Well, it’s too late to put up a flashing siren on this story, and that pains me a great deal, but of-course it’s been announced that the new album by Bob Dylan will be released on August 29th, and will be titled “Modern Times.” Typical story here from the North Korea Times:

Columbia Records Monday announced the first album in five years from U.S. folk icon Bob Dylan will hit the streets Aug. 29.

Modern Times, Dylan’s 44th career album, will feature 10 new songs, his label announced in a news release.

“A new Bob Dylan record is an event. Bob is that rare artist whose music defies all trends and resonates throughout all levels of our culture, and he continues to be as contemporary and relevant as any artist in music, Columbia Chairman Steve Barnett said.

Some song titles reportedly include “Workingman’s Blues,” “Spirit on the Water,” “When the Deal Goes Down” and “Thunder on the Mountain.”

Well, what’s in an album title? Before speculating, one should ask what would have been gleaned in advance by knowing the titles of various other Bob Dylan albums. “Desire”? “Blonde On Blonde”? “Street Legal”? “Time Out Of Mind”? The more difficult thing by far is to come up with an example of a title that actually predicted something about the content of the album. The one that occurs to me at the moment is “Saved.” Yeah, that was relatively descriptive.

Dylan can be sly about titles. In 1985 he admitted using John Wesley Harding as the title of that album because:

… that was one song that I had no idea what it was about, why it was even on the album. I figured I’d call the album that, call attention to it, make it something special …

It worked. That song probably would have been dismissed as a kind of overly-light non-sequitor if the album had been titled, instead, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” But as it was, people tended to focus in on the mysteriousness of that title track about the outlaw/hero, and wonder what it all could possibly mean.

In Chronicles, Dylan recalls coming up with the title for his 1970 album:

I had just heard the song “New Morning” on the playback and thought it had come out pretty good. New Morning might make a good title, I thought, and said it to Johnston [the producer]. “Man, you were reading my mind. That’ll put them in the palm of your hand — they’ll have to take one of them mind-training courses that you do while you sleep to get the meaning of that.” Exactly. And I would have to take one of them mind-reading courses to know what Johnston meant by saying what he said.

Nevertheless, what would there be to do around here if not to indulge in a little bit of meditation on the title of the new Dylan album? Right, not very much. So here’s my two cents:

Clearly, “Modern Times” is the name of a great film by Charlie Chaplin. Dylan, with his thin appearance and at times clownish stage presence has been labeled “Chaplinesque” almost too many times to count by the usual wags. So, without even knowing the content of the album, that title could work as a joke on those who have so characterized Dylan — not unlike those who use the label “Dylanesque” to describe a great many songs and songwriters that would be better judged on their own merits. At the same time, the title could serve as a tip of the hat to Chaplin after all. The duality of the gesture would appeal to Dylan, one might imagine.

Moving on from Chaplin, of-course you have to consider the import of the phrase itself. “Modern Times” — as distinct from ancient times, mediaeval times, old times, previous times. The times they are a-changin’. And yet, even that song itself conveys a seemingly contradictory theme that is abiding in Dylan’s body of work; that as much as times change, they remain the same in important ways. As he put it in an interview in 1997, “people haven’t changed since Moses.”

And from 1985’s Biograph interview:

What’s changed? When did Abraham break his father’s idols? I think it was last Tuesday. God is still the judge and the devil still rules the world so what’s different?

From the same interview, Dylan considered the relative significance of his own time and seemed to find it wanting:

I mean if I had a choice I would rather have lived at the time of King David, when he was high King of Israel, I’d love to have been riding with him or hiding in caves with him when he was a hunted outlaw. I wonder what he would have been saying and about who — or maybe at the time of Jesus and Mary Magdalene — that would have been interesting, huh, really test your nerve … or maybe even later in the time of the Apostles when they were overturning the world … what happened in the ’sixties? Wiretapping?

The idea of our own time being somehow so distinct and important is a kind of vanity, Dylan seems to think. As he reflects on in Chronicles, he internalized a sort of template for his own body of work from the period of the American Civil War. Not because he wanted to write songs that were irrelevant to his own time, but because he instinctively saw this as a way to write songs that were intensely relevant to his time, and songs that would in turn not be left behind by the passing of time.

So, one finds it difficult in the context of the general drift of Dylan’s work not to hear a title like “Modern Times” as being perhaps a bit derisory. Are our times so modern? What does modern mean, other than chronologically more recent? Are we more enlightened — the same humanity that gave itself over to greater mass slaughter in the wars and tyrannies of the twentieth century than in any previous time? The same human race that seems to show every capability of keeping up the pace of killing and misery in the twenty-first century? Are we more modern for our relative God-lessness? For our skill at cheapening human life not only on the battlefield, now, but in the womb and in the laboratory? Are we more modern for worshipping the goddess of Earth as fanatical environmentalists, or for getting our astrological charts made out by computers, or for meditating on our “past lives,” or for fathering and then abandoning our children in unprecedented numbers?

Of-course one can take the whole “nothing changes” theme too far. Things obviously do change. Indeed, things have changed. The relative constant Dylan is tuned into is human nature. If we think that changes, that there really is a modern version of human nature we possess that leaves the old ways behind, then we should really look in the mirror more often.

Well, a lot of the above is my own sermonizing, but you get the idea. Modern times indeed.

None of this is to pre-judge the content of the album itself, about which I’d have zero speculation to make. It’s just what it is — a riff on the title, in the absence of being able to riff on the riffs themselves. As far as the album goes, I’m just very glad, as I’m sure lots of other people are, that another volume is going to be added to the inestimable body of work that is Dylan’s, America’s, the world’s and ours. It’s reached the stage where hoping for one thing or another from the new Dylan album is — or should be — patently ridiculous. It’s another chapter in the story. Maybe it will be as exciting as the best previous chapters, and maybe not, but you’ve got to want to have it, because you want the complete book.

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