And because it is well known that there are no coincidences, not in a setting like this and never with an artist like Dylan, that can only mean one thing. We are here, at the location of the show entitled “Shadow Kingdom”, beyond the reckoning of time. In a dimension in which the clocks somehow run differently, at least not forward. Maybe even beyond space. At the end of the film, the Bon Bon Club in Marseille is specified as the location. The last time we checked there was no Bon Bon Club in Marseille.
“Shadow Kingdom” was announced in mid-June as a streaming event that you could take part in via the Veeps platform, which is little known to us. A log-in ticket should cost $ 25. This was seen as a replacement for the many concerts that Bob Dylan has not given in the past year and a half.
With someone like him, who is otherwise always on tour, the pandemic pause has been felt most clearly since the end of 2019. Mainly because Dylan didn’t take part in nonsense like the virtual “One World: Together at Home” festival, where stars from their laundry rooms and ornamental gardens joined in. And because in June 2020 he also released “Rough and Rowdy Ways”, one of his best and most concise albums for a long time. A record that literally seemed to be thirsting to finally be thundered live from the ramp.
Dylan shows again and again how much you stay up to date even as a notorious living legend
The disappointment was all the greater for many when they realized it on the night from Sunday to Monday, punctually after the world-simultaneous start of the stream: “Shadow Kingdom” was not a real-time concert. Not even a filmed live performance. Apparently Dylan and his band had re-recorded some old songs in the studio. The recordings were then used as playback to accompany several concert scenes that the musicians re-enacted for the cameras.
In short: no more than an hour long music video. But, and that can be postulated in advance: a borderline ingenious good.
It’s not that easy with Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize winner who has just turned 80, inventor of songwriting and inexhaustible stage conductor. Some complain that others always unpack their meta-discourses in volumes as soon as the old man croaks a 50-year-old song into the microphone somewhere in Iowa. One can understand the lawsuit. On the other hand, and this must also be seen, Dylan’s interpretations of depth turn out to be absolutely justified in most cases.
He has recently shown again and again how much you can stay up to date even as a notorious living legend. How many ways there are to staging your own work in a clever and layered way in order to keep it alive in exactly this way. In Dylan’s world, music is an eternal performance culture, pure, agile action art. Which is only occasionally pressed onto records or saved in files so that people can actually come to the shows later.
They drink, they smoke, and then it becomes terribly surreal
What you see in “Shadow Kingdom”: A band gives a pub concert. The scenery is high-contrast black and white, the musicians wear masks, more Zorro than Corona. Only Dylan looks and sings into the camera while a handful of listeners crouch at the tables. They drink, smoke, and then it becomes terribly surreal. The light breaks in the smoke, in the crazy clouds that are exhaled here. The noble ladies and squat guys light up the room with their puffing. Right from the start, that’s so much more Expressionist cinematic art than MTV stuff could ever be.
Directed by Alma Har’el, an Israeli-born American who is known only from a few scattered videos. The film band is also young by Dylan’s standards, including the one Big-ThiefGuitarist Buck Meek and up-and-coming jazz star Joshua Crumbly. The youngest song on the setlist is from 1989, so not even from the new album. If it is always 10.11 a.m., you probably have to juggle the year numbers differently.
For this they went to the extra mile to invent a great, completely new sound for the sake of the show. Pieces like “Queen Jane Approximately”, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” or “Forever Young” suddenly shimmer, shimmer and take off. There are no drums and still swings, alternately smelling of a fair, with a velvet-lined theater and a juke joint. As if the master and the troupe had rolled up the collected dance music of the US pre-pop era, from zydeco to rockabilly, in large cigarette paper and let it go around once smoldering. So “Shadow Kingdom” even has the potential to reconcile people with Dylan, whom he has simply rumbled too much over the past few decades.
If virtual, then everything should follow the logic of the dream
But the aesthetic triumph is even greater. Because Dylan and his director have simply raised the Corona concert stream, this compulsive, visually and conceptually usually so dissolute genre, to a completely new aesthetic level. What you notice at the latest when Alma Har’el takes the band out of the pub and into a magical room, a limbo universe with a checkerboard floor and Doctor Caligari curtains. When, one scene later, she puts two odyssey muses at the singer’s side, who also kindly wipe the dust off his jacket shoulder. Suddenly a psychedelic spiral of light turns in the bar, the apathetic from before get up and begin an exuberant and slightly eerie ringelpiez. And applaud silently at the end, because the silence on the playback tape drowns out everything.
If a concert is already virtual, then please right away – that seems to be what “Shadow Kingdom” says to us. Then the event should also consistently follow the logic of the dream, the rules of the imagination. Then the show should be capable of all this, of all the alienation and abstruse spotlighting that is only possible as long as we cannot actually visit it. Ideally, not only should time get out of hand in the stream. But also every other law of narrative film semiotics.
The fact that Bob Dylan’s curly hair itself looks like a fleeting cloud of smoke in the backlight is only noticeable when everything is over after “Baby Blue”.
“Shadow Kingdom” is still available until Wednesday morning at nine (German time) via Bobdylan.veeps.com. The chance that it will soon be published on image carriers should be high.