Ranking the Best 5 Songs on Bob Dylan’s Late-Period Masterpiece ‘Love and Theft’
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, Professional Fellow of Institute Of Information Management Africa, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador, Registered Freight Forwarder and Editorial Adviser at News Updates.
More about him here: https://independent.academia.edu/ChidiAnthonyOpara
cornelius...@gmail.com
Just a brief aside (I’m under pressure: Better Half wants to use her computer.
Whatever happened to Chidi’s lovebird Kenny Rogers?
The fact is that most of us fear the day and know not the hour.
Our Bobby Dylan jumped into that genre - the Kenny Rogers country genre sounding a little like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly in the Album “ Nashville Skyline”
And yes, I understand that Chidi is all for quiet poetic contemplation and meditation when it’s “ come on now it’s song time” - the Igbo soul rhythms jumping and bouncing off his shoulders and Sizzla like Rizla sizzling through his veins.
There’s this principle - call it corny if you like, the criterion: "If it don't have that swing, it don't mean a thing.” powerfully illustrated by Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald in "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)"
You’d have thought that Dylan the evangelist would have been endorsed by the Nigerian Pentecostals with all their hearts when he jumped on the Pentecostal bandwagon with his Slow Train Coming. But despite his passionate rendition of “I believe in you” he was only a Christian - if at all, for a little while.
Here’s my man: Bob Dylan: George Jackson
As a Dylan fan (ever since time began) I’d hate to valorise every song in every album - including the uncountable bootleg series ( I have many of them ) that Mr. Dylan has released since his INFIDELS, as “Masterpiece” - putting him on the same level as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Jimi Hendrix, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ralph Elision, Muhammad Ali, King Sunny Ade, Felix Baloy!
In the period under their purview, Dylan issued “ Modern Times” (2006) and there‘s one of my easy motion favourites: Spirit in the Water
You know the lines :
“Grandpa died last week
And now he’s buried in the rocks
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked
But me, I expected it to happen
I knew he’d lost control
When he built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes” ( Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again)
Re- “When I paint my masterpiece”: I hope that someday soon, I’ll pen a Dylan appreciation that will be wholly to my satisfaction and that this happens before either of us kicks the bucket further down the road and passes on to the Olam ha-ba - a time when all kinds of pious hypocrites rise to the occasion with some weepy hagiography mostly in response to the New York Times and the Rolling Stones obituary. With Sam Cooke, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, Franco, Miles Davis, Don Cherry, Fela Kuti, Michael Jackson, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Paco de Lucia, Leonard Cohen, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Hugh Masekela, who took us all by surprise and left us all bereft, it was pretty awful. From the 1960s to 2024, the list is long
cornelius...@gmail.com
cornelius...@gmail.com
With the ancestors :
James Brown - Soul Brother Number One (2006) Donald Byrd (2013) Joseph Jarman (2019/
João Gilberto (2019) Ginger Baker ( 2019) McCoy Tyner (2020) Manu Dibango (2020)
Tony Allen ( 2020) Cándido Camero (2021) Charlie Watts ( 2021)Pharoah Sanders (2022)
Jeff Beck (2023) Ahmad Jamal (2023) Julian Bahula ( 2023)