Bob Dylan
Together Through Life

I believe he has understood everything. And that he is the greatest.

Not a forward in a world of midfielders, but the absolute best in a world where we are all destined to be average.

Because the glory of brilliance, of the grand record, of the absolute and everlasting work is often smoke and mirrors, a decoy, small-time management, a special effect.

The artist, whether songwriter, painter, director, or writer, is judged by their body of work. By their entire body of work.

And it doesn't matter if you've had the time to make three albums or if Godorwhoever has given you the minutes and years to make thirty or forty.

An artist is judged by the art they have been able to weave into their life, which ultimately is their work, and it's all of it.

It is for this reason that certain former greats of ours can never boast the "A" in Artist. Because they've sold out, cheapened themselves, grown lazy, "televisionized".

Dylan has not. He hasn't done it.

If live, Our Man cultivates his own self-destruction, from that "magnificent wreck" he is, in his records he always manages to surprise us, producing, for some years now, one work more interesting and more genuinely beautiful than the last.

And these are mature works, the fruits of the hands and mind of a master chef, who knows the recipe, the dish, and the kitchen. Who knows taste, is the child of the God of Taste, and knows how to make you revel.

And he knows very well that the ingredients are the same, as are the pots and the stoves, and the desire to dine in the room is high and unchanged. And it's not the diners' fault if the world continues to be an increasing mess and the greats have become so few and alone.

It is useless to hope for a new dish, but possible and right to enjoy the variations, even small ones, of the usual great course.

Here the variations are the splendid omnipresent accordion, the huskier voice, more lived-in and "well-worn" than ever, the pure and profound sense of blues and folk (are they really different?).

At times, the deep soul of the Blues is touched, at times we brush against an environment we could almost blissfully define as Smooth, and it is wonderful that it is so. Then we are carried away by a ballad of stunning beauty, as if two years had passed and not more than forty since the first strumming.

There is the people, there is America, and there is Love in the words and in the music (and in the voice) of this gigantic genius of the 20th century, called to brighten these desolate years of the new millennium with works immortal because they are timeless.

No one can complain about the overproduction, especially when Bob will have crossed over, and his words and voice will reach us no longer, leaving us alone, at the mercy of predictable and horrifying tribute concerts, and the predictable rocky desert that will surround them.

No epitaph to the so-called light music could ever be better than these last Dylanesque and dilacerated works.

True, profound, absolute.