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Doubt Yourself
The 1980s were not very kind to Bob Dylan. He had entered into his forties after twenty years of on-off again celebrity, a hillbilly messiah of the folk movement, a renegade poet that had transformed rock music. His religious fervor phase had burned away. Career wise, all the momentum seemed gone, as Dylan lapsed into shoddy (sometimes terrible) production on his new studio albums. A few of these records were produced with truly confusing direction: to acclimate to the new alien sound of pop, synth, dance music, etc., or repudiate such trends altogether, thereby burying himself as dinosaur, nostalgic for old school recording styles. Dylan has always preferred to cut records in the same room as all the musicians, not to chop up the various parts of a track separately then fuse them together on the soundboard (which gives the mixer or producer the greater power). In the 80s, one could argue, more even than the Sun Records’ days of the earliest rock music, the producer became king. Every pop star today needs a Sam Phillips to do anything.
And in many ways, much like the political disasterism of Reagan conservatism back then, credit card mentalism, we haven’t left that world. Dylan would find a way out with World Gone Wrong. But that wouldn’t be until 1993, when Dylan donned only a guitar to make a covers record of obscure blues songs and ancient country ballads. World Gone Wrong is quietly a great album. On it, Dylan says, you’re right, I’m not of this time, and I refuse to pretend to be. Instead, I’m going back to the Dixieland of plantation evil, of lost heroic spirits, of hills and myth. The liner notes are wild. I’ll never tire of hearing his version of “Delia.”