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OK, it's not really worth five stars but I do get tired of all of the negative and derivative reviews of this album. Some critic mentioned "nursery rhymes" at some point in the past and every unoriginal thinker out there now seizes on this term and parrots it to death.
It's a rather "lightweight" album at times but there are really only two songs that seem to be based on the so-called "nursery rhyme" structure - "Under the Red Sky" and "Cat's in the Well," both of which have an undertone of dark ambiguity, more so on the latter which verges on subtly Apocalyptic. They are still both enjoyable pieces of music and nothing like what a person might expect who has actually bought a REAL "nursery rhymes sung for children" kind of album for their kids. It's simply a "structure" he uses, and by the way, lots of rock-and-roll uses that same kind of simple repetitive structure. The same "structure" is used on "The Beatles" (White Album) song "Cry Baby Cry" to great effect; here, it's probably the inclusion of a line like "the little boy and the little girl got baked in a pie" that trips people up. But it's more like a surrealistic dream than a child's story.
One odd fact is that this is the only Dylan album I have (35 so far) that includes all of the lyrics. There's nothing monumentally moving here, but there are lots of subtle little gems sprinkled throughout, couplets and phrases of vaguely philosophical despair and questioning.
"Wiggle wiggle" rocks, even if the words sound like Bob wrote them for his four-year-old daughter to dance to, and the highly-lauded "Basement Tapes" are full of verses of equally monumental silliness. No one ever complained about "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," one version of which mentions "a flute that toots and a bee that stings, a bird that flies and and a sky that cries, a fish that walks and a dog that talks."
I don't consider "2 X 2" (which is a beautiful song) to be a nursery rhyme structure, as it and "10,000 Men" both seem to be based on a kind of gospel music that I used to hear when I was young. One of the songs I'm thinking of may have been called "Children Go Where I Send Thee" and used the same approach of counting one number higher on each verse. So what? It's an effective rhetorical technique and works well in those songs. Dylan knows all about old gospel and folk music and I'm surprised that people aren't recognizing some of those simple yet memorable devices on this album.
As I said, this album is fairly lightweight, for the most part, but quite listenable and fun, and there are no "skip-over" songs for me on it, unlike some of his best albums. ("Oh Mercy," one of my favorites, has at least one tedious song that I rarely listen to in its entirety, as do "Blonde on Blonde" and the last three "greats," "Time Out of Mind," "Love and Theft," & "Modern Times.")
This one is at least better than several of Dylan's albums and actually shows some of the same goofing-off spirit that occurs on some of his equally-listenable "Traveling Wilburys" contributions. And "Handy Dandy" is one of the most-fun Dylan songs out there, a song I can't help singing along with when I hear it.
It's not "Blonde on Blonde" or "Highway 61" or "Blood on the Tracks" but it's NOT "bad," although I can see how someone who was stuck in one of those '60's-stuff-only modes, whether folk/protest or '65-'66 triad-of-greats, might not think that this was up to snuff. It doesn't suck, it's just not "great" and in any case it's not irritating the way, say, the musical "sound" of "Empire Burlesque" seems so out-of-character and even contradictory to Bob's voice.
- Audio CD (February 22, 2008)
- Original Release Date: February 22, 2008
- Number of Discs: 1
- Label: Legacy
- Run Time: 35 minutes
- ASIN: B0015XAT3O
- Average Customer Review: 60 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#19,633 in CDs & Vinyl (See Top 100 in CDs & Vinyl)
- #163 in Rock Singer-Songwriters
- #582 in Folk Rock (CDs & Vinyl)
- #765 in Pop Singer-Songwriters
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