Word: songfulness
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...That would have been the summer of 1965; the song, the rock ballad "Like a Rolling Stone." But Springsteen came late to Dylan, as did Martin Scorsese, director of last year's Dylan documentary No Direction Home, who acknowledged that he was ignorant of the singer's folk period and only caught on when Bobby D. went electric. By then, Dylan was already nearing the end of his artistic prime - a five-year stretch from 1961 to '66, when he revolutionized first folk, then rock, infusing his music with astringent, haunting imagery that fully justified critic Richard Goldstein...
...knew it was magic, those of us who thumbed a ride on the Dylan astro-rocket as it blasted out of Greenwich Village in 1961-62. Even then we knew that he was changing everything. First he updated Woody Guthrie's notion of the topical folk song and made it his own, creating anthems that were the sound track to the early-'60s Civil Rights movement. Then he smartly ransacked the tropes of every hip lyricist from Bertolt Brecht to the Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Then adapted his righteous belligerence to the standard love song, upending...
...What a popular song could express. It could address any subject, and be written with a poetic density that needed multiple listenings to be understood, or to convince listeners that they understood them. Suddenly, nothing was forbidden...
...What a pop song could be called... Dylan pioneered the eccentric fashion of hit singles whose title words don't appear in the song: "Subterranean Homesick Blues" ("Look out, kid, it's somethin' you did./ God knows when, but you're doin' it again"), "Positively Fourth Street" ("You've got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend"), "Rainy Day Woman #12 and 35" ("Everybody must get stoned...
...much, but you probably won't hear a better adult pop album this year. Musically, Taking the Long Way is full of swaggering country-tinged rock hooks--like a peak Eagles record, except without the misogyny and drug references and the advice to Take It Easy. Instead the songs aspire to do what the best pop always does, function as a smart expression of its creators' lives while remaining accessible to its listeners'. There are allusions to the recent past--on the jubilant opener The Long Way Around ("It's been two long years now/ Since...