Bob Dylan becomes first artist with a US Top 40 album in every decade since the 1960s

It’s Dylan’s 23rd Top 10 album, and his 50th to get a Top 40 position. As the new record states, the legendary singer/songwriter now has Top 40 albums in the last seven decades – eight in the 1960s, 14 in the ’70s, seven in the ’80s, four in the ’90s, seven in the ’00s, nine in the 2010s, and now his first in the 2020s.

In the UK, meanwhile, Dylan’s new album took the top spot, followed at No. 2 by Neil Young’s “lost” 1975 album ‘Homegrown’.

Giving ‘Rough And Rowdy Ways’ a five-star review before its release, NME wrote: “The roots of the erosion of US democracy plays out against a backdrop of counter-culture revolution. Between flickering scenes from Dealey Plaza and Parkland hospital, Dylan widens the shot to take in the birth of rock’n’roll, The Beatles, Woodstock and Altamont, before unleashed a bombardment of musical, cinematic and social references stretching the entire 20th Century, like ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ grew up and got a degree.

“Bluesmen, silent movie clowns, soul queens, jazz greats, rockers, hippies and pin-ups – Dylan revels in a hundred years of creative progress as if in accusation of America’s immutable ideological savagery. JFK, he’s saying, was just the highest profile, on-camera bloodstain to be splashed across the stars and stripes.”