Once more into the bowels of the archival collection. Clarity comes to those who listen to Pretty Rainbow, not so much a new offering but a Trojan horse for early folk recordings. It is all the tape team can offer, and at this point, it would be remarkable to hear any playlist compilation feature songs not from the first three albums. They do not make it that far into the discography for Pretty Rainbow, a playlist creation featured on the official Bob Dylan YouTube account. Whoever is managing the channel is once more muddying the waters of an already difficult task. Piecing together the vast depths of a discography where even minor changes to the instrumental or vocal inflexion are praised to the heavens is hard enough without a lazy playlist such as Pretty Rainbow. This is, quite literally, the self-titled debut, but shuffled and featuring a single cut track.
Everyone wants a slice of the Dylan pie. He has and will remain one of the most-searched topics online. Placing Dylan’s name next to a project which sounds relatively unfamiliar is an easy win. But what does this mean for a compilation like Pretty Rainbow? It is hard to call it a compilation when all that happens is Bob Dylan is listened to out of order. But it does presume listeners can figure this out. For those who do dedicate their time to Pretty Rainbow and wonder what fresh material is in store for them, they will likely not realise before the end. There goes forty minutes which were better spent on a bootleg compilation from the hard-working curators of A Thousand Highways or Albums That Should Exist. Both can pull the deeper cuts, the oft-forgotten shows, out of the void.
An official channel has limited access to those given copyright laws, but still, there is a big enough backlog to make rewarding listens of Dylan’s work. Not just rewarding listens, but reinventions, as Pretty Rainbow tries to do here. Its “what if” answers the age-old question. “What if Dylan’s first album was played on shuffle, but also featured Baby, Let Me Follow You Down?” Thankfully, we have answered that question. Many more are left unresolved, such as the purpose of this playlist or the impact it has on those seeking out new material to feature on the carefully crafted bootlegs easily available on other websites. Pretty Rainbow features some excellent songs, of course it does, it is just the debut repackaged with a nonsensical reference to an optical phenomenon. What place the weather has on these songs is irrelevant to the context of covers, creative spills of love and folk passion.
Dig a little deeper into Pretty Rainbow, and you can, at least, find the source of this playlist. Rebeat Digital GmbH is an Austria-based digital distribution company which specialises in bringing digitised material to wider audiences. It is likely, then, that in selling off his discography, Dylan has not given it to trusted hands. He has sold off his songs to the cubeheads and day trippers who feel streaming should not be an active connection with music, but a way to peddle old songs. Like magpies, we flock to the promise of fresh material, a glitzy cover here or an extra song there, and it works. Time and again, we are fooled, and in the days of disgusting generative AI, be it action figure packages of Dylan or having a likeness cover songs he never did, we must be on our toes, wary of releases like Pretty Rainbow.
