What Bob Dylan Knows About This Moment

Read: Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture says the unsayable

Which is why it’s nice that Dylan has given us a new album to tangle with. The arrival of Rough and Rowdy Ways, the 79-year-old’s first set of original songs since 2012, has already been an occasion for writers to revisit Dylan’s history as a protest singer, specifically one attuned to racial injustice. He sang about discrimination, uninvestigated murders, and law enforcement’s use of tear gas in 1963’s “Oxford Town.” He lamented a black boxer’s false imprisonment in 1975’s “Hurricane.” Often, his songwriting has involved him taking his own account of whose lives should matter, whose shouldn’t, and the way in which violence and cruelty help people kid themselves about their own significance. His withering description of the man who murdered the civil-rights activist Medgar Evers (famously sung at the 1963 March on Washington) is typical: “He’s only a pawn in their game.”

The immersive and strange Rough and Rowdy Ways, however, is not quite a protest album. It is in the mode of Dylan’s songs that he says were written by “trance,” which is to say its lyrics are dreamlike and impressionistic. But the overall idea isn’t hard to peg. This is a work of pessimistic Americana. With hallucinatory fervor, Dylan spangles himself in totems of Western culture while reveling in decline and futility.

The project announced itself in late March, when Dylan livened up quarantine with a doozy of a comeback single: “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute ramble about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Over tender orchestration, in his poutiest sing-speak, Dylan reinvests one of the most chewed-over events of the 20th century with a new sense of tragedy. The details are gory and gothic. The blame is assigned to a collective evil. Eventually, his vantage widens beyond one famous killing. Some passages describe the awfulness of segregation. Others list titles of works by artists as disparate as the Eagles and Shakespeare. All in all, the song rebukes the gauzy notion of the Baby Boomer wave—or the American story itself—as marked by idealism and progress. “The day that they killed him, someone said to me, ‘Son, / the age of the anti-Christ has just only begun,’” Dylan reports, and you get the sense that he believes that prophecy.

Though the rest of Rough and Rowdy Ways is more obscure in meaning—and Dylan is never a believer in tidy meaning anyway—the music follows in the incantatory mode of “Murder Most Foul.” Songwriting per se does not appear to be a priority. Mostly, he and his band lay down blues and country riffs, and then lovingly, lengthily work them over. Meanwhile, Dylan swings from stoned monotone to lounge-lizard hamminess. The results are songs of great excess and nagging familiarity, yet the pairing of vampiric vocals with pastoral backings is often spellbinding. Dylan is taking you to places you know and telling you they’ve been haunted all along.