Bob Gets Ronsoned

Okay, so go to Dylan07.com, where you will promptly get hit in the ear with Mark Ronson’s “re-version” of Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine).” This is the add-on single for a 51-song box set that Sony is releasing this fall.  Sony/Columbia is asking for a vote on whether people actually like the thing, probably to poke Dylan worshippers into a skin-shredding frenzy over what is being done to “sacred” material and whip up faux controversy.

Ronson is setting himself up as today’s primo desecrator — his “Stop Me” earlier this summer worked Smiths fans into a lynching mood. I thought it was the weakest track on Ronson’s “Version,” but not because I was trying to protect Morrissey from sacrilege — I just thought it sounded like a cheapola cut-and-paste job booming out of a Manila disco, and the Daniel Merriwether vocals just made it sound even more like one of those awful early ’90s Eurodisco songs that would end up on a late-night commercial for a bad collection of Technotronic and Black Box tracks. His Lily-augmented version of the Kaiser Chiefs’ “Oh My God” was much, much better.

But this remix of “Most Likely” is more in line with what RCA did when it commissioned Junkie XL to recast the obscure Elvis Presley song “A Little Less Conversation” as a left-field dance stomper, and then went back to the well with “Rubberneckin’” and “Burning Love” — the original vocals are there, just augmented with Ronson’s currently preferred Winehousey retro-soul arrangement.