I am a pretty good writer. At least I thought I was. I could think of things to say. I could make a point. I could express myself somewhat. That was until Bob put out Modern Times last week. Now I don’t think I’m such a good writer anymore. Because I cannot put into words how powerful this album is. How huge and important this achievement is in the history of American Culture. I strain to comprehend the vastness of what has been achieved here. My mind is spinning, swimming in the casual beauty of the arrangements, the mastery of the ensemble performance, the honesty and humility of the creaky, lone singing voice, literally the voice of America, the amazing ability he possesses to say everything that needs to be said about the world right now without specifically saying anything at all. I chuckle to myself and feel quietly awed and envious. I'm sure all his peers do too. After thirty years of wandering, Dylan found his final and greatest voice on Time Out Of Mind and now, some ten years later, has come close to damn near perfecting it. I can’t see him singing any better, any easier, any more emotionally. The overall word for this massive triumph of the spirit is unforced. Everyone else trying so hard to say something, so hard to hit the point right on the head. Dylan just does it. Without any effort. It’s astonishing how easy it seems for him. Because he’s not trying. Because he doesn’t have to.

He has recorded an album of new songs that sound like they were written in 1929 or ’39 or ’49 or either ’99 and has used “modern” technology to capture the performances of what could be the best band he’s ever had in a way that could not have been accommodated in any of those years. But it can be and has been accommodated now. This could be the best sounding record he’s ever made. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, Dylan has become “unstuck in time.” It no longer has any hold upon him. He is skipping from decade to decade, existing in the Eternal Now. In the ’80’s, especially, he sounded bogged down under the weight of silly production, immediately dated recording values, straining to keep up with the times, trying to sound “modern”. It’s ludicrous now. This music gives new meaning to the word “timeless”. These songs, these performances, and these recordings have no date on them whatsoever and never will. A hundred years from now, this record will not have aged one day, let alone a century. And in this gesture, Dylan makes his most powerful commentary on the world at large: Nothing in today’s culture has any value, any longevity anymore. It’s all disposable nothingness. And culture, and the world, even, was a better place fifty years ago. A hundred years ago. Or at least, the music was. This album is a roadmap of American music. And the best American Music, according to Bob Dylan, is African-American in nature: Jazz Balladry, Rhythm & Blues, and Rock and Roll, the hearty collision of Black and White. And in the hands of a master such as this, it’s all the same beautiful thing, a grand, rolling river of merging cultures…like America itself. Or at least, in the best dream of what America was supposed to be when it was invented. Integration of ideas, of ideology, unity and liberation for all. And nowhere on this album does Dylan refer to this idea literally. He lets the music do it for him.

This is Big Genius at work. This is a gift to a needy world.

9/06