Bob Dylan vs Funkstar De Luxe – All Along the Watchtower Review

With a man whose cover art depicts the alien from Destroy All Humans… the fight between Funkstar De Luxe and Bob Dylan takes on a form of out-of-this-world proportions. Who would win? Folk legend with a Nobel Prize or a bald man wielding a cowboy hat and grating cover of All Along the Watchtower? No clue. But here it is, a cover of a Dylan classic which wound its way into the hands of Jimi Hendrix. There is a fresh spot in hell for those who enjoy this cover of the Dylan classic. Another for the lengthy list of artists who hope to ride the coattails of his name value. The Ting Tings, Avenar, Mark Ronson and now the Funkstar himself. But this is a more egregious attempt – covers of massive classics from well-respected artists as if there was some rivalry or collaboration, as implied by the title.  

Not a hint of the passion Dylan displayed on the acoustic beauty makes it across to this clubhouse hatchet job. Ripped from Keep On Moving, this subtle attempt at moving along some of the best works available is a fascinating, dire experience. Not a second of this track sounds at all like the original, the point of a remix is not lost on Funkstar at least. What is lost is the meaning of the song. Does warbling and trip-hop exploitation make the most of Dylan and his verbal onslaught? No, it does not. It makes for an indifferent experience where the vocal performance of a fine song is rattled through speakers and repeated, redubbed and ripped apart. Awful listening for those who like a bit of meaning with their song. Funkstar has no sense of pride in these mixes, instead rushing through All Along the Watchtower as he attempts to explore and exploit another classic as a club number.  

“There must be some kind of way out of here,” becomes an attempt at leaving the club as it is filtered through a shoddy vocoder and trundles along with a few flickers of joy. A club trapping for your pill-loving relatives to dig if they were around for the scene twenty-five years ago. But nobody remembers the music fondly they hope to recapture the experience – this just happens to be the background fodder of the time when tripped-out acid lovers were throwing themselves around a sweat-covered dancefloor. This is not a matter of marking respect for the Dylan name or even on the monumental track but of knowing your audience. Funkstar gets nothing but the potential for rage from other parties with this one – a bait and switch that he would use across the Keep On Moving release.  

Overall it matters not what the context or aim of Keep On Moving was, the result was a nasty collection of cool tracks exposed to the subculture of popular beats and BPM. It made no sense to combine the acoustic folk heartbreaks of Dylan with a dancefloor fever which still grips festivals across the globe. Both are extreme and intense, the likes of which we will see evolve time after time. But together they mark a messy occasion and it is thanks to Funkstar that we now know never to put Dylan behind the decks of an Ibiza clubhouse. Or maybe do it, get him a few segments in the Boiler Room and take it from there. If Thom York and Charli XCX can, so too can the man behind All Along the Watchtower.