Man of constant solo

So yeah, Don't Look Back. It'd been a long time since I'd watch that much Dylan, that many Dylans, as if there were ever a plurality. From the beginning, the same old song: nobody tells Bob what to do, who to be. Nobody revels in the game of hide and seek with the critics more than Bob, nobody uses allegorical openness to suggest but pull back from the edge of concreteness quite as well. From the beginning, he delights in fucking with the audience's head. Like David Byrne, he begins with a rhyme and a rhythm and fills the line in going backwards, and the audience takes metric fill dirt for profundity. Like Miles and Johnny Rotten, he spits on the public. Like a rapper, he accentuates the rhythm with clear articulation and a thrusting head. Like almost nobody else, he stretches verses out to arbitrary lengths with but a pro forma refrain to let you catch your mental breath, basically using the guitar get people to focus on the verse.

He's just Bob, and, yeah, at the end of the day, the acoustic work is seminal and the later stuff, well, I don't know so well. And there's a reason. But one things for sure, if he hadn't turned off the spigot of bard, he would have debased an epochal body of work. And he knew that.