Bob Dylan - Infidels MPEG4 Audio File H.A. rip

For Infidels, his 22nd studio album (released in 1983), Bob Dylan returned from what critics--and audiences to some degree--felt was a 70's induced inertia and hiatus from the thought provoking imagery and emotional crispness of his earlier work. Here, Dylan is back to writing introspective, witty, and sometimes broken hearted songs that, while they echo some of the same political and religious themes of his younger years yet speak of contemporary issues (ie. the outsource/selling out of the American manufacturing, industry and economy) and contain a self effacement/awareness and irony that only age can bring to fruition. With the help of Dire Straits members Mark Knopfler (guitar, production and musical arrangement) and Alan Clark (keyboards), former Rolling Stones maestro guitar player Mick Taylor, and a rhythm section provided by a highly respected collaborative Jamaican team (Robbie Shakespeare [bass]/Sly Dunbar [drums]), Infidels consists of eight songs shot through with a new sensibility forged from the experimentation of youth and the soul searching of a man whose middle years are upon him.

Rolling Stone magazine's review of Infidels is that it succeeds due to "Knopfler and his fellows [having] coaxed some careful work out of the notoriously studio-shy Dylan without sacrificing the spontaneity that has always marked his best records". I think Infidels is an important record not only because of the collaborative process, but because of where Dylan and where his nation -- and the western world in general -- were at during this time period. American culture and politics of the time posited around the idea that American had strayed too far from the essentialist idea of family values and conservatism, but which under the early Reagan era expressed itself as a somewhat sick nostalgia for war as THE defining factor of American identity. Reaganomics had reduced the over all prosperity of the nation, while making the richest two per cent of the population two to three times wealther. A culculated process of deferring attention away from a system that had become so broken that the American Dream was a fiction of the past, so enemies were invented in order to offer a something or someone to to fight for, and a something or someone to fight against. It was a period ruled by a president and nation that felt the best that was yet to come could only come from looking backwards, from pulling out the dusty photo album of a the fantasy 50's tv sitcom family to breathe life into corpses that had never lived in the first place.
Like America at this time, Dylan also longs for a special time of belonging that was never really REAL (the 60's call to change and revolution -- had it happened or was it just some cool fashion trend that looked and felt better while stoned) and the sense of which can't be recreated without tearing down and rebuilding up a place scorched back into amnesia and childish naivety that the prosperous and hedonistic baby boom generation reflected during "the best years of their lives". The difference is in Infidels, is that while Dylan acknowledges the day dreams of the love years as a time of the very best of intentions, he realizes that nostalgia for a past is just that; it is a longing for an IMAGINARY past. What the future holds is uncertainty, and as we all struggle to do at important passages in our lives, particularly when youth is not quite gone yet age is not quite upon us, we understand that within the process to "know thyself", we must inevitably propel ourselves forward with at least the semblance of a jaunt in our step and a the vigour of curiosity a new age brings, as if to say: no matter what happened in the past, I'm still here, and now that I finally now know where I am…hey world, what ya got coming up for me next? (H.A.)