Will Ulrich: Bob Dylan, he is a-changin'

When Bob Dylan told an interviewer in 1965 that he was "just a song and dance man," the world was not ready to believe him.

After all, this was Dylan, the so-called voice of his generation, the unkempt, wise-cracking, harmonica-holder-carrying, darling of the illuminati. He was topical; he was a revolutionary; he was a poet.

Dylan abhorred such labels way back then and did his best -- consciously or unconsciously -- to frustrate nearly everyone's expectations from then on. From seclusion to country to born-again Christianity, Dylan managed to piss off everyone's sensibilities: he wasn't going to let any label stick on him.

But in the last 10 years or so, a new Dylan has emerged. He's an artist who spends most of the year on the road backed by a grown-up band, reworking his unmatched songbook in crowd-pleasing ways. He'll make "Desolation Row" -- a song that some knucklehead must have written his Ph.D. dissertation on -- sound like a dance hall number, and sometimes he'll even smile, an event that used to be tantamount to making a Buckingham Palace guard laugh at a dirty joke.

After all these years, Dylan fits the label he gave himself. Call him a postmodern troubadour if you want, he's just a song and dance man.

His recently released new studio album, Love and Theft, serves as the perfect capstone for this past decade. In the songs that comprise the 43rd album of his career, Dylan uses the 12-bar blues form as a jumping off point to explore a kind of archeology of American music. The self-produced work sounds loose and fun as his top-notch backing band leads the 60-year-old through a Southern landscape of bluesmen and riverboats.

His unorthodox appearance in the liner notes -- complete with pencil-thin mustache and broad-brimmed white hat -- is a sign of what the album has in store. It is a light-hearted and enjoyable work that, at the same time, mines the history of American blues and rock and roll.

"Mississippi" is perhaps the disc's best song. Previously recorded by Sheryl Crow, the tune begins with a brief guitar overture that, without the edge, recalls the fullness of sound that Dylan reached with the Nashville studio musicians that recorded Blonde on Blonde. The song's lyrics -- punctuated by an unforgettable chorus declaring that the only thing he did wrong was to "stay in Mississippi a day too long" -- are perfect for Dylan's aged and ever-imperfect vocal range.

Many of the songs on the album seem to be situated in strange times and places. "Moonlight" sounds like it was lifted right out of a 1930s Broadway musical. It begins by setting a scene: "The seasons they are turning and my sad heart is yearning / To hear again the songbird's sweet melodious tone."

"Bye and Bye" is similarly theatrical, but it has a much more decidedly Southern sound to it, with all its talk of "paintin' the town" and "makin' my last go-round."

"High Water," written for legendary Delta musician Charlie Patton, dips its hand deep into the meat of the blues, but it sits alongside a unique-sounding song like "Summer Days," which can perhaps best be described as one part rockabilly, one part swing and two parts Bob Dylan.

Why this mixture of styles?

The album's title may hold a clue. Love and Theft shares its title with a 1993 book by Eric Lott on the history of "blackface minstrelsy and the American working class." In it, Lott explores the intriguing way in which the appropriation of blackness functioned in American entertainment.

In a similar way, everyone knows that the history of American music in this past century is also largely a story of racial appropriation, a story of black music "stolen" by whites. Dylan is clearly playing with this history in his new album.

This doesn't mean that the album makes any coherent statement about this history; post-1963 Dylan is never so didactic. Rather, it merely conjures up the tangled roots of the blues, country and rock n' roll.

It's because this theme of appropriation can be applied so strongly to Dylan's own life and career that the title of this 43rd album is doubly meaningful.

From his arrival in New York City in 1961, Robert Zimmerman has been in the business of appropriating identities. The middle class Jew first became a rambling Woody Guthrie clone. Eventually the angry superstar became a Bible-thumping Christian. The white family man, scarred by a bitter divorce, found solace with black women who didn't treat him like a star.

After nearly 40 years of dueling with the spotlight, Dylan has come out for another performance. And he sounds as good as ever.

Will Ulrich is a senior Philosophy major from the Bronx, N.Y.

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