Like a re-rolling stone

The 65-year-old songwriter-singer?s latest album, Modern Times, enters the US pop charts at the No. 1 slot.

The track record of Bob Dylan is a veritable timescape. The Baby Boomers and Midnight’s Children discovered him; the generation that followed venerated him. But the true worth of any longstanding icon is gauged by whether he is applauded by people not blinded by the mythology and is ‘rediscovered’ for what he does today. Dylan, unlike many of his contemporaries in the musical as well as literary arena, hasn’t rested on his laurels. The 65-year-old songwriter-singer’s latest album, Modern Times, entered the US pop charts at the No. 1 slot — something that he last managed in 1976 with his album, Desire.

HT Image

The ‘rediscovery’ of Dylan is especially sweet for two reasons. First, critics, who seem to measure the man’s output only by their nostalgia-fuelled ‘favourite’ Dylan album, condemning everything since the 1974 Planet Waves, were left holding their earphones while 192,000 copies of Modern Times were snapped up in the first week of the album’s release. True, there are plenty of examples to show that the quality of an album and its sales are not always concomitant. But with one man’s Justine Timberlake being another man’s Pearl Jam, sales figures are the only empirical evidence of popular glory to go by.

The second reason why Dylan deserves more than a harmonica’n’guitar salute is that the man himself has conducted an exercise of chameleon-like self-fashioning over the decades. For any songwriter-singer with Dylan’s back-catalogue, it would have been tempting to write and sing songs that are basically Like A Rolling Stone rehashed — or to lurch in the different direction, to cater to tailor-made contemporary tastes regardless of whether he is any good at doing them or not (e.g. The Rolling Stones’ disco period). Dylan has stuck to his furrow while widening it on his own terms. To get rewarded for that is humbling for anyone. Not that the iPod-attached teenager listening to Dylan’s new song, Someday Baby, cares for all that explanation. He is probably just memorising the lines of ‘this guy who sounds even better than James Blunt’, “I’m so hard pressed, my mind tied up in knots/ I keep recycling the same old thoughts”, simply because he really, really likes them.