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‘Modern Times,’ that classic voice
Bob Dylan proves familiar sounds don’t die, they evolve
By Andrew Rooney
“Modern Times” is not “Blood On The Tracks” or “Bringin It All Back Home,” but nothing will ever be again. Those albums were made in a certain time and place, and Dylan is never going back there again.
Any semi-intelligent conversation about the history of rock ‘n’ roll, or even popular culture in general, cannot linger long before Bob Dylan is mentioned.
A convincing case could be made that he is the most influential popular musician of the 20th century and it is a case that probably could have been made as early as 1976.
To critics, and to Dylan himself, his career has been an up-and-down affair filled with masterpieces and littered with far-from-great records, especially in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.
Yet Dylan is still vital in the overly polluted musical air of the 2000s. Take for example the recent painstakingly created 2005 documentary, “No Direction Home,” directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. Or we can look to his recent New York Times bestseller, “Chronicles: Volume 1” for further testament.
Bob Dylan is 65 years old and has been on his “never-ending tour” since the early 1990s. Yet, he still manages to produce highly listenable records in the era of “the single.”
“Modern Times” is one such record. It completes a trilogy of Dylan albums that is arguably the second-best trilogy of his storied 44-album career.
“Modern Times” picks up right where the 2001 “Love and Theft” left off — placing murder ballads and old-fashioned blues alongside typical Dylan-esque rockers.
Kicking off with the highly catchy “Thunder on the Mountain,” with the now famous line, “I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys, couldn't keep from crying / When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line.”
When Dylan was asked why he name-dropped the now flattered Keys, he replied, “I remember seeing her on the Grammys. I think I was on the show with her. I didn’t meet her or anything. But I said to myself, ‘There’s nothing about that girl I don’t like.’ ”
“Modern Times” continues with two more of the album’s most fiery numbers before settling into more familiar Dylan territory with tracks like; “Nettie Moore,” and “Beyond the Horizon,” in which Dylan plays the poet we all know and love.
A New Orleans-inspired track, “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” brings the current situation in the Bayou to the front burner once again, but shies away from the political territory that once made Dylan famous. On “Rollin’ and Tumblin,’” Dylan mistakenly claims writing credit, but still crafts the song as if it were his own — allowing for one of the album’s best numbers.
Like so many other artists who have been performing for decades, Dylan often suffers from the fact that his records are always compared to his monumental records of the ’60s and ’70s. “Modern Times” is not “Blood on the Tracks” or “Bringin’ It All Back Home,” but nothing ever will be. Those albums were made in a certain time and place, and Dylan is never going back there again. However, we can take comfort in the new directions he takes with “Modern Times” and sleep soundly at night knowing Dylan is still far from done.
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