specific geographical reference to Florida
(more literalization) and an evocation of a musical phenomenon,
the pirate radio station ("Coming out of Luxembourg and
Budapest") that is beyond geography and can sing to the entire
earth.
This pairing of geography and music becomes central to the final
song, "Murder Most Foul." In the last tune, the implicit
experience of community, of listening together, that has marked
the structure of the diction and performance, now becomes
explicit, part of the story. We move from personal identity, in the
first song, to national crisis, in the last. Moreover, Dylan's
account of the murder of JFK is above all an account of the
consequences of that event for our national spirit: "The soul of a
nation been torn away," sings Dylan. In the last tune, the
hesitations and pauses in the singer's diction are gone, as the
story unspools in long lines, like a passage from Milton's Paradise
Lost. Having hesitated and offered brief bits of information in the
earlier songs, Dylan now takes a deep breath decides to "tell the
real story," as he urges Jimmy Reed to do earlier on. That story
is a story about spirit, as is fitting for a song that takes its title
from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the ultimate ghost story. It asks
what happens to Kennedy's "soul" after he dies: "For the past
fifty years they been searchin' for that." Dylan's claim is that
Kennedy's spirit circulates in the music of the country, in a music
that can console and heal, but that is also wounded and haunted,
like the country itself. The song, like "Key West," is in part a
celebration of radio, the medium of ghostly voices. And here
Dylan's play with personal identity and pronouns is also exploded,
as the "I" of the song shifts between the dying president and the
commentator. I contain multitudes, indeed.

It is unclear to me whether the opening line of "Murder Most

Foul"--"Twas a dark day in Dallas, November '63"--is supposed to
evoke Joni Mitchell's powerful ballad of generational
disillusionment and friendly counsel: "The last time I saw Richard
was Detroit in '68." Either way, the resonance is
meaningful. Mitchell's song closes her 1971
masterpiece Blue, just as Dylan's song closes Rough and Rowdy
Ways. Blue is certainly one of the most self-absorbed recordings
ever made. It is all about "I." Rough and Rowdy Ways, by
contrast, takes us from an "I" that already contains "multitudes"
to a parable of national tragedy. It offers a series of recordings
that are set after historical tragedy and personal disappointment,
after the events narrated by historians and epic poets. It
explores the movement of spirit--across bodies, across time. It
carries radio waves and warm breezes, breath, soul.

By Timothy Hampton
Published at timothyhampton.org