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The Philosophy of Modern Song
The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.
In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.
In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2022
About the author
Bob Dylan
515 books1,394 followersBob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album charts at #1, making him, at age sixty five, the oldest living person to top those charts.
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016).
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 632 reviews
November 6, 2022
Bobby Darin gets two songs, as does Willie Nelson. Beatles & Stones get zero. But that’s okay, I think Dylan was just inspired by some songs more than others; these aren’t his all-time favourites - he’s rude about a couple of them. But he loved the idea of writing about such lurid obscure singers as Johnny Paycheck and John Trudell at one end of the spectrum and interrogating some creaky old furniture like “Strangers in the Night”, “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” and “Black Magic Woman” at the other end of the almost infinite spectrum of popular song.
There are two parts to each section – a freewheeling riff on what the song inspires in the brain of Bob, then a couple of notes on the record itself, or, more often, the singer and his near death experiences. Occasionally something personal emerges – I had to find this rant against divorce lawyers piquant :
Divorce is a ten-billion-dollar-a-year industry…If you’re lucky enough to get into this racket, you can make a fortune manipulating the laws and helping destroy relationships between people who at one point or another swore undying love to one another. ….How many divorce lawyers are parties to this betrayal between two supposedly civilised people? The honest answer is all of them.
Unfortunately as other reviewers have noticed there are many rants about women in these oddball ruminations. Still from the same section (on “Cheaper to Keep Her” (what a title!) by Johnnie Taylor, 1973) Bob says :
But the screws already get tightened from all sides – women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists take turns putting a man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling.
I guess that’s why those hounded pressured men end up killing so many of their wives and girlfriends, yelling at them “Look what you made me do” while they dump the body in a shallow grave or torch the house. But I digress – we’re supposed to be talking about Bob Dylan talking about 66 old pop songs.
Bob gives us a steady supply of zingers
Rock and roll went from being a brick through the window to the status quo
and
He was a little guy, barely five feet and change. Like a lot of little men, he was wrapped tighter than the inside of a golf ball and hit just about as often.
(sounds like Raymond Chandler!) and
There are more songs about shoes than there are about hats, pants and dresses combined.
Along with this hardboiled jive talk there is a lot of hyperbole and dizzymaking overstatement. Talking about the rubbishy “Come on-a My House” by the sweet Rosemary Clooney he says
This is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer. The song of the guy who’s got thirty corpses under his basement and human skulls in the refrigerator.
Rosemary sings :
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you candy
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give a you
Apple, a plum and apricot-a too eh
Come on-a my house, my house I'm gonna give a you
Figs and dates and grapes and cakes eh
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you candy
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you everything
(deviant mouthpiece)
Seriously, Bob, get a grip.
HIPSTER LOOPINESS
This is the third book Bob has written for us. The first he didn’t even want to publish (quite rightly). That was Tarantula (1971). They had pestered the boy wonder for years – when are you gonna write a novel? And he had been typing away. And finally he gave up and said “that’s the nearest you are going to get”. And it was incoherent incomprehensible unreadable sub-Burroughs. Anyone who gets through it deserves a medal and therapy.
Second book was Chronicles Volume 1 published in 2004. There has never been a Volume 2. This was a brilliant series of highly detailed memories of 1961, 1970 and 1989, omitting everything else. I loved it. But then came the strange revelation that the book was not so much written as collaged. And the borrowing/thieving from other authors like Jack London, Hemingway, Proust, Twain and Henry Rollins and LIFE magazine (one specific issue) was extremely extensive. You can find all the details by googling “Bob Dylan Chronicles plagiarism”. So after that I was less than thrilled. Although the book itself is still a fascinating read. It’s confusing!
Now we have book three. Maybe I will not be surprised if the Dylanologists are able to trace some of the actual origins of the many striking phrases from Dylan’s various rants. Or maybe this is all his own work!
SOME STATS
66 songs are considered, 62 of them sung by men.
No surprise that the 50s are Dylan’s favourite years – 30 are from the decade he grew up in
12 from the 60s
15 from the 70s
The other 9 scattered between 1924 and 2003
A BIG COMPLAINT
This book contains many gorgeous photos, none of which are captioned or identified. Whoever omitted this crucial information should be fired.
LAST PETTIFOGGING NOTE
I saw that the lyrics for “Mack the Knife” and “The Whiffenpoof Song” are not credited correctly. For Mack, add English lyrics by Marc Blitzstein. For the other one add : Based on “Gentleman Rankers” by Rudyard Kipling.
There are two parts to each section – a freewheeling riff on what the song inspires in the brain of Bob, then a couple of notes on the record itself, or, more often, the singer and his near death experiences. Occasionally something personal emerges – I had to find this rant against divorce lawyers piquant :
Divorce is a ten-billion-dollar-a-year industry…If you’re lucky enough to get into this racket, you can make a fortune manipulating the laws and helping destroy relationships between people who at one point or another swore undying love to one another. ….How many divorce lawyers are parties to this betrayal between two supposedly civilised people? The honest answer is all of them.
Unfortunately as other reviewers have noticed there are many rants about women in these oddball ruminations. Still from the same section (on “Cheaper to Keep Her” (what a title!) by Johnnie Taylor, 1973) Bob says :
But the screws already get tightened from all sides – women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists take turns putting a man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling.
I guess that’s why those hounded pressured men end up killing so many of their wives and girlfriends, yelling at them “Look what you made me do” while they dump the body in a shallow grave or torch the house. But I digress – we’re supposed to be talking about Bob Dylan talking about 66 old pop songs.
Bob gives us a steady supply of zingers
Rock and roll went from being a brick through the window to the status quo
and
He was a little guy, barely five feet and change. Like a lot of little men, he was wrapped tighter than the inside of a golf ball and hit just about as often.
(sounds like Raymond Chandler!) and
There are more songs about shoes than there are about hats, pants and dresses combined.
Along with this hardboiled jive talk there is a lot of hyperbole and dizzymaking overstatement. Talking about the rubbishy “Come on-a My House” by the sweet Rosemary Clooney he says
This is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer. The song of the guy who’s got thirty corpses under his basement and human skulls in the refrigerator.
Rosemary sings :
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you candy
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give a you
Apple, a plum and apricot-a too eh
Come on-a my house, my house I'm gonna give a you
Figs and dates and grapes and cakes eh
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you candy
Come on-a my house, my house, I'm gonna give you everything
(deviant mouthpiece)
Seriously, Bob, get a grip.
HIPSTER LOOPINESS
This is the third book Bob has written for us. The first he didn’t even want to publish (quite rightly). That was Tarantula (1971). They had pestered the boy wonder for years – when are you gonna write a novel? And he had been typing away. And finally he gave up and said “that’s the nearest you are going to get”. And it was incoherent incomprehensible unreadable sub-Burroughs. Anyone who gets through it deserves a medal and therapy.
Second book was Chronicles Volume 1 published in 2004. There has never been a Volume 2. This was a brilliant series of highly detailed memories of 1961, 1970 and 1989, omitting everything else. I loved it. But then came the strange revelation that the book was not so much written as collaged. And the borrowing/thieving from other authors like Jack London, Hemingway, Proust, Twain and Henry Rollins and LIFE magazine (one specific issue) was extremely extensive. You can find all the details by googling “Bob Dylan Chronicles plagiarism”. So after that I was less than thrilled. Although the book itself is still a fascinating read. It’s confusing!
Now we have book three. Maybe I will not be surprised if the Dylanologists are able to trace some of the actual origins of the many striking phrases from Dylan’s various rants. Or maybe this is all his own work!
SOME STATS
66 songs are considered, 62 of them sung by men.
No surprise that the 50s are Dylan’s favourite years – 30 are from the decade he grew up in
12 from the 60s
15 from the 70s
The other 9 scattered between 1924 and 2003
A BIG COMPLAINT
This book contains many gorgeous photos, none of which are captioned or identified. Whoever omitted this crucial information should be fired.
