Bob Dylan – The Best of Bob Dylan Review

Listeners have an endless supply of best-of compilations to choose from. Bob Dylan’s career has been ripped through time and again, and between Biograph and Mixing Up the Medicine, the simply titled The Best of Bob Dylan may be the worst of all. The Best of Bob Dylan is not to be confused with the excellent compilation of the same name, featuring tracks up to Oh Mercy. That at least has variety. A mission statement to define each album by just one song. It works a treat and is a compilation that new listeners can use as a chance to choose which classic they wish to start with first. The Best of Bob Dylan, however, is a mucky compilation on YouTube which highlights just how pathetic the facade for the channel is. A best-of compilation which only features songs from Dylan’s first two albums. It’d be like a Johnny Cash compilation using only his early ‘80s recordings.  

Either the staff monitoring the Dylan YouTube channel are folk purists still not over the electric controversy, or they had their keyboard stolen midway through compiling this piece. It is utterly useless. A best-of compilation implies this is the best of an artist from their whole career, not just up to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It’s a comical moment on the official channel, one of many ridiculous notions which has come to pass because of poor labelling and a desire to pump out anything with Dylan on it. So long as it is from the early years or the brief spot of religious sets, that is. A truly peculiar directive at the best of times is what guides the YouTube channel, and yet there is no real excuse for The Best of Bob Dylan. Let’s be clear. The trouble is not the quality of the songs selected, but the cut-off.

Tracks like Girl from the North Country, Masters of War, and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right are inevitabilities of any self-respecting best-of. You could even argue The House of the Rising Sun as an inclusion for a compilation. But even then, it misses the whole point of the music to follow and the contrast made. If we are to base The Best of Bob Dylan only on the albums featured, then it misses Song to Woody, arguably the first great song Dylan wrote and recorded, as well as A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. These playlists are generated with barely any care. There is enough care to feature a new album cover, but other than that, this is the height of laziness. Few will get it confused with the other, better compilations out there, but there is always the chance. That chance is what the YouTube channel relies on.  

Someone out there will listen to this and be left confused by the lack of Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks recordings. We live in difficult times as is, and there are at least a few listeners out there dumb enough to assume this is the correct edition, or even a valid release, in the many compilations of Dylan’s career. What usually separates a compilation is the track selection. Some bold choices can be found on the 2007 Dylan release. New songs were heard on Greatest Hits Vol. II. These compilations are not like the others. Few artists are releasing new material through their compiled efforts. Dylan did. This playlist, of course, offers none of that, but there is the slim chance it does, given they are the ones with the archival tapes. They litter them in other playlists and hope we do not notice. We do. The official channels should do more to curb the rise of these lazy playlists, but who knows what will happen.