Media Nation

Well, of course Bob Dylan deserves to be among The New York Times’ “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters.” He could stand all by himself. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few bones to pick.

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First, Dylan’s “five essential songs” includes “Isis,” which is a good but not great song. More to the point, he had a co-writer on that one — Jacques Levy, whom Dylan employed as a lyricist on his 1976 “Desire” album. Of the hundreds of truly essential songs that Dylan has written over the past 60 years, why would the Times choose one on which he had substantial help with the lyrics?

Second, Jody Rosen, who wrote the Dylan essay, points to the so-so “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” from the B-plus “Infidels” album (1983), as an example of his sense of humor:

It’s like I’m stuck inside a painting that’s hanging in the Louvre
My throat starts to tickle and my nose itches, but I know that I can’t move

You want museums and humor? How about this, from “Visions of Johanna”?

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez, I can’t find my knees”

That’s from 1966’s “Blonde and Blonde,” a top-five Dylan album (or top three; or best ever), which isn’t even represented in the Times’ list of essentials. Nor is his acoustic period, which many admirers still regard as his greatest. Now, I’m mainly a fan of Dylan the rocker, but it’s hard to imagine how “Chimes of Freedom” didn’t make it in here. He could have won the Nobel Prize for that alone. Consider:

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder

Finally a nitpick. I’m glad to see that Dylan’s astonishing late-career comeback is represented in the essential-songs list. “Nettie Moore,” from “Modern Times” (2006), is deeply moving, both weird and elegiac. But the Times could have chosen “Not Dark Yet,” from “Time Out of Mind,” the 1997 album that began Dylan’s revival, which continues 29 years later. “Not Dark Yet” is even more elegiac than “Nettie Moore,” if less weird, and Daniel Lanois’ production makes it one of Dylan’s greatest recordings.

At least they got Patti Smith to contribute her thoughts about “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” She recalls hearing Dylan perform it live, before he recorded it. She says in part:

What I remember most was the line “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to,” which made me very sad. But the line that made me feel understood, and that I have held onto my whole life, was “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.” A person like me, who had many conflicting thoughts about everything, a lot that I kept to myself: I felt like he understood.

My caveat is that absolutely no one is going to be satisfied with anyone’s list of Dylan’s most esential songs. Mine changes all the time — and no doubt yours does, too.