PART FOUR
Artforum
February 1993
with Roots and Branches
Image (San Francisco Examiner)
17 January 1993
2) Bob Dylan: Good As I Been to You (Columbia). Solo versions of very old ballads and prewar blues standards, released last November 3, which just happened to be Election Day: “other people’s songs,” but these songs are as much Dylan’s as anyone else’s, and he sings them with an authority equal to that he brought to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” in 1962. The authority is not the same, though; there’s more freedom in it now. “Little Maggie” is always played for its melody, but Dylan goes for its drama, the drama of a weak, scared man in love with an unfaithful drunk. The music is cut up, stretched, snapped back: each line opens with a stop, and at its end just fades out. The more historical numbers—the likes of “Canadee-I-O” and “Arthur McBride,” 18th and 19th century tales of, to be blunt, imperialist class war and primitive capitalist exploitation—are personalized, Dylan inhabiting the first-person narratives as if he lived them twice. As the rough, tested character of the voice and the darkness of the melodies hidden in the guitar link the undatable past of “Blackjack Davey” to the early twentieth century of “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” you hear the old songs resolve themselves into a single story: variations on the tale of innocents setting out on long journeys into the unknown and the terrible betrayals they find when they reach their destinations. It’s only after a time, when the melancholy and bitterness seem too great for one voice, that you hear them as history, as more than one man’s plight. Finally all of the story is shared, the singer only its mouthpiece, medium for private miseries within the great sweep of disaster; these songs are as much yours as anyone else’s. As for the guile, the slyness, the pleasing cynicism of the singer’s voice, he gets to keep that—leaving you to wonder why, at just this moment in time, one person who has in stray moments seen as clearly as Natty Bumppo is offering this story as a version of American legacy.
Artforum
March 1993
3) Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers, Bill Clinton, James Ingram, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Dionne Warwick, Michael Bolton, children’s choruses, adult choruses, and more: “We Are the World,” at An American Reunion, preinaugural celebration on the Mall of America (HBO, January 17). It may be that behind the great good feeling of this performance lies only propaganda, a fabulous sheen of communitarian self-recognition disguising a new administration that means to leave the country as it found it. But as John F. Kennedy proved against his own will, or for that matter his thoughtlessness, false promises can be taken up by those who only hear the tune and don’t care about the copyright. If, as Robert Ray of the Vulgar Boatmen puts it, “The sound of Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did,” then the same can be said of the sound of Kennedy’s voice and his political acts. The same may prove true of Bill Clinton’s demeanor and his political instinct—as opposed to his personal instinct—to pull back at the first sign of trouble. The double-hearted rule but do not govern; desires have been loosed in the air and there’s no telling where they’ll light.
8) Bob Dylan: “Chimes of Freedom,” An American Reunion (HBO). Yeah, he sounded terrible, but did you see that jacket? Purple, with black appliqué? On a night when Michael Jackson looked less human than the Mickey Mouse men in Disneyland commercials, Dylan looked like he’d just bought a Nashville haberdashery.