LAST PETTIFOGGING NOTE
I saw that the lyrics for “Mack the Knife” and “The Whiffenpoof Song” are not credited correctly. For Mack, add English lyrics by Marc Blitzstein. For the other one add : Based on “Gentleman Rankers” by Rudyard Kipling.
September 8, 2023
How many stars of pop culture have been around longer than Bob Dylan? I am having trouble naming one. So, when I learned of this book, I asked my local library to put me on the waiting list.
For several years, Dylan, had a show on SiriusXM satellite radio call Theme Time Radio. As soon as I opened the book it whispered to me that this was going to follow a similar format of Bob’s stream of consciousness on a particular theme. Let me give you a few samples. In chapter 41 titled, Key to the Highway – Little Walter, he takes a wandering course to praise for Little Walter including: “It’s ironic, a lot of dignitaries give you the key to the city. That indicates that everything in the city is open to you for inspection at any time. I have gotten lots of keys to different cities but I’ve never really tried to inspect anything yet. Seven keys from seven houses in seven towns are supposed to cure impotence. A new key is better than an old key. You can strike a werewolf in the forehead with a key and that will bring him back to human form. If you are ever fired from a job, you’ve got to give your keys back. Some people say that if you take the last nail out of any coffin, it will work as a key to unlock what whatever you want to unlock…” He does get around to praising Little Walter as “a greater singer than anyone on Chess Records.” His singing is very good, but Dylan doesn’t mention his iconic harmonica. (If you like the song, also give a listen to the songwriter, Big Bill Broonzy’s version and that cut by David Bromberg.)
Perhaps the chapter that takes us back to his radio show is Chapter 37 – Blue Suede Shoes – Carl Perkins. In it, Dylan gives us a three-page riff on the significance of blue suede shoes to the man, and then adds an additional two pages covering other shoes in history (including during the Stalin era in Russia).
In Chapter 56 titled, Black Magic Woman - Santana, he goes on a long riff on how “The black magic woman is the ideal woman…” and never gets around to discussing Santana.
In Chapter 1 titled, Detroit City – Bobby Bare, he basically paraphrases the entire song and then speculates what might happen if “you’re going to take your foolish self-love and egotism and go back to what’s familiar.”
In Chapter 9 titled, My Generation - The Who, he chooses to focus on HIS GENERATION updated: "In reality, you're an eighty-year-old man, being wheeled around in a home for the elderly, and the nurses are getting on your nerves. You say why don't you all just fade away. You're in your second childhood, can't get a word out without stumbling and dribbling. You haven't any aspirations to live in a fool's paradise, you're not looking forward to that, and you've got your fingers crossed that you don't. Knock on wood. You'll give up the ghost first."
Dylan, in many ways, is the coyote of his era. So, in the words of Barrett Strong (as vocalized by Gladys Knight and/or Marvin Gaye) -
People say believe half of what you see
Some and none of what you hear
But I can't help but be confused
If it's true please tell me dear
Opinion shouldn’t be confused with fact. There are both in this fascinating book and you might need to pay attention to the differences or just kick back with your favorite intoxicant and let it all flow by. Which may make the case for getting this as an audiobook.
Additional notes:
The following (though speculation) is one of the delights of this book: “The guitar player sounds like Luther Perkins playing a Gibson Les Paul, instead of his usual Fender.”
“Soul records, like hillbilly, blues, calypso, Cajun, polka, salsa, and other indigenous forms of music contain wisdom that the upper crust often gets in academia. The so-called school of the streets is a real thing and it doesn’t just apply to learning to steer clear of hustlers and charlatans. While Ivy League graduates talk about love in a rush of quatrains detailing abstract qualities and gossamer attributes, folks from Trinidad to Atlanta, Georgia, sing of the benefits of making an ugly woman your wife and the cold hard facts of life.”
For several years, Dylan, had a show on SiriusXM satellite radio call Theme Time Radio. As soon as I opened the book it whispered to me that this was going to follow a similar format of Bob’s stream of consciousness on a particular theme. Let me give you a few samples. In chapter 41 titled, Key to the Highway – Little Walter, he takes a wandering course to praise for Little Walter including: “It’s ironic, a lot of dignitaries give you the key to the city. That indicates that everything in the city is open to you for inspection at any time. I have gotten lots of keys to different cities but I’ve never really tried to inspect anything yet. Seven keys from seven houses in seven towns are supposed to cure impotence. A new key is better than an old key. You can strike a werewolf in the forehead with a key and that will bring him back to human form. If you are ever fired from a job, you’ve got to give your keys back. Some people say that if you take the last nail out of any coffin, it will work as a key to unlock what whatever you want to unlock…” He does get around to praising Little Walter as “a greater singer than anyone on Chess Records.” His singing is very good, but Dylan doesn’t mention his iconic harmonica. (If you like the song, also give a listen to the songwriter, Big Bill Broonzy’s version and that cut by David Bromberg.)
Perhaps the chapter that takes us back to his radio show is Chapter 37 – Blue Suede Shoes – Carl Perkins. In it, Dylan gives us a three-page riff on the significance of blue suede shoes to the man, and then adds an additional two pages covering other shoes in history (including during the Stalin era in Russia).
In Chapter 56 titled, Black Magic Woman - Santana, he goes on a long riff on how “The black magic woman is the ideal woman…” and never gets around to discussing Santana.
In Chapter 1 titled, Detroit City – Bobby Bare, he basically paraphrases the entire song and then speculates what might happen if “you’re going to take your foolish self-love and egotism and go back to what’s familiar.”
In Chapter 9 titled, My Generation - The Who, he chooses to focus on HIS GENERATION updated: "In reality, you're an eighty-year-old man, being wheeled around in a home for the elderly, and the nurses are getting on your nerves. You say why don't you all just fade away. You're in your second childhood, can't get a word out without stumbling and dribbling. You haven't any aspirations to live in a fool's paradise, you're not looking forward to that, and you've got your fingers crossed that you don't. Knock on wood. You'll give up the ghost first."
Dylan, in many ways, is the coyote of his era. So, in the words of Barrett Strong (as vocalized by Gladys Knight and/or Marvin Gaye) -
People say believe half of what you see
Some and none of what you hear
But I can't help but be confused
If it's true please tell me dear
Opinion shouldn’t be confused with fact. There are both in this fascinating book and you might need to pay attention to the differences or just kick back with your favorite intoxicant and let it all flow by. Which may make the case for getting this as an audiobook.
Additional notes:
The following (though speculation) is one of the delights of this book: “The guitar player sounds like Luther Perkins playing a Gibson Les Paul, instead of his usual Fender.”
“Soul records, like hillbilly, blues, calypso, Cajun, polka, salsa, and other indigenous forms of music contain wisdom that the upper crust often gets in academia. The so-called school of the streets is a real thing and it doesn’t just apply to learning to steer clear of hustlers and charlatans. While Ivy League graduates talk about love in a rush of quatrains detailing abstract qualities and gossamer attributes, folks from Trinidad to Atlanta, Georgia, sing of the benefits of making an ugly woman your wife and the cold hard facts of life.”
November 25, 2022
Dylan Looks Back
Review of the Simon & Schuster hardcover (November 1, 2022)
I'll declare my bias upfront and say that I'm an old-time Dylan fan going back to "Highway 61 Revisited" being one of the first LPs that I ever purchased, so a 5-rating is a natural to me in this case. Assuming that you have at least a general interest in music history and trivia, most others will likely see it as a 3 to 4-rating.
