It saddens me that I can't find it in my heart to agree with my colleague Dave Marsh that Bob Dylan's new record is a joke, or anyway a good one. Most of the stuff here is dead air, or close to it. The novelty of the music–soul chorus backup (modeled on Bob Marley's I-Threes), funk riffs from the band, lots of laconic sax work–quickly fades as one realizes how indifferent the playing is: "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)," the most musically striking number here, is really just a pastiche of the best moments of the Eagles' Hotel California. Still, I believe some of the songs on Street-Legal: those that are too bad to have been intended with anything but complete seriousness.
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Dylan may have once needed a dump truck to unload his head, but you'd need a Geiger counter to find irony in "Is Your Love in Vain?" or affection in "Baby Stop Crying."
Both are wretched performances, but the former is particularly cruel: compared to Dylan's posture here, Mick Jagger in "Under My Thumb" is exploring the outer reaches of humility. Not that there's any bite in the song, as there is in "On the Road Again" or "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," two other Dylan numbers in which a woman gets what the singer thinks she has coming to her. There's too much distance here for that–distance between an ego and its object. The man speaks to the woman like a sultan checking out a promising servant girl for VD, and his tone is enough to make her fake the pox if that's what it takes to get away clean. When, after a string of gulf-between-the sexes insults (which pretty much come down to, Are you good enough for me?/I'm hot stuff, you know), the singer finally makes the big concession ("Alright, I'll take a chance, I will fall in love with you"–odd notion of how falling in love works), you can almost see the poor girl heading for the exit. "Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow," the man mouths, apparently making a dumb leap from housewife to earth mother, but in truth just rhyming. Then comes the kicker: "Can you understand my pain?" Women all over America must be saying what a friend of mine said: "Sure, Bob, give me a call sometime. If I'm not home, leave a message on the answer-phone." As it happens, "Is Your Love in Vain?" is a high point on Street-Legal–or, at least, the most emotionally convincing track on the album. No joke.
Ah, but the singing! The singing, which on other records has redeemed lines nearly as terrible as those I've quoted–what about the singing? Well, Bob Dylan has sounded sillier than he does on Street-Legal (who could forget "Big Yellow Taxi"), more uncomfortable ("The Boxer") and as disinterested ("Let It Be Me"), but he's never sounded so utterly fake. Though this quality is sometimes cut with playfulness ("Changing of the Guards"), in "Baby Stop Crying," the vocal is so fey, so intolerably smug, that the only reference point is one of those endless spoken intros Bar
