World Gone Wrong.

BOB DYLAN: notes to World Gone Wrong (Columbia), & MIKE KELLEY: Winter's Stillness #1. Reading Dylan as he explicates his album's old blues and Appalachian folk songs (on the ancient "Love Henry": "Henry-modern corporate ma off some foreign boat, unable to handle his 'psychosis' responsible for organizing the Intelligensia, disarming the people, an infantile sensualist"), two thoughts struck me. First, by abandoning liner notes after his 1965 Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan invented rock criticism, or anyway called it into being, simply by making a vacuum for it to fill. Second, even today no critic would dare make half as much of a song as Dylan always has when he's taken to putting them into other words.

Since a verbal commentary would inevitably fall short of the one Dylan had already provided, I thought World Gone Wrong needed a visual commentary, by someone who could let the music spark a picture. Given the opportunity, I asked Mike Kelley; he demurred, suggesting Raymond Pettibone. But then,paging through Mike Kelley--Catholic Tastes, the catalogue Elisabeth Sussman edited for Kelley's recent retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, I realized the picture was already there. Winter's Stillness #1 is from 1985: a top border illustrates the title in Currier & Ives cliches; below it there's a rough drawing of the map of the U.S.A. The top two-thirds are blank; then Kelley's version of the Mason-Dixon line stretches from coast to coast, with th lower third of the country dark and dank, the word "Hillbillies" dripping excreta into a lake of slime. On that lake is a cabalistic symbol, seemingly named in Kelley's caption, a pun on hillbilly cliche and on the title of the piece itself: "A NEW KIND OF STILL--IT DISTILLS PURE INBRED EVIL. THE FOUL-SMELLING MASH SINKS TO THE BOTTOM--FIRE-BREWED. DOWN HERE IT IS. UH UH." I that doesn't outdistance Dylan it sure as hell keeps up with him.