Despite its overly pretentious title, The Philosophy of Modern Song hardly goes into any major analysis of the development or the structures of song writing, the verses & the choruses, the key changes, the melodies, the chord progressions etc. Instead, Bob Dylan examines 66 songs, mostly from the USA and in the mid-20th century, which for one reason or another have inspired or influenced him over time. Most of the essays are in two parts: an opening stream of consciousness about what the song evokes in him, followed by some history of the song or the singer (sometimes the songwriter(s)), often with an offbeat piece of trivia which somehow ties in. Reading the stream of consciousness portions you will often think that Dylan is writing about himself and not about the song at all.
Not surprisingly from a still performing musician who is often infamously labelled to be on a "never-ending tour", many of the songs are road and traveling songs which centre on a life on the move, whether that of a musician, an outlaw, a gypsy or a vagabond.
Aside from the expected classic early folk, blues, rhythm'n'blues, and rock'n'roll songs there is a perhaps surprising selection from tin pan alley, broadway musicals (and/or their movie adaptations), and romantic ballads. I did not detect any particular order to the listing. The earliest dated song seems to be Nelly was a Lady, written in 1849 by Stephen Foster. The latest recording seems to be By the Time I Get to Phoenix, recorded in 1996 by Jimmy Webb, although originally written by him in 1965 and made popular by Glen Campbell in 1967.
Theatrical poster of the original release of the film "Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back" (1967) dir. D.A. Pennebaker. Image sourced from Wikipedia.
The collection is lavishly illustrated with photographs of the recording artists, art posters and of other period real life or movie characters. Although photography & art credits are provided in an appendix, the actual subjects are not identified or captioned, so you are on your own to figure those out.
Elvis Presley in a record store in Memphis 1957, one of the photographs used in "The Philosophy of Modern Song." Image sourced from Pinterest.
The selection of trivia stories is often informative and entertaining. The one that stood out for me was that the generally believed popular myth that lemmings are suicidal is based on a faked sequence from the Walt Disney Company's so-called documentary movie White Wilderness (1958). This was the trivia story associated with song #65 Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, Pete Seeger's song about a suicidal army patrol crossing the Mississippi River, which was generally interpreted as political commentary on the Vietnam War.
Soundtrack, Trivia and Links
Song titles are linked to a copy of the recording on YouTube, in almost all cases those are of the original recording cited by Dylan, except in the case of #24 which was not available.
1. Detroit City (1963) by Bobby Bare.
2. Pump It Up (1978) by Elvis Costello.
3. Without A Song (1951) by Perry Como.
4. Take Me From this Garden of Evil (1956) by Jimmy Wages.
5. There Stands the Glass (1953) by Webb Pierce.
6. Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me (1973) by Billy Joe Shaver.
7. Tutti Frutti (1955) by Little Richard.
8. Money Honey (1956) by Elvis Presley.
9. My Generation (1965) by The Who.
10. Jesse James (1928) by Harry McClintock.
11. Poor Little Fool (1958) by Ricky Nelson.
12. Pancho and Lefty (1983) by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.
13. The Pretender (1976) by Jackson Browne.
14. Mack the Knife (1959) by Bobby Darin.
15. Whiffenpoof Song (1947) by Bing Crosby.
16. You Don’t Know Me (1956) by Eddy Arnold.
17. Ball of Confusion (1970) by The Temptations.
18. Poison Love (1950) by Johnnie and Jack.
19. Beyond the Sea (1958) by Bobby Darin.
20. On the Road Again (1980) by Willie Nelson.
21. If You Don’t Know Me By Now (1972) by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.
22. The Little White Cloud that Cried (1951) by Johnnie Ray.
23. El Paso (1959) by Marty Robbins.
24. Nelly was a Lady (2016) by Charles Szabo, n.b. Dylan's preferred recording is from (2004) by Alvin Youngblood Hart, but it was not available.
25. Cheaper to Keep Her (1973) by Johnnie Taylor.
26. I Got a Woman (1954) by Ray Charles.
27. CIA Man (1967) by The Fugs.
28. On the Street Where You Live (1956) by Vic Damone.
29. Truckin’ (1970) by The Grateful Dead.
30. Ruby, Are You Mad? (1956) by Osborne Brothers.
31. Old Violin (1986) by Johnny Paycheck.
32. Volare (1958) by Domenico Modugno.
33. London Calling (1979) by The Clash.
34. Your Cheatin’ Heart (1953) by Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys.
35. Blue Bayou (1963) by Roy Orbison.
36. Midnight Rider (1970) by The Allman Brothers.
37. Blue Suede Shoes (1956) by Carl Perkins.
38. My Prayer (1956) by The Platters.
39. Dirty Life and Times (2003) by Warren Zevon.
40. Doesn’t Hurt Anymore (2001) by John Trudell.
41. Key to the Highway (1958) by Little Walter.
42. Everybody Cryin’ Mercy (1968) by Mose Allison.
43. War (1970) by Edwin Starr.
44. Big River (1957) by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two.
45. Feel So Good (1957/58) by Sonny Burgess. [Unreleased?]
46. Blue Moon (1964) by Dean Martin.
47. Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves (1971) by Cher.
48. Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy (1924) by Uncle Dave Macon.
49. It’s All in the Game (1958) by Tommy Edwards.
50. A Certain Girl (1961) by Ernie K-Doe.
51. I’ve Always Been Crazy (1978) by Waylon Jennings.
52. Witchy Woman (1972) by Eagles.
53. Big Boss Man (1960) by Jimmy Reed.
54. Long Tall Sally (1956) by Little Richard.
55. Old and Only in the Way (1928) by Charlie Poole.
56. Black Magic Woman (1970) by Santana.
57. By the Time I Get to Phoenix (1996) by Jimmy Webb.
58. Come On-A My House (1951) by Rosemary Clooney.
59. Don’t Take Your Guns to Town (1958) by Johnny Cash.
60. Come Rain or Come Shine (1956) by Judy Garland.
61. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (1964) by Nina Simone.
62. Strangers in the Night (1966) by Frank Sinatra.
63. Viva Las Vegas (1964) by Elvis Presley.
64. Saturday Night at the Movies (1964) by The Drifters.
65. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (1967) by Pete Seeger.
66. Where or When (1959) by Dion.
Review of the Simon & Schuster hardcover (November 1, 2022)
I'll declare my bias upfront and say that I'm an old-time Dylan fan going back to "Highway 61 Revisited" being one of the first LPs that I ever purchased, so a 5-rating is a natural to me in this case. Assuming that you have at least a general interest in music history and trivia, most others will likely see it as a 3 to 4-rating.
Despite its overly pretentious title, The Philosophy of Modern Song hardly goes into any major analysis of the development or the structures of song writing, the verses & the choruses, the key changes, the melodies, the chord progressions etc. Instead, Bob Dylan examines 66 songs, mostly from the USA and in the mid-20th century, which for one reason or another have inspired or influenced him over time. Most of the essays are in two parts: an opening stream of consciousness about what the song evokes in him, followed by some history of the song or the singer (sometimes the songwriter(s)), often with an offbeat piece of trivia which somehow ties in. Reading the stream of consciousness portions you will often think that Dylan is writing about himself and not about the song at all.
Knowing a singer's life story doesn't particularly help your understanding of a song. Frank Sinatra's feelings over Ava Gardner allegedly inform "I'm a Fool to Want You," but that's just trivia. It's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important. - excerpt from #2 "Pump It Up" by Elvis Costello.
Not surprisingly from a still performing musician who is often infamously labelled to be on a "never-ending tour", many of the songs are road and traveling songs which centre on a life on the move, whether that of a musician, an outlaw, a gypsy or a vagabond.
The song is related to the talking blues. It's like Walt Whitman if he was a musician. The song contains multitudes. It's also played with a resonator on the banjo. It rings and twangs like an electric guitar. The guy is a thief. He steals meat, he steals chickens and he gets his women good and drunk. People say about entertainers that they may sing and play okay, but they are not good people. This song tells you why. - excerpt from #48 "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" by Uncle Dave Macon.
