Dylan at 80

Bob Dylan did not die young. That still seems a surprise.

Dylan himself has reflected a number of times about his cheating of death, toying with concepts of transfiguration and rebirth. From early on, biographers have recorded Dylan’s thoughts on his own death, speculating what it might mean for him to grow old. At the close of his landmark 1986 biography, No Direction Home – The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, Robert Shelton wondered what Dylan’s future career might be like. Would his creativity come to an abrupt end like that of Rimbaud, or would it flourish in late age, like that of Yeats?

If once an open question, the answer has been clear since 1997’s Time Out of Mind. Dylan at 80, reflects on the evolving creativity across various stages of Dylan’s life and career, from a youthful Guthrie jukebox to elderly statesman with the blood of the land in his voice. On his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, the Blakean song ‘I Contain Multitudes’ serves as a piece of retrospective self-reflection upon Dylan’s own many-sidedness, in turn refracted into the many songs on the album. Heartfelt love songs, rowdy blues, mournful reflections on the political past and present, and ruminations on the end of things represent and deepen Dylan’s repertoire ever since Another Side of Bob Dylan.

2021 marks Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and none. We can now consider what it means for Dylan to be entering his seventh decade as a recording artist. If this book is about anything, it is about reflecting on Dylan at 80. How is he? How is his art? Does he still embody the themes and styles of his younger self, or has he developed a late style that won’t look back? The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate’s masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age.

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