A Film Canon

Self Portrait is one of Dylan's weaker albums, but its weakness at least serves a conceptual end, thereby exhibiting a self-consciousness, and even ingenuity, that makes it incomparable to his mid-80s nadir. This end is twofold - on the one hand, to eschew the revelatory voice that had been increasingly associated with him throughout the 1960s; on the other (and more radically), to reject any consistent or identifiable authorial voice, presumably for the sake of creating the vacuum necessary for the renewed experimentation and development that would culminate with Blood On The Tracks and Desire. Given the album's title, this makes for the most pervasively ironic of Dylan's efforts, and so, once again, redeems itself from the realm of his poorest moments, if only by taking one of his signature affects to its logical conclusion. This self-disassociation, or erasure, ensures that the album's material falls into four major categories. Its largest portion is devoted to covers of contemporary or near-contemporary songs, frequently chosen in a playful, perverse spirit. Most obviously, Dylan covers artists (Elvis, Simon & Garfunkel) whose sensibilities and style are apparently inimical to his own, as if to explicate their shared indebtedness to a relatively recent musical heritage. More subtly, he covers songs whose imagery makes for a surreal contrast with his own recurrent motifs and preoccupations, most delightfully Gordon Lightfoot's 'Early Mornin' Rain', the contrast between its airport backdrop and Dylan's railroad-drifting South acknowledged in the lyrics themselves ("You can't jump a jet plane/Like you can a freight train..."), and perhaps an indirect comment on the incongruity between Dylan's own concerns and the jet-setting lifestyle that they have generated. That said, there are several covers that are more in the respectful, traditional spirit of Bob Dylan - particularly Alfred Frank Beddoe's "Copper Kettle (The Pale Moonlight)", the highlight of the album - and these segue into the second, and most recognisably Dylanesque, mode, covers of traditional songs (most memorably "Alberta"). Thirdly, Dylan presents a series of live numbers, including an original number ("Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"), but mainly dating from the 1969 Isle Of Wight Festival, whose bemused, disoriented, disappointed crowd is presumably the prototype for this album's intended audience. Finally, Dylan presents a segment of original numbers - although, with the exception of the relatively brief "Living The Blues", these are all instrumentals, or, at least, either reduce Dylan's voice to a chanting instrument ("Wigwam"), or replace it altogether, most extraordinarily with the female crooners on the lavish first track, "All The Tired Horses", surely one of the most startling, unexpected openings in the history of the rock album (and perhaps only rivalled by David Bowie's Low)