Aside from the expected classic early folk, blues, rhythm'n'blues, and rock'n'roll songs there is a perhaps surprising selection from tin pan alley, broadway musicals (and/or their movie adaptations), and romantic ballads. I did not detect any particular order to the listing. The earliest dated song seems to be Nelly was a Lady, written in 1849 by Stephen Foster. The latest recording seems to be By the Time I Get to Phoenix, recorded in 1996 by Jimmy Webb, although originally written by him in 1965 and made popular by Glen Campbell in 1967.
Theatrical poster of the original release of the film "Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back" (1967) dir. D.A. Pennebaker. Image sourced from Wikipedia.
The collection is lavishly illustrated with photographs of the recording artists, art posters and of other period real life or movie characters. Although photography & art credits are provided in an appendix, the actual subjects are not identified or captioned, so you are on your own to figure those out.
Elvis Presley in a record store in Memphis 1957, one of the photographs used in "The Philosophy of Modern Song." Image sourced from Pinterest.
The selection of trivia stories is often informative and entertaining. The one that stood out for me was that the generally believed popular myth that lemmings are suicidal is based on a faked sequence from the Walt Disney Company's so-called documentary movie White Wilderness (1958). This was the trivia story associated with song #65 Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, Pete Seeger's song about a suicidal army patrol crossing the Mississippi River, which was generally interpreted as political commentary on the Vietnam War.
Soundtrack, Trivia and Links
Song titles are linked to a copy of the recording on YouTube, in almost all cases those are of the original recording cited by Dylan, except in the case of #24 which was not available.
1. Detroit City (1963) by Bobby Bare.
2. Pump It Up (1978) by Elvis Costello.
3. Without A Song (1951) by Perry Como.
4. Take Me From this Garden of Evil (1956) by Jimmy Wages.
5. There Stands the Glass (1953) by Webb Pierce.
6. Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me (1973) by Billy Joe Shaver.
7. Tutti Frutti (1955) by Little Richard.
8. Money Honey (1956) by Elvis Presley.
9. My Generation (1965) by The Who.
10. Jesse James (1928) by Harry McClintock.
11. Poor Little Fool (1958) by Ricky Nelson.
12. Pancho and Lefty (1983) by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard.
13. The Pretender (1976) by Jackson Browne.
14. Mack the Knife (1959) by Bobby Darin.
15. Whiffenpoof Song (1947) by Bing Crosby.
16. You Don’t Know Me (1956) by Eddy Arnold.
17. Ball of Confusion (1970) by The Temptations.
18. Poison Love (1950) by Johnnie and Jack.
19. Beyond the Sea (1958) by Bobby Darin.
20. On the Road Again (1980) by Willie Nelson.
21. If You Don’t Know Me By Now (1972) by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.
22. The Little White Cloud that Cried (1951) by Johnnie Ray.
23. El Paso (1959) by Marty Robbins.
24. Nelly was a Lady (2016) by Charles Szabo, n.b. Dylan's preferred recording is from (2004) by Alvin Youngblood Hart, but it was not available.
25. Cheaper to Keep Her (1973) by Johnnie Taylor.
26. I Got a Woman (1954) by Ray Charles.
27. CIA Man (1967) by The Fugs.
28. On the Street Where You Live (1956) by Vic Damone.
29. Truckin’ (1970) by The Grateful Dead.
30. Ruby, Are You Mad? (1956) by Osborne Brothers.
31. Old Violin (1986) by Johnny Paycheck.
32. Volare (1958) by Domenico Modugno.
33. London Calling (1979) by The Clash.
34. Your Cheatin’ Heart (1953) by Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys.
35. Blue Bayou (1963) by Roy Orbison.
36. Midnight Rider (1970) by The Allman Brothers.
37. Blue Suede Shoes (1956) by Carl Perkins.
38. My Prayer (1956) by The Platters.
39. Dirty Life and Times (2003) by Warren Zevon.
40. Doesn’t Hurt Anymore (2001) by John Trudell.
41. Key to the Highway (1958) by Little Walter.
42. Everybody Cryin’ Mercy (1968) by Mose Allison.
43. War (1970) by Edwin Starr.
44. Big River (1957) by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two.
45. Feel So Good (1957/58) by Sonny Burgess. [Unreleased?]
46. Blue Moon (1964) by Dean Martin.
47. Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves (1971) by Cher.
48. Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy (1924) by Uncle Dave Macon.
49. It’s All in the Game (1958) by Tommy Edwards.
50. A Certain Girl (1961) by Ernie K-Doe.
51. I’ve Always Been Crazy (1978) by Waylon Jennings.
52. Witchy Woman (1972) by Eagles.
53. Big Boss Man (1960) by Jimmy Reed.
54. Long Tall Sally (1956) by Little Richard.
55. Old and Only in the Way (1928) by Charlie Poole.
56. Black Magic Woman (1970) by Santana.
57. By the Time I Get to Phoenix (1996) by Jimmy Webb.
58. Come On-A My House (1951) by Rosemary Clooney.
59. Don’t Take Your Guns to Town (1958) by Johnny Cash.
60. Come Rain or Come Shine (1956) by Judy Garland.
61. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (1964) by Nina Simone.
62. Strangers in the Night (1966) by Frank Sinatra.
63. Viva Las Vegas (1964) by Elvis Presley.
64. Saturday Night at the Movies (1964) by The Drifters.
65. Waist Deep in the Big Muddy (1967) by Pete Seeger.
66. Where or When (1959) by Dion.
December 30, 2023
“All art is one,” proclaimed Ballets Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev, and Bob Dylan obviously concurs. His broad statement here isn’t what he says about anything in particular, it’s that he’s written 66 short articles about 66 songs he likes, and presented them non-chronologically, nor grouped by style, as testament that rock ‘n roll, blues, country, doo wop, folk, soul, funk, Tin Pan Alley, hillbilly warbling, and the Great American Songbook are all equally worthy aesthetic forms.
I’d assumed his analysis would be heavily craft-specific: this key, that chord change, arrangement, vocal inflection, but he’s more interested in the intangibles, the magic. I could have done without the beatnik-y riffs on lyric imagery and thematic summations, but his attendant historical nuggets, comparisons, and opinions are pure gold. This is probably what it’s like to hang out with Bob Dylan these days, an octogenarian with a story from every one of the million miles he’s traveled.
I also wondered what my own list might look like. Sat around awhile, came up with:
"There'll Be Some Changes Made" - Boswell Sisters, 1932
"I'm Against It" - Groucho Marx, 1932
"Hong Kong Blues" - Hoagy Carmichael, 1939
“Manteca” - Dizzy Gillespie, 1947
“All Shook Up” - Elvis Presley, 1957
“Pannonica” - Thelonious Monk, 1957
“Blue Moon” - The Marcels, 1961
“Surf City” - Jan & Dean, 1963
“House of the Rising Sun” - The Animals, 1964
“I’m Waiting for the Man” - The Velvet Underground, 1967
“Call Any Vegetable” - The Mothers of Invention, 1967
“I Can See for Miles” - The Who, 1967
“Loose” - The Stooges, 1970
“Echoes” - Pink Floyd, 1971
“Hobo Ho” - Charles Mingus, 1972
“Big Eyed Beans from Venus” - Captain Beefheart, 1972
“Return of the Grievous Angel” - Gram Parsons, 1974
"When in Rome" - Tony Bennett & Bill Evans, 1975
“Heroes” - David Bowie, 1977
“Hey Nineteen” - Steely Dan, 1980
"From the Air" - Laurie Anderson, 1982
“King of Rock” - Run-D.M.C., 1985
“The Queen is Dead” - The Smiths, 1986
"Battery" - Metallica, 1986
“Tania” - Camper Van Beethoven, 1988
“Tunic” - Sonic Youth, 1990
“Day of Reckoning” - Robbie Robertson, 1991
“Pigeon Club” - Jump with Joey, 1997
"America, Fuck Yeah!" - DVDA, 2004
“Feel Good Inc.” - Gorillaz w/ De La Soul, 2005
"Hey Life" - Tune-Yards, 2014
"Right Hand Man" - Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2015
"Heavy Balloon" - Fiona Apple, 2020
“It Might Be Time” - Tame Impala, 2020
"My Own Version of You" - Bob Dylan, 2020
I’d assumed his analysis would be heavily craft-specific: this key, that chord change, arrangement, vocal inflection, but he’s more interested in the intangibles, the magic. I could have done without the beatnik-y riffs on lyric imagery and thematic summations, but his attendant historical nuggets, comparisons, and opinions are pure gold. This is probably what it’s like to hang out with Bob Dylan these days, an octogenarian with a story from every one of the million miles he’s traveled.
