Love and Theft (Bob Dylan Album) - Reception

Reception

In a glowing review for his "Consumer Guide" column published by The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote: "Before minstrelsy scholar Eric Lott gets too excited about having his title stolen . . . he should recall that Dylan called his first cover album Self Portrait. Dylan meant that title, of course, and he means this one too, which doesn't make "Love and Theft" his minstrelsy album any more than Self Portrait's dire "Minstrel Boy" was his minstrelsy song. All pop music is love and theft, and in 40 years of records whose sources have inspired volumes of scholastic exegesis, Dylan has never embraced that truth so warmly. Jokes, riddles, apercus, and revelations will surface for years, but let those who chart their lives by Dylan's cockeyed parables tease out the details. I always go for tone, spirit, music. If Time Out of Mind was his death album—it wasn't, but you know how people talk—this is his immortality album. It describes an eternal circle on masterful blazz and jop readymades that render his grizzled growl as juicy as Justin Timberlake's tenor—Tony Bennett's, even. It's profound, too, by which I mean very funny. 'I'm sitting on my watch so I can be on time,' he wheezes, because time he's got plenty of." Christgau gave the album an A+. Later, when The Village Voice conducted its Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 2001, "Love and Theft" topped the list, the third Dylan album to accomplish this. It also topped Rolling Stone's list.

In 2012, the album was ranked #385 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, while Newsweek magazine pronounced it the second best album of its decade. In 2009, Glide Magazine ranked it as the #1 Album of the Decade. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "The predictably unpredictable rock poet greeted the new millennium with a folksy, bluesy instant classic."