Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home

The folk scene thought Dylan had betrayed them by "going electric" on the first half of this watershed record and abandoning topical political songs in favor of whatever was on his roiling, restless mind. In fact, he just opened up possibilities for himself — and created folk-rock while he was at it. He's raiding ideas from blues and traditional songs even more deftly than before, and cranking them up until they're as immediate and catchy as the British Invasion pop that had taken over the airwaves in the previous year or so. "Maggie's Farm" is as delicious and resilient a critique of capitalism and its power relations as anyone has ever cooked up; "Subterranean Homesick Blues" pours out of Dylan faster than anyone can parse it. The electric half of the album is also funnier than history tends to remember — its last three songs are straight-up comedy. Every lyric on the album is packed with explosive little bon mots: "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," "you are a walking antique," "skippin 'reels of rhyme," "the highway is for gamblers." And the four imagistic wonders that constitute the original LP's second side were some of the first successful fusions of their era's poetry with pop music. What's "Mr. Tambourine Man" about? Anything you want it to be, pretty much, but mostly the delirious power of Dylan's language.