I also wondered what my own list might look like. Sat around awhile, came up with:
"There'll Be Some Changes Made" - Boswell Sisters, 1932
"I'm Against It" - Groucho Marx, 1932
"Hong Kong Blues" - Hoagy Carmichael, 1939
“Manteca” - Dizzy Gillespie, 1947
“All Shook Up” - Elvis Presley, 1957
“Pannonica” - Thelonious Monk, 1957
“Blue Moon” - The Marcels, 1961
“Surf City” - Jan & Dean, 1963
“House of the Rising Sun” - The Animals, 1964
“I’m Waiting for the Man” - The Velvet Underground, 1967
“Call Any Vegetable” - The Mothers of Invention, 1967
“I Can See for Miles” - The Who, 1967
“Loose” - The Stooges, 1970
“Echoes” - Pink Floyd, 1971
“Hobo Ho” - Charles Mingus, 1972
“Big Eyed Beans from Venus” - Captain Beefheart, 1972
“Return of the Grievous Angel” - Gram Parsons, 1974
"When in Rome" - Tony Bennett & Bill Evans, 1975
“Heroes” - David Bowie, 1977
“Hey Nineteen” - Steely Dan, 1980
"From the Air" - Laurie Anderson, 1982
“King of Rock” - Run-D.M.C., 1985
“The Queen is Dead” - The Smiths, 1986
"Battery" - Metallica, 1986
“Tania” - Camper Van Beethoven, 1988
“Tunic” - Sonic Youth, 1990
“Day of Reckoning” - Robbie Robertson, 1991
“Pigeon Club” - Jump with Joey, 1997
"America, Fuck Yeah!" - DVDA, 2004
“Feel Good Inc.” - Gorillaz w/ De La Soul, 2005
"Hey Life" - Tune-Yards, 2014
"Right Hand Man" - Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2015
"Heavy Balloon" - Fiona Apple, 2020
“It Might Be Time” - Tame Impala, 2020
"My Own Version of You" - Bob Dylan, 2020
December 26, 2022
Reviewed for Newcity.com:
Even before Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the esteemed literary critic Christopher Ricks referred to him as “the greatest living user of the English language.” While that may sound like hyperbole to the uninitiated, anyone looking for a glimmer of why Dylan’s verbal dexterity has always held—and continues to hold—so many of his admirers in thrall would do well to peruse “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” a new collection of sixty-six essays that he began writing in 2010, and his third official book (following “Tarantula,” a collection of prose poems published in 1971, and “Chronicles: Volume One,” an offbeat memoir from 2004). The ingenious sense of wordplay that characterizes the Minnesota bard’s best work as a songwriter, including the songs that appear on 2020’s majestic “Rough and Rowdy Ways” album, is everywhere in evidence in this substantial yet wild 334-page work of creative nonfiction.
It isn’t necessary to be a Dylan fan to appreciate “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” however, since the book’s subject is the work of other musicians. Dylan dissects popular songs spanning the majority of the history of recorded music—from Uncle Dave Macon’s 1924 hillbilly ditty “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” to Alvin Youngblood Hart’s soulful, piano-driven cover of Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady” from 2004. Dylan only name-drops one of his own songs once—when rightly mentioning that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is in the DNA of Elvis Costello’s adrenaline-pumping “Pump It Up.” But, as a friend of mine likes to point out, Dylan also has a way of indirectly talking about his own work through discussing the work of others. That would seem to be the case here, as when he praises crooner Bobby Darin for his unusual, ahead-of-the-beat phrasing or extols bluegrass act the Osborne Brothers for allowing a song to “morph and grow” from its original studio version to a radical rearrangement in live performance years later.
“The Philosophy of Modern Song” excels as traditional music criticism when it wants to: Dylan has a knack for making surprising and provocative points of comparison (e.g., the way Black bluesman Jimmy Reed “signs off” on the verses of his songs with harmonica riffs that are similar in function to the yodeling of white country singer Jimmie Rodgers) and contrast (the narrator of Ernie K-Doe’s “A Certain Girl,” Dylan assures us, is a guy you want to know while the narrator of The Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret” is someone you want to avoid). But the book is at its very best when it takes off into more poetic flights of fancy—the interstitial sections that publisher Simon & Schuster has referred to as “dreamlike riffs” in pre-release publicity. These passages, which appear immediately before more conventionally written essays on the same songs, resemble both the liner notes to Dylan’s “World Gone Wrong” LP from 1993 as well as his Nobel lecture from 2017 (wherein he described his favorite works of literature by using an unusual second-person, present-tense point of view).
This being Dylan, the book is also frequently digressive, funny and perverse. An essay on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her,” for instance, serves as a pretext for Dylan to indict the greedy lawyers he sees as responsible for the “ten-billion-dollar-a-year” divorce industry before seguing into an outrageously satirical defense of “polygamist marriage.” Still other analyses may catch readers off guard for their heartfelt sincerity, as when Dylan decries modern society’s disregard for the elderly or the historical mistreatment of Native Americans. Some will undoubtedly be surprised by the inclusion of artists like Cher, The Eagles and The Fugs, while several of Dylan’s biggest influences (such as Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson) are conspicuously absent. It’s worth pointing out, however, that the book isn’t meant to be a comprehensive encyclopedia but rather a series of eclectic musings—some playful, others profound—on songs about which the author felt he had something to say. Besides, we can always hope for a Volume 2.
Even before Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the esteemed literary critic Christopher Ricks referred to him as “the greatest living user of the English language.” While that may sound like hyperbole to the uninitiated, anyone looking for a glimmer of why Dylan’s verbal dexterity has always held—and continues to hold—so many of his admirers in thrall would do well to peruse “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” a new collection of sixty-six essays that he began writing in 2010, and his third official book (following “Tarantula,” a collection of prose poems published in 1971, and “Chronicles: Volume One,” an offbeat memoir from 2004). The ingenious sense of wordplay that characterizes the Minnesota bard’s best work as a songwriter, including the songs that appear on 2020’s majestic “Rough and Rowdy Ways” album, is everywhere in evidence in this substantial yet wild 334-page work of creative nonfiction.
It isn’t necessary to be a Dylan fan to appreciate “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” however, since the book’s subject is the work of other musicians. Dylan dissects popular songs spanning the majority of the history of recorded music—from Uncle Dave Macon’s 1924 hillbilly ditty “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy” to Alvin Youngblood Hart’s soulful, piano-driven cover of Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady” from 2004. Dylan only name-drops one of his own songs once—when rightly mentioning that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is in the DNA of Elvis Costello’s adrenaline-pumping “Pump It Up.” But, as a friend of mine likes to point out, Dylan also has a way of indirectly talking about his own work through discussing the work of others. That would seem to be the case here, as when he praises crooner Bobby Darin for his unusual, ahead-of-the-beat phrasing or extols bluegrass act the Osborne Brothers for allowing a song to “morph and grow” from its original studio version to a radical rearrangement in live performance years later.
