Nov
04
2009
The Unfalsifiable Genius of Bob Dylan
Andrew Ferguson, reviewing Bob Dylan’s new Christmas album, first writes about Dylan fans:
Dylan fans are like Baby Huey dolls, those inflatable figures with the big red nose and the rounded bottom, weighted so that when you punch them–punch hard, punch with all your might–they bounce right back, grinning the same frozen, unchangeable grin.
Ferguson is just getting warmed up.
He eventually gets around to the new album:
The production and packaging are professional. The band is competent in a midnight-at-the-Nashville Hyatt sort of way–maybe a little heavy on the tremolo but still. And the songs themselves are fine, of course. The arrangements, though, are jarringly slick, with sleigh bells and gossamer strings and cooing girl singers–as if Dylan had chosen to lift the backing tracks from an Andy Williams Christmas special circa 1968. Oozing just beneath his asthmatic croak, the arrangements give an effect of overwhelming creepiness. His voice gets worse with every track. You wonder whether someone left the karaoke machine on in the emphysema ward at the old folks’ home. He doesn’t sing notes so much as make exhausted gestures in their general direction, until at a break he falls silent and is rescued by the backup singers, who reestablish the melody in the proper key. But then he starts singing again. . . .
. . . The conclusion is unavoidable: He’s doing this on purpose. He knows what his record sounds like. It’s not a misstep. It’s not a gag. It’s an affront, a taunt. He’s giving us a choice. He’s saying, Okay, this is what it’s come to: You’ve got two options. You can cover your ears and go running from the room in horror, or you can call me an enigmatic genius who’s daring to plumb heretofore unexplored archetypes of the American imagination. But you can’t do both.
You can read the whole thing here.