Confessional

Still in minimalist mode, I followed up Plastic Ono Band with Dylan's John Wesley Harding the other day. Another album which puzzled me in its heyday, aside from the instantly accessible All Along The Watchtower, but which I came to some terms with some years ago. So nothing revelatory, as with the Lennon, this time round, aside from a heightened awareness of just how many masks the Bobster wears in the various songs. In fact, how indirect an artist he really is, always coming at things at a slant, crooked. Always trying on the character who sings the song, who's never quite really Dylan. Whilst Lennon absolutely is himself in Plastic Ono Band, painfully, sometimes embarrassingly, but always wonderfully so.

Two ways of making art - from the utterly sincere, to the entirely false. Both turn out to be true.