Who Has Had The Most “Returns To Form”?

Also, “always seem[ing] to have a return to form with every damn album according to at least one or two critics” and “seemingly every REM album is a proclaimed return to form by someone, even the really bad ones, to the extent it’s become a cliché and no one ever believes it” are not remotely equivalent to “gets five-star reviews in Rolling Stone and Spin and wins Pazz & Jop in a runaway.” So, reversing what I said upthread about the Fall, the reason Dylan seems the obvious choice, at least in proclaimed returns to form, is that he’s probably the right choice in proclaimed returns to form.

I don’t have a horse in this race. I doubt that I’ve heard more than three songs from Time Out Of Mind, though I heard the two subsequent albs and threw a few P&J points at one of them. I also have never heard a full R.E.M. album (though did squeeze “Losing My Religion” onto my 1991 singles ballot), don’t even remember what the last Bowie album I heard in full was (Lodger? Scary Monsters?), and haven’t at all kept up with the discussion about R.E.M. and Bowie. But a seeming precondition for our perpetually being able to find someone to declare an R.E.M. or Bowie return to form is that it be surrounded by widespread disbelief and indifference. I realize that there is an alternative: what made Dylan’s ’70s return-to-form threepeat of New Morning, Planet Waves (with Before The Flood being the return’s supposed confirmation), and Blood On The Tracks (ditto for Desire) extraordinary is that it necessitated that, each of the latter two times, some of the proclaimers discount (or admit that in their heart they’d never believed) the previous return(s) to form that they’d endorsed. So there’s the incredible need for the return, and then the dawning realization that, no, this wasn’t quite the buzz we wanted. Which isn’t to say that everyone was on board for the return. I remember a review of New Morning that lamented that Dylan wasn’t an amoeba hence, unlike a band, he couldn’t break up. And the only Dylan album to actually win Pazz & Jop in the ’70s was The Basement Tapes, recorded circa 1967. But the return-to-form albums came with an accompanying discourse of “We’ve got Dylan back” (though Planet Waves came after a long layoff from recording and touring, so that was part of the return too).

Whereas the accolades for Time Out Of Mind were from people who hadn’t expected or needed a great Dylan album.

Those are the only Dylan returns to form that really register, the three in the ’70s and Time Out Of Mind, with Love And Theft confirming and building on the latter. I still think those returns beat any other artist’s in the category Proclaimed Returns To Form – though from what TriffidFarm @39 says about Black Tie White Noise, it’s possible that Bowie had a ’90s string to match Dylan’s ’70s. I wasn’t paying attention if he did, but that hardly means he didn’t. But that’s what it would take for Bowie and R.E.M. to really be in the running. Of course, artists with a specialized market or with fanbases that are socially or geographically distant from me might also be in the running, but obviously I don’t know who they are.

But a point I don’t want to get lost is that there isn’t a difference in kind between wanting a Dylan or Young to return to form and wanting a John Shanks or a Timbaland or a Frank Farian or a Lukasz Gottwald to return to form, or a Kelly or a Britney or an Ashlee.

@44 some quality assumed not to usually inhere in the (popular?) art-form the artists under regard are working in

But certainly Louis and Elvis and Dylan etc. created our idea of what is possible in the art forms, and once those possibilities are there, they can’t be withdrawn – at the most will only fade or go into remission. Don’t know enough about Korean music, but I’d wager that acts like Seo Taiji in the ’90s and 2NE1 right now are living in a space of possibility partly created by Dylan and Michael Jackson, and that here in the U.S. the commentariat underestimated the extent to which groups like *NSync and the Backstreet Boys were living in such a space (and ’90s Michael Jackson was living in a space partly created by New Edition, like the Backstreet Boys and *NSync were)(btw, to complicate the story further, Teddy Riley is now producing records in Korea).