Bob Dylan – Masters of War (SherGun Remix) Review

Hope for some sudden deafness to strike when listening to these Masters of War remixes. Bob Dylan, who marked a stunned and protest-worthy takedown of the Cold War on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan has his cries of country-wide shame revoked on The Aveners and SherGun reworkings. Stock gunmetal font usage and murky camouflage background aside, this is a withered approach to a mighty song which gets it all wrong. Masters of War (SherGun Remix) fails to distribute itself evenly – falling to a harsher rock styling as though gearing up for war rather than scaling down from it. A protest against warfare which sounds as though it would be played through the megaphones of a helicopter zooming through some foreign lands.  

A shame it misses the point entirely as the string editions do add a sense of epic grandeur. But then the percussion kicks in and it sounds more like generic menu music for an iPhone game than a project Dylan would want his name associated with. It is on SherGun, the double bill of Drew Sherrod and Strange Daddy, who miss the point with this one. It could not be any clearer where Masters of War stands. Hearing it trialled as this punchy piece of yearning action and excitement is a strange call to arms. A far stretch better than The Avener remix but still missing the fundamentals of what a remix or remake of a track should be. Having the haunting explosion of string and percussion rest on the “and I hope that you die” is turned into an endorsement of a terrifying period in world history. 

Masters of War (SherGun Remix) may sound middling to good at times, but its historical revisionism is a gut punch which should not be forgiven. Sherrod and Strange Daddy fail to acknowledge the essential and only message of this track – that the terrors and fear of living under the icy, nuclear grips of Cold War fear is anything to celebrate. It feels a bit more like a spit in the face to the original than a reworking, though this may be a grand sign of changing tides in how warfare is perceived in the United States. Nothing can be more of an exposing stance than the blind support of troops, and this is how Masters of War now sounds, blinded by crashing instrumentals and losing itself in the thick fog of brass.  

No, it was not to be for the remix package tackling a tender acoustic number from Dylan who expresses the rage and terror of a period which stretched for twenty years. People were rightly doubting the peace which had only just been secured – and listening to it all these years later and hearing the relevance still is at times reassuring but also a tease of the anxieties to come. Hearing the boom and combustible nature of the SherGun Remix feels more like musicians with a keen ear for instrumental beauty but no sense of timely releases or context. The bleak outlook presented in the original Masters of War is nowhere to be found. This remix adds instrumentals which try and champion warfare.