He’s not effacing himself — he’s finding the skin he’s most comfortable in. Think of his wardrobe in recent years, the dapper pencil moustache, the string ties and trim Western suits. As Dylan carried himself in his 2003 film Masked and Anonymous (as original, funny, thrilling, and alarming a vision of America as any American movie in years), he could have been Hank Williams on the way to the next gig, or Stagger Lee looking to kill a man for the fun of it. His whole bearing is the most humble way imaginable of saying, “Don’t fuck with me.”
He’s adopted the salaciousness of bluesmen, musicians who didn’t pretend their sexual desire ebbed with age. That’s why his sound is often more roll than rock. It fits sentiments like the now infamous pass at Alicia Keys in the opening “Thunder on the Mountain,” or, a little later on, “I got the pork chops/She got the pie/She ain’t no angel/And neither am I.” That might be too much for some, like Rob Harvilla, who in the Village Voice admitted he had no trouble with icons making records about being close to death but that it really, really creeped him out to hear Dylan admit he still likes the ladies. But Dylan’s silver-foxiness isn’t just fun (and a way of honoring the essence of blues and rock and roll), it’s part of what’s elemental in this music. Modern Times has some of his most forthright and affecting declarations of love, like the stoic sob he gets in his voice when he sings, “I’ll be with you when the deal goes down,” right alongside burning declarations of erotic torment.
Sometimes an artist narrows his scope to increase his depth. The lyrics here don’t have the kaleidoscopic dandyism of Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde. Dylan would be exhaustingly false if he still wrote the same way after 40 years. Instead, the blues and country and the lilting pop styles of the ’30s open up roads between the past and the present, allowing him a simultaneous ease and fervor, a way of burrowing into the root mysteries.
The mysteries are all present in “When the Levees Break.” On a Dylan album released in the week that marks the first anniversary of Katrina, a song with that title can’t help raise the expectation of a Major Statement. It is, but it’s a sideways statement, not the outraged reporting of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Who Killed Davey Moore?” The song — an upbeat blues of all things — places Katrina in the lineage of disasters that country and folk ballads and blues have commemorated. To take another line from Greil Marcus, “In the strange decor of the past, ordinary acts themselves seem strange.” Katrina was not ordinary, but to render it as the subject of an old-time blues, the type of song we experience as strange, brings home how unthinkable an event it was.
The present comes alive here in the language of the past. Reverence is inextricable from dread (“Everybody saying this is a day only the Lord could make”). The most direct empathy (“Well, I look in your eyes, I see nobody other than me”) exists alongside naked horror (“Some people on the road carryin’ everything they own/Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones”). And the pleasures of this life are so transitory, they hardly bear mentioning in the face of waiting Glory (“Put on your cat clothes, mama, put on your evening dress/Few more years of hard work, then there’ll be a thousand years of happiness”).
