The best album since “Blood on the Tracks?” Our critics weigh in.
Bob Dylan
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Culture Dylan’s best since ‘Blood on the Tracks?’ You’re asking the wrong question
To me ranking albums, paintings, buildings, poems, or anything else in art — including baseball teams, players and moments — makes no sense. I could care less what anybody, myself included, thinks are the best ten Rolling Stones songs, the three essential Emily Dickinson poems, or if “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “I Married a Communist,” “Sabbath’s Theater,” or “The…
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Culture In my life, there were two Bob Dylans — my father’s and mine
The sounds of a big house in the south of Mexico City. A house full of books, albums, paintings, sculptures and dust. This was the place of my dad, a place filled with music, ideas and wonders. My Dominican mother decided to move here after living in D.R, U.S.A and the late USSR; and by…
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Culture In a hellish landscape of Huey Lewis and Liza Minnelli, a new Dylan album thankfully arrived
It was September 1989, and I’d just been hired as a clerk at See Hear, a small record store in Chicago. I’d spent the summer in a melancholic haze of post-college graduation wastreldom, smoking cheap weed and drinking cheaper beer (where have you gone, Carling Black Label?), and spending countless hours in communion with my…
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Culture Why no Dylan album will ever surpass ‘Stormy Season’
When I got the text from a friend of mine, asking if I’d heard Bob Dylan’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” I hadn’t yet had a chance to listen to it all the way through. “Honestly, the music isn’t much,” my friend wrote. “But the lyrics are amazing.” She quoted a stanza from “Key West,” her…
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Culture Dylan painted his masterpiece — the next year he painted another one
It’s as predictable as death and taxes. Bob Dylan releases a new album and critics hyperventilate that it is his best since his masterful 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” The latter was an acoustic song cycle largely about the dissolution of a marriage (his marriage?), and it does indeed stand the test of time…
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Culture The best Dylan comeback album featured no Dylan songs at all
Bob Dylan always liked stories about people who get up and go somewhere, and then come back. They are constructs about change; in the end, the subject comes back — and is a different person. For a young man thirsting to grow, you can see the appeal. Indeed, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” one of…
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Culture ‘Will men keep explaining Dylan to me into eternity?’
To be a Bob Dylan fan has too often meant occupying 'a world of men.'
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Culture Dylan’s latest album comes at a time when we need it most
The Forward, a Jewish publication, asks me a question: “Is ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ Bob Dylan’s best album since “Blood on the Tracks?” As a Jew, I can imagine only one possible answer: “yes and no.” Musically, it’s not even close. “Desire” has more beautiful melodies, tighter lyrics and far better hooks. I also think,…
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