“The Philosophy of Modern Song” excels as traditional music criticism when it wants to: Dylan has a knack for making surprising and provocative points of comparison (e.g., the way Black bluesman Jimmy Reed “signs off” on the verses of his songs with harmonica riffs that are similar in function to the yodeling of white country singer Jimmie Rodgers) and contrast (the narrator of Ernie K-Doe’s “A Certain Girl,” Dylan assures us, is a guy you want to know while the narrator of The Beatles’ “Do You Want to Know a Secret” is someone you want to avoid). But the book is at its very best when it takes off into more poetic flights of fancy—the interstitial sections that publisher Simon & Schuster has referred to as “dreamlike riffs” in pre-release publicity. These passages, which appear immediately before more conventionally written essays on the same songs, resemble both the liner notes to Dylan’s “World Gone Wrong” LP from 1993 as well as his Nobel lecture from 2017 (wherein he described his favorite works of literature by using an unusual second-person, present-tense point of view).
This being Dylan, the book is also frequently digressive, funny and perverse. An essay on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her,” for instance, serves as a pretext for Dylan to indict the greedy lawyers he sees as responsible for the “ten-billion-dollar-a-year” divorce industry before seguing into an outrageously satirical defense of “polygamist marriage.” Still other analyses may catch readers off guard for their heartfelt sincerity, as when Dylan decries modern society’s disregard for the elderly or the historical mistreatment of Native Americans. Some will undoubtedly be surprised by the inclusion of artists like Cher, The Eagles and The Fugs, while several of Dylan’s biggest influences (such as Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson) are conspicuously absent. It’s worth pointing out, however, that the book isn’t meant to be a comprehensive encyclopedia but rather a series of eclectic musings—some playful, others profound—on songs about which the author felt he had something to say. Besides, we can always hope for a Volume 2.
January 3, 2023
Well, I dunno. I’m a big Dylan fan, from Highway 61 Revisited through Rough and Rowdy Ways, seen him in most of the decades of my life, so I was of course given this book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, for the holidays. One of the great songwriters and performers ever. Oh, there’s a lot of crap in this book, of course, but you can expect that from a Jokerman, a con man (in the most playful sense), a master of disguise.
As soon as I had known of the title of this book, before I had even seen it, I knew he was goofin’ on us. He’s not a philosopher, he’s a shapeshifter. But if you ever doubted his deep respect for and knowledge of music history, you have only to see the songs he dj’ed on his XM Satellite Radio show, or listen to the musical tributes he makes to popular and obscure twentieth century music, and you will know he may be a joker, but not when it comes to playing music.
Dylan’s book, a 334-page work of creative nonfiction.The Philosophy of Modern Song, is itself a joke as there is ery little philosophy of music in it. In a 1997 interview, Dylan said that “I find religiosity and philosophy in music. I don't find it anywhere else.'' You can see his fanciful take on a lot of popular music. You get some wonderful(and unattributed) photographs (argh), you get a lot of rambling, some of it a little mean or just strange, 62 of the 66 songs were sung by men. If that weren’t already a problem, he sometimes makes snide? mock-snide? Comments about women in his notes--like liner-notes).
Most of the songs he chooses are from the fifties, the era he grew up. There’s a Stephen Foster sing covered in 2004; otherwise no twenty-first century music. None of his chief musical influences seem to be here, such as Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. So there doesn’t seem to be much of a move to coherence. Maybe diversity is the point. We expect quirky from him and we get it. I expect tongue-in-cheek from time to time, too. Here’s the list, all of which you can find on YouTube, which I recommend doing as you read:
“Detroit City”--(Bobby Bare); “Pump It Up”--(Elvis Costello & the Attractions); “Without a Song”--(Frank Sinatra);“Take Me From This Garden of Evil”--(Jimmy Wages); “There Stands the Glass”--(Webb Pierce); “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me”--(Billy Joe Shaver); “Tutti Frutti”--(Little Richard); “Money Honey”--(Elvis Presley); “My Generation”--(The Who); “Jesse James”--(Harry McClintock); “Poor Little Fool”--(Ricky Nelson); “Pancho and Lefty”--(Townes Van Zandt); “The Pretender”--(Jackson Browne); “Mack the Knife”--(Bobby Darin); “The Whiffenpoof Song”--(Rudy Vallee); “You Don’t Know Me”--(Ray Charles); “Ball of Confusion”--(The Temptations); “Poison Love”--(Johnnie & Jack); “Beyond the Sea”--(Bobby Darin); “On the Road Again”--(Willie Nelson); “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”--(Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes); “The Little White Cloud That Cried”--(Johnnie Ray); “El Paso”--(Marty Robbins);“Nelly Was a Lady”--(Stephen Foster); “Cheaper to Keep Her”--(Johnnie Taylor); “I Got a Woman”--(Ray Charles); “CIA Man”--(The Fugs); “On The Street Where You Live”--(From “My Fair Lady”); “Truckin'”--(The Grateful Dead); “Ruby, Are You Mad?”--(The Osborne Brothers); “Old Violin”--(Johnny Paycheck); “Volare”--(Domenico Modugno); “London Calling”--(The Clash); “Your Cheatin’ Heart”--(Hank Williams); “Blue Bayou”--(Roy Orbison); “Midnight Rider”--(The Allman Brothers Band); “Blue Suede Shoes”--(Carl Perkins); “My Prayer”--(The Platters); “Dirty Life and Times”--(Warren Zevon); “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore”--(Regina Belle); “Key to the Highway”--(Little Walter); “Everybody Cryin’ Mercy”--(Mose Allison); “War”--(Edwin Starr); “Big River”--(Johnny Cash); “Feel So Good”--(Shirley & Lee); “Blue Moon”--(Elvis Presley); “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”--(Cher); “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”--(Uncle Dave Macon); “It’s All in the Game”--(Tommy Edwards); “A Certain Girl”--(Ernie K-Doe); “I’ve Always Been Crazy”--(Waylon Jennings); “Witchy Woman”--(Eagles); “Big Boss Man”--(Jimmy Reed); “Long Tall Sally”--(Little Richard); “Old and Only in the Way”--(Charlie Poole); “Black Magic Woman”--(Santana); “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”--(Glen Campbell); “Come On-a My House”--(Rosemary Clooney); “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”--(Johnny Cash); “Come Rain or Come Shine”--(Ray Charles); “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”--(Nina Simone); “Strangers in the Night”--(Frank Sinatra); “Viva Las Vegas”--(Elvis Presley); “Saturday Night at the Movies”--(The Drifters); “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”--(Pete Seeger); “Where or When”--(Dion and the Belmonts).
Here’s just a taste of the prose:
There’s humor, as you might expect:
“No matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass.”
About Mose Allison, kind of responding to the play in Allison’s “Everybody’s Crying Mercy.”:“You’re the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud—the stool pigeon, the scandal-mongerer—the prowler and the rat—the human trafficker and the car jacker,” he writes, riffing on Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Crying Mercy.”
On "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" by Uncle Dave Macon: "It's like Walt Whitman if he was a musician. The song contains multitudes. It's also played with a resonator on the banjo. It rings and twangs like an electric guitar. The guy is a thief. He steals meat, he steals chickens and he gets his women good and drunk. People say about entertainers that they may sing and play okay, but they are not good people. This song tells you why.”
Oh, there’s a touch of insight on many pages:
“In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid.” He cautions against “the trap of easy rhymes.”
“Sometimes when songwriters write from their own lives, the results can be so specific, other people can’t connect to them. Putting melodies to diaries doesn’t guarantee a heartfelt song.”
“The more you study music, the less you understand it.”
“. . . an inexplicable thing happens when words are set to music. The miracle is in their union. . . People keep trying to turn music into a science, but in science one and one will always be two. Music, like all art, including the art of romance, tells us time and time again that one plus one, in the best of circumstances, equals three.”
“Music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space,” Dylan writes.
