Real Life Rock Top 10

6) Sean Wilentz reports on Bob Dylan's return to the Newport Folk Festival after 35 years (Aug. 5)

"The thing that was most apparent to me was how ghostly it was -- because they're all dead. All the people the young folk artists were drawn to in 1965 or before; they're all dead. Mississippi John Hurt is dead. Son House is dead. Geoff Muldaur was funny: He asked who had been to Newport before; he asked who had been born in 1965. Maybe half had. He told a story about Mississippi John Hurt: 'He'd just do a little finger-picking -- and we'd all collapse.' There were a lot of ghosts around. At the same time it was a very conscious passing on of that tradition to something new -- on the part of the older folks. Dylan did that very intentionally. Songs that he was singing in 1965, and songs that recalled that tradition.

"There was a roots stage -- [but] given the explosion of interest in [old-time] music, there was too little. Most of the music was personal song-stories. In a funny way, what with 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?,' Allison Krauss, the festival seemed to be out of step with where folk music now is. It was largely virtuoso self-indulgent adolescent angst. It was Shawn Colvin.

"Dylan walked out on stage with [Orthodox Jewish] earlocks -- and a ponytail, and a fake beard. He looked like a guy who was on the bus to Crown Heights and got lost. From another angle, not really seeing the beard, he could have been in a girl group -- he could have been in the Shangri-Las. Then he looked like Jesus Christ. He was putting on a show, and he was donning a mask -- because he's a minstrel. A Jewish minstrel. And an American minstrel.

"There came a point when he could have said something -- when he was introducing the band. I looked at him very closely then -- but he just sort of smiled. He twitched. And then he went into the last song, 'Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.' Then he goes away, and comes back, and does a sizzling Buddy Holly, 'Not Fade Away,' the Grateful Dead arrangement. Again it was ghosts. That was Bob Dylan. He was the whole fucking tradition. He was a one-man festival."

7) Kelly Willis, "Easy" (Ryko)

The devastatingly clear-voiced country singer can walk on melodies as if they're water. The first number, Willis' "If I Left You," has that kind of melody, but the words are inescapable, and they make no sense: If the singer left the guy who left her, she'd worry about him all the time and love him forever. The best number here is Paul Kelly's "You Can't Take It With You," a brilliantly slick putdown ("You might own a great big factory, oil wells on sacred land" -- "sacred land" is a priceless touch) Willis sings with barely a hint of malice.

8) "Me Without You," directed by Sandra Goldbacher (Fireworks/Goldwyn)

As we follow best friends Marina (Anna Friel) and Holly (Michelle Williams) from 1973 (jumping rope) to 2001 (watching their children play), pop eras come and go. In 1978, when the girls can't be more than 15, they crash at a punk non-party where Holly lets Marina's brother make love to her and Marina lets a guy shoot her up with heroin; a few years later their apartment wall features dead Ian Curtis of Joy Division, clutching his mike stand like a cross. You hear all the right period music, from the Clash to the Stranglers to Echo and the Bunnymen -- and nothing sounds half so right as, in a scene shot in a club where half the men seem to to be wearing Adam Ant pirate hats and skirts, a DJ pumps out Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough."

9) John Paxson, "Elvis Live at Five" (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's)

On a Dallas TV station looking for a new angle on the 25th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, a producer and a computer genius create a virtual Elvis and, making no pretense that it is anything but the image of a dead man, turn him into a talk show host. Then the station owner takes over and turns Elvis into a demagogue, taking on homosexuals, immigrants, Hare Krishnas, his denunciations backed by footage created by means of the same technology that keeps Elvis talking. Soon homicidal mobs roam the land, their victims driven before them: "Thousands of men, women and children in a long snaking line of misery and fear stumbling through the winter snows of Nebraska."

Very convincing. No happy ending.

10) Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising," on "Late Night With David Letterman" (CBS, Aug. 2)

With Steve Van Zandt singing into Springsteen's mike along with Patti Scialfa as the song hit its last choruses, it was impossible not to see his dimwitted "Sopranos" thug Silvio Dante there too. And that made it feel as if the song meant, among other things, to kill somebody.

• View blog reactions