After three albums of what could only be called Christian music, in 1983 Bob Dylan did yet another of the many about-faces in his storied career. Seemingly returning to his Jewish roots, he also marked a return to secular music with his release Infidels<\/i> \u2013 but did he still have the magic to create songs like \u201cBlowin\u2019 In The Wind\u201d or \u201cLike A Rolling Stone\u201d after abandoning that side of his craft?<\/p>\n
Well, that depends where you start listening to this disc. If you start at the beginning, one could understand why you would think the answer would be \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n
The opening track, \u201cJokerman,\u201d has enough subtleties in it that you could easily think it was a track left over from Dylan\u2019s religious period (\u201cWell, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy \/ The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers\u201d), and while it\u2019s not terrible, it doesn\u2019t rank among Dylan\u2019s best work, even from the religious period. This is, possibly, as religious as Dylan gets on Infidels<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The first half of this disc features Dylan getting his feet wet in pop music again, and he doesn\u2019t seem to be quite steady on his feet. \u201cNeighborhood Bully\u201d sounds like something that was a Warren Zevon cast-off, down to the musical and lyrical phrasing of the track and Dylan\u2019s performance. That\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing, but this track just doesn\u2019t do anything spectacular for me. Likewise, \u201cSweetheart Like You\u201d and \u201cLicense To Kill\u201d are nothing spectacular, though they\u2019re also not wretched. They\u2019re just\u2026 there<\/i>, which is perhaps the bigger sin that Dylan could have committed.<\/p>\n
The scorecard changes to Dylan\u2019s favor, and in a big way, with \u201cMan Of Peace,\u201d quite possibly one of Dylan\u2019s best performances ever (as well as under-rated). The twelve-bar blues fits Dylan perfectly this time around, and he embraces it by pouring his entire being into this track. The energy continues to flow on \u201cUnion Sundown,\u201d featuring Dylan\u2019s return to the protest song by lambasting the abuse of foreign workers in the name of our getting lower-cost merchandise. With this simple one-two musical punch, you are left with no doubt that Bob Dylan is back, and back with a vengeance.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s for that reason that the final two tracks on Infidels<\/i> disappoint me that much more. After such a powerful performance, one doesn\u2019t expect to be returned to the mediocre music that makes up the bulk of this disc. \u201cI And I\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Fall Apart On Me Tonight\u201d aren\u2019t bad tracks, I guess, but coming off the adrenalin rush of \u201cUnion Sundown,\u201d I expected much, much more.<\/p>\n
If Infidels<\/i> proved anything, it proved two points. First, it showed that the Dylan of old was still alive and well, writing songs to musically knock one on their behinds in order to get a point across. But it also showed that Dylan was going to need some time to get his musical sea-legs back \u2013 something that would prove to be difficult as the music industry itself continued to try and figure out which flavor of the month to follow, with Dylan not quite fitting in neatly with any of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5866],"rating":[11204],"class_list":["post-40710","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bob-dylan","rating-rating-c-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40710"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40710"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}