As soon as I had known of the title of this book, before I had even seen it, I knew he was goofin’ on us. He’s not a philosopher, he’s a shapeshifter. But if you ever doubted his deep respect for and knowledge of music history, you have only to see the songs he dj’ed on his XM Satellite Radio show, or listen to the musical tributes he makes to popular and obscure twentieth century music, and you will know he may be a joker, but not when it comes to playing music.
Dylan’s book, a 334-page work of creative nonfiction.The Philosophy of Modern Song, is itself a joke as there is ery little philosophy of music in it. In a 1997 interview, Dylan said that “I find religiosity and philosophy in music. I don't find it anywhere else.'' You can see his fanciful take on a lot of popular music. You get some wonderful(and unattributed) photographs (argh), you get a lot of rambling, some of it a little mean or just strange, 62 of the 66 songs were sung by men. If that weren’t already a problem, he sometimes makes snide? mock-snide? Comments about women in his notes--like liner-notes).
Most of the songs he chooses are from the fifties, the era he grew up. There’s a Stephen Foster sing covered in 2004; otherwise no twenty-first century music. None of his chief musical influences seem to be here, such as Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. So there doesn’t seem to be much of a move to coherence. Maybe diversity is the point. We expect quirky from him and we get it. I expect tongue-in-cheek from time to time, too. Here’s the list, all of which you can find on YouTube, which I recommend doing as you read:
“Detroit City”--(Bobby Bare); “Pump It Up”--(Elvis Costello & the Attractions); “Without a Song”--(Frank Sinatra);“Take Me From This Garden of Evil”--(Jimmy Wages); “There Stands the Glass”--(Webb Pierce); “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me”--(Billy Joe Shaver); “Tutti Frutti”--(Little Richard); “Money Honey”--(Elvis Presley); “My Generation”--(The Who); “Jesse James”--(Harry McClintock); “Poor Little Fool”--(Ricky Nelson); “Pancho and Lefty”--(Townes Van Zandt); “The Pretender”--(Jackson Browne); “Mack the Knife”--(Bobby Darin); “The Whiffenpoof Song”--(Rudy Vallee); “You Don’t Know Me”--(Ray Charles); “Ball of Confusion”--(The Temptations); “Poison Love”--(Johnnie & Jack); “Beyond the Sea”--(Bobby Darin); “On the Road Again”--(Willie Nelson); “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”--(Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes); “The Little White Cloud That Cried”--(Johnnie Ray); “El Paso”--(Marty Robbins);“Nelly Was a Lady”--(Stephen Foster); “Cheaper to Keep Her”--(Johnnie Taylor); “I Got a Woman”--(Ray Charles); “CIA Man”--(The Fugs); “On The Street Where You Live”--(From “My Fair Lady”); “Truckin'”--(The Grateful Dead); “Ruby, Are You Mad?”--(The Osborne Brothers); “Old Violin”--(Johnny Paycheck); “Volare”--(Domenico Modugno); “London Calling”--(The Clash); “Your Cheatin’ Heart”--(Hank Williams); “Blue Bayou”--(Roy Orbison); “Midnight Rider”--(The Allman Brothers Band); “Blue Suede Shoes”--(Carl Perkins); “My Prayer”--(The Platters); “Dirty Life and Times”--(Warren Zevon); “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore”--(Regina Belle); “Key to the Highway”--(Little Walter); “Everybody Cryin’ Mercy”--(Mose Allison); “War”--(Edwin Starr); “Big River”--(Johnny Cash); “Feel So Good”--(Shirley & Lee); “Blue Moon”--(Elvis Presley); “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”--(Cher); “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”--(Uncle Dave Macon); “It’s All in the Game”--(Tommy Edwards); “A Certain Girl”--(Ernie K-Doe); “I’ve Always Been Crazy”--(Waylon Jennings); “Witchy Woman”--(Eagles); “Big Boss Man”--(Jimmy Reed); “Long Tall Sally”--(Little Richard); “Old and Only in the Way”--(Charlie Poole); “Black Magic Woman”--(Santana); “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”--(Glen Campbell); “Come On-a My House”--(Rosemary Clooney); “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town”--(Johnny Cash); “Come Rain or Come Shine”--(Ray Charles); “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”--(Nina Simone); “Strangers in the Night”--(Frank Sinatra); “Viva Las Vegas”--(Elvis Presley); “Saturday Night at the Movies”--(The Drifters); “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”--(Pete Seeger); “Where or When”--(Dion and the Belmonts).
Here’s just a taste of the prose:
There’s humor, as you might expect:
“No matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass.”
About Mose Allison, kind of responding to the play in Allison’s “Everybody’s Crying Mercy.”:“You’re the spoofer, the playactor, the two-faced fraud—the stool pigeon, the scandal-mongerer—the prowler and the rat—the human trafficker and the car jacker,” he writes, riffing on Mose Allison’s “Everybody’s Crying Mercy.”
On "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" by Uncle Dave Macon: "It's like Walt Whitman if he was a musician. The song contains multitudes. It's also played with a resonator on the banjo. It rings and twangs like an electric guitar. The guy is a thief. He steals meat, he steals chickens and he gets his women good and drunk. People say about entertainers that they may sing and play okay, but they are not good people. This song tells you why.”
Oh, there’s a touch of insight on many pages:
“In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid.” He cautions against “the trap of easy rhymes.”
“Sometimes when songwriters write from their own lives, the results can be so specific, other people can’t connect to them. Putting melodies to diaries doesn’t guarantee a heartfelt song.”
“The more you study music, the less you understand it.”
“. . . an inexplicable thing happens when words are set to music. The miracle is in their union. . . People keep trying to turn music into a science, but in science one and one will always be two. Music, like all art, including the art of romance, tells us time and time again that one plus one, in the best of circumstances, equals three.”
“Music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space,” Dylan writes.
December 1, 2022
This book is fun. Savor it. Enjoy Bob Dylan's streaming consciousness. I had my music app open and listened to the songs as I read.
November 3, 2022
Musings from the man behind Highway 61 Revisited and Rough and Rowdy Ways will most definitely be in high demand. Bob Dylan is projected by fans and contemporaries alike as one of the great lyricists of his time. A Nobel Prize-winning writer, yet despite that, there is little of that marked quality in The Philosophy of Modern Song, a book that details 66 select tracks. What reason they have for appearing within this bulky book beyond that of Dylan picking them is unknowable. Pairing Dylan’s knowledge of music with that of his thoughts on popular tracks from his own life, but with little expansion on what the mega fans will already pretend they know.
At the core then, The Philosophy of Modern Song must note itself as an interesting read. It is vaguely so. Very light, very brief musings that would barely last a page should the font be in proper order. Visuals abound, this is half picture book, half distant ramblings from a seasoned veteran of the music industry. Dylan is aware of his presence with fans and actively rejects his reputation. Muttered musings on already-known backstories with the likes of Perry Como and Elvis Costello. Each entry boils down to core essentials that see Dylan throw out synonyms for what the song makes him think, an abrupt and brief history stretched over the page and no real comment on its place in either his life or that of the listener beyond the pages. To expect The Philosophy of Modern Song to be a personal account is a fool's errand, but to engage with it in the hopes of having any form of new detail or experience appears just as foolhardy.
Under the guise of legend, Dylan takes aim at what constitutes a family (if you don’t have kids, you’re just “friends with benefits and insurance coverage”) and the holiness of polygamy. These often incomplete thoughts range from anywhere from a few pages to barely half a paragraph. Stretching the book out is the imagery, not conjured by Dylan but by the propped-up stocks and album covers littered throughout. Do they engage in any form with the writing around it? Not particularly. For the nodding dogs of the fandom, whatever Dylan prattles out is going to have context and mystery, intrigue and desire placed upon it. That comes not from his words, especially not in The Philosophy of Modern Song, but from individual interpretation. This is a book of interpretations, fairly obvious ones at that. His interpretation of song, sometimes followed by an unhinged ramble and then three images to stretch the pages, is a theme spread across the book.
