“Initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive, earning a 95/100 rating from Metacritic based on 22 reviews. It would have taken the ignominious place in Dylan’s discography Self-Portrait has always occupied – because like that album, it is mostly crap.īut what are the critics of today saying? I’m going to cheat and copy and paste the “Critical Reception” section from Wikipedia ( ), because I think it communicates pretty well the kind of unjustifiably gushing reviews most of the servile, bootlicking, suckup music critics gave the album, just like they do for every other crap album dropped by a rock legend these days: So let’s do a little hypothetical thinking and place Rough and Rowdy Ways in 1970, after Nashville Skyline and before New Morning – what would have happened? The critics would have destroyed the album. That, of course, hasn’t happened since Under the Red Sky, it was about that time that music critics somehow became contractually obligated to lavish unearned praise on any album released by leftover rockers from the 60s and 70s.
These past few decades of aging rock stars getting rave reviews for lazy albums have made us forget that there was a time when an artist of Bob Dylan’s stature could release a bad album and actually get a bad review for it. If anything, he might have been more scathing. I think he would written pretty much the same scathing review. But imagine, for a moment, that after a decade of masterpieces like The Freewheeelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They are A’ Changin’ and Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, imagine that instead of releasing Self-Portrait he had released Rough and Rowdy Ways in 1970. And rightly so – Self-Portrait is not a good album, revisionist attempts to rehabilitate its image decades after the fact notwithstanding. Dylan, disappointed critics sharpened their knives and cut to the bone.
Accustomed to hearing nothing but genius from Mr. Let’s open this review of Rough and Rowdy Ways by paraphrasing Greil Marcus’ immortal opening line to his review of Bob Dylan’s Self-Portrait, “What is this sh…vaguely 50s sounding mishmash of cultural references from the 60s mixed with doomsday imagery sung by a grouchy old man with the most boring musical backing imaginable”? Actually, I’d like to use Self-Portrait as a starting point in assessing the quality of Rough and Rowdy Ways – back in 1970 Self-Portrait received universally scathing reviews.
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