It was Dylan's second double album, and features mostly cover versions of well-known pop and folk songs. Also included are a handful of instrumentals and original compositions. Most of the album is sung in the affected country crooning voice that Dylan had introduced a year earlier on ''Nashville Skyline''. Seen by some as intentionally surreal and even satirical at times, ''Self Portrait'' received extremely poor reviews upon release; Greil Marcus' opening sentence in his ''Rolling Stone'' review was: "What is this shit?"

Dylan later claimed in interviews that ''Self Portrait'' was something of a joke, far below the standards he set in the 1960s, simply to get people off his back and end the "spokesman of a generation" tags; but he has also given other, contradictory accounts of his motives.

Despite the negative reception, the album quickly went gold in the US, where it hit #4, and it gave Dylan yet another UK #1 hit before it fell down the charts. - Wikipedia

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