When "Street-Legal" was released, it was dismissed by the American press. "Crawdaddy!" critic Jon Pareles remarked that "Dylan still needs a producer," but others found fault with both the songs and the performances. Greil Marcus criticized the singing as "simply impossible to pay attention to for more than a couple of minutes at a time" and accused "Is Your Love in Vain?" of sexism, claiming Dylan was "speak to the woman like a sultan checking out a promising servant girl for VD."