Review: Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways Is Powerfully Prescient

The album encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster during the most turbulent of ages.

Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways
Photo: William Claxton

When, in March, Bob Dylan previewed “Murder Most Foul,” the closing track from his 39th album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, the timing was eerie. A haunting, 17-minute piano and violin duet that addresses the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the song paints an epic, Bosch-like portrait of a country ripped asunder by violence, confusion, and hatred, the president’s death marking the moment when “the soul of a nation [was] torn away.” Released two weeks after the U.S. government’s bumbling proclamation of a national emergency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and not long before mass protests erupted over the killing of George Floyd, “Murder Most Foul” looks back to the mythical origin point of the era that fostered Dylan as a visionary of social conscience and artistic freedom and depicts America’s seemingly perpetual state of chaos and division.

Dylan’s first album of original material since 2012’s Tempest, Rough and Rowdy Ways operates in the same vein as its larger-than-life finale. Sharp and precise in its references, descriptions, and personal confessions, the album is also thematically universal and powerfully prescient, in many ways acting as the culminating expression of the apocalyptic spirituality that’s preoccupied Dylan since his earliest recordings. It’s also a masterpiece of mood as much as lyrical poetry, and as stunningly and surprisingly atmospheric as many of the major musical achievements in a career more associated with monumental songwriting than sonic mastery.

Only superficially signaling a retreat from contemporary and topical concerns, Dylan’s last three albums—all composed of material from the Great American Songbook—gradually perfected the stark, elegiac sonic palette that Dylan has been refining since 1997’s Time Out of Mind, and Rough and Rowdy Ways applies that palette to the most poignant songcraft of his late career. This is evident on opening track “I Contain Multitudes,” which features a slowly strummed, drum-less arrangement that would have fit snugly on any of his three previous albums. But instead of comforting traditionalism, the song offers a statement of purpose that dares immodesty and tastelessness (“I’m just like Anne Frank and Indiana Jones”) only to somehow arrive at honest self-reflection and self-discipline (“I’ll keep the path open, the path in my mind/I’ll see to it that there’s no love left behind”).

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“I Contain Multitudes” sets the tone for the rest of Rough and Rowdy Ways, which frequently meditates on mortality and mayhem with bemusement as well as dread, though not always in equal parts. Whereas the album’s opener posits that an unstable world can be rescued through expansive perspective and creativity, “My Own Version of You” turns this reassurance on its head and in the process becomes one of the most macabre songs of Dylan’s gargantuan catalog.

On the song, he casts himself as a grave robber digging up “limbs and livers and brains and hearts” in order to create a patchwork human a la Frankenstein’s monster. The dark, running joke here is that this human is “you”—a former lover Dylan wishes to perfect according to his perverse, insatiable desires, perhaps, but also any listener whose point of view has become fragmented and disoriented by a lyrical kaleidoscope referencing Richard III, Julius Caesar, The Godfather, Scarface, Leon Russell, Liberace, St. John the Baptist, the Crusades, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx, and more. “My Own Version of You” suggests that the restoration of sense and meaning, as well as a shot at artistic immortality, through the reimagining of history and culture is yet one more desecration of an ungraspable grand design; the song’s creepy waltz-time shuffle, as pierced through by Donnie Herron’s ghostly steel guitar work, forms an unsettling backdrop for Dylan’s hypnotic, and hypnotized, despair.

Like much of the grittier material that Dylan has penned since turning to electric rock in the mid-’60s, the album’s no-nonsense blues are also shot through with dire proclamations that at times get downright bloody. The second half of Rough and Rowdy Ways contains two such numbers, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “Crossing the Rubicon.” The former is a deceptively upbeat tribute to sackcloth-and-ashes religiosity (“For thine is kingdom, the power, the glory/Go tell it on the mountain, go tell the real story/Tell it in that straightforward, puritanical tone/In the mystic hours when a person’s alone”), while the latter is a 12-bar slow-burner that speaks of final decisions and lasting regrets during a time of tribulation (“What are these dark days I see?/In this world so badly bent/I cannot redeem the time/The time so idly spent/How much longer can it last?/How long can it go on?”).

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As others have pointed out, “False Prophet” pilfers (and without giving credit to) Billy “The Kid” Emerson’s smoky “If Lovin’ Is Believing.” Dylan has unabashedly stolen others’ music since at least “Masters of War,” but in almost every case he’s made other musicians’ work so uniquely his own in terms of lyrics and sensibility that he’s almost justified the practice. In “False Prophet,” he brilliantly replaces Emerson’s straightforward tale of romantic betrayal with a surreal, eschatological narrative that, as spun in Dylan’s gravelly croak, evokes the possible viewpoint of the Angel of Death: “You don’t know me darlin’/You never would guess/I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest/I ain’t no false prophet/I’m just said what I said/I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head.”

Rough and Rowdy Ways, though, doesn’t just hammer away at a few foreboding notes. This is an album that showcases a similar comprehensive spectrum of ideas, attitudes, citations, perspectives, stories, and jokes as Dylan’s greatest recordings. True, many of these are grave, but the few hopeful spots—like “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” and “Key West (Pirate Philosopher)”—are well-earned and, quite simply, beautiful. Latter-day Dylan is the man behind “To Make You Feel My Love” as well as “Not Dark Yet,” and along with dispensing fire and brimstone, the album keeps romantic and spiritual faith alive, through both the fervor of unshaken convictions concerning the high stakes of the soul as well a basic yearning for love, companionship, and peace. As with his best work, Rough and Rowdy Ways encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster that can be clearly discerned but rarely summarized in the most turbulent of ages.

Score: 

Michael Joshua Rowin

Michael Joshua Rowin is a freelance writer and artist who lives in Queens, New York. His writing has appeared in The Notebook, Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and other publications.

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