Disjointed ramblings from the man who holds power over millions with his words, The Philosophy of Modern Song gets to no point or conclusion featured in the title. Whether any of this is seriously what Dylan believes is unknowable. He keeps the shroud up and his guard higher, and to that end he reveals nothing. Dylan is aware that many reading his book will take his word as gospel. His influence is that far and mighty for people, and to have him not tarnish his reputation, but completely disregard it, is truly the funniest part of this non-book entity. A masterclass from Dylan, but that is what he was expecting his audience and critics to think anyway. To release this as Nick Cave puts out his beautiful, touching and moving piece, Faith, Hope and Carnage are to realise Dylan is a man who has no want or need to be honest with those that praise him for his openness.
If you liked this review, you can read more of my work on my website, Cult Following.
At the core then, The Philosophy of Modern Song must note itself as an interesting read. It is vaguely so. Very light, very brief musings that would barely last a page should the font be in proper order. Visuals abound, this is half picture book, half distant ramblings from a seasoned veteran of the music industry. Dylan is aware of his presence with fans and actively rejects his reputation. Muttered musings on already-known backstories with the likes of Perry Como and Elvis Costello. Each entry boils down to core essentials that see Dylan throw out synonyms for what the song makes him think, an abrupt and brief history stretched over the page and no real comment on its place in either his life or that of the listener beyond the pages. To expect The Philosophy of Modern Song to be a personal account is a fool's errand, but to engage with it in the hopes of having any form of new detail or experience appears just as foolhardy.
Under the guise of legend, Dylan takes aim at what constitutes a family (if you don’t have kids, you’re just “friends with benefits and insurance coverage”) and the holiness of polygamy. These often incomplete thoughts range from anywhere from a few pages to barely half a paragraph. Stretching the book out is the imagery, not conjured by Dylan but by the propped-up stocks and album covers littered throughout. Do they engage in any form with the writing around it? Not particularly. For the nodding dogs of the fandom, whatever Dylan prattles out is going to have context and mystery, intrigue and desire placed upon it. That comes not from his words, especially not in The Philosophy of Modern Song, but from individual interpretation. This is a book of interpretations, fairly obvious ones at that. His interpretation of song, sometimes followed by an unhinged ramble and then three images to stretch the pages, is a theme spread across the book.
Disjointed ramblings from the man who holds power over millions with his words, The Philosophy of Modern Song gets to no point or conclusion featured in the title. Whether any of this is seriously what Dylan believes is unknowable. He keeps the shroud up and his guard higher, and to that end he reveals nothing. Dylan is aware that many reading his book will take his word as gospel. His influence is that far and mighty for people, and to have him not tarnish his reputation, but completely disregard it, is truly the funniest part of this non-book entity. A masterclass from Dylan, but that is what he was expecting his audience and critics to think anyway. To release this as Nick Cave puts out his beautiful, touching and moving piece, Faith, Hope and Carnage are to realise Dylan is a man who has no want or need to be honest with those that praise him for his openness.
If you liked this review, you can read more of my work on my website, Cult Following.
November 22, 2022
2.5 rounded up to for the photos and ephemera included with the essays. Unfortunately there is no copy with the photos only an archival list on the last page in tiny print. Some of the essays were interesting, but Dylan's frame is strange. I'm not sure if he was inspired by the songs he included or just had things he wanted to say about them. There are very few contemporaries of Dylan included, and of the 66 songs he writes about only four are performed by women: Cher, Rosemary Clooney, Judy Garland and Nina Simone. I think what the author left out says much more about him than the philosophy of modern song. Gift book? Maybe if you love Bob Dylan.
February 10, 2023
Here’s what Bob has to say about the Fugs in Chapter 27:
And that’s a pretty humorous paragraph to encounter midway through The Philosophy of Modern Song because daring you to “figure out what they were about” has generally been the case with Dylan himself over the course of his long career and specifically what you’ll discover as soon as you crack open this book which lurches along over the course of Bob’s 66 short chapters devoted to the 66 songs (you think that number’s a coincidence?) he discusses here, careening from the absolutely brilliant to the totally baffling with no rhyme or reason for why he has selected these songs, how he’s ordered them, or what he wants to say about each.
Here in his new book Bob dares you to figure things out for yourself, and that’s often an impossible task based on some of the strange content. For example, how did Cher's “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” make the cut while there’s nothing here by Woody Guthrie? And if you really need to include the Eagles, of all the tunes you could pick, why choose “Witchy Woman,” especially when Santana's “Black Magic Woman” appears just a few pages later? Or “The Whiffenpoof Song”? Really, Bob…?
I’m not complaining, mind you. I’m a fan, and I have been since my grade school days, so I’m used to Bob being inscrutable. We’re talking about the guy who helped me develop a love of language, the guy who wrote “Highway 61 Revisited," “All Along the Watchtower” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” all those great tunes I listened to on the radio back in the '70s, but when by the time I had a job and earned some spending money of my own to take to the record store, he was putting out the insufferable Slow Train Coming or Shot of Love or Saved. That was a kick in the balls, but I rolled with it and although it took me decades, I can even listen to some of that stuff now. But he’s also the guy who long before that changed things up at the ’65 Newport Festival when he went electric, riling up all the folkies there, and then a year later went to England and got the Brits’ panties in such a bunch they called him Judas. Bob is so elusively mercurial that he was played by six different actors in the 2007 film I'm Not There, including Cate Blanchett. When you are least expecting, he’ll release an album of Christmas carols. And then he’ll go and put out a triple set of the dusty old tunes he enjoyed as a lad, whether anyone out there is interested or not.
So with Bob, you never know what you’re going to get, and that's how it is with the Jokerman. But unlike those folkies, I don’t feel betrayed, although still a lot of numbskulls today will attend a show on his Never Ending Tour and leave unhappy because they don’t recognize any of the songs he’s played. And then they see a playlist later and discover those mysterious tunes were actually some of their favorites turned inside out by a performer who likes to change things up. Bob don’t really care and I fully understand. Bob’s Muse is not subject to the simple whims of mere mortals.
Thus it is with The Philosophy of Modern Song, a book which contains precious little “philosophy” and hardly anything in the way of “modern song,” depending on your definition of that term. The most “modern” of the 66 songs is an obscure tune by John Trudell called “It Don’t Hurt Anymore,” which is already well over 20 years old by now. The earliest song of the bunch is by Stephen Foster, going all the way back to 1849. By and large, the table of contents reads like your grampa’s “Favorite Songs” playlist on Spotify set to “random,” if your grampa is still alive and knows how to use Spotify. Today’s casual reader will recognize far fewer than half the titles that appear. To make things stranger, on the cover is an image of Little Richard and Eddie Cochrane flanking Alis Lesley, the so-called “female Elvis Presley.” Why is she on the cover? I dunno, because Alis is never referred to in the book, as far as I can tell, although Little Richard gets two chapters (“Tutti Fruitti” and “Long Tall Sally”). Go figger.
The book opens with a discussion of Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” interpreted by Bob as a confessional from the Prodigal Son and closes with Dion’s “Where or When,” which gives Bob a chance to rap on and on about reincarnation, memory, and repetition, before moving to a discussion of the 1937 Broadway show Babes in Arms reincarnated and ruined by Busby Berkeley two years later for Hollywood and then on to Dion himself, a performer who went through a number of his own rebirths: “an earnest Teenager in Love to a swaggering Wanderer, a soul-searching friend of Abraham, Martin and John to a hard-edged leather-clad king of the urban jungle who was a template for fellow Italo-rocker Bruce Springsteen. Most recently, he has realized one of his early dreams and become some kind of elder legend, a bluesman from another Delta.” And that’s all true, and equally the case for the inscrutably ever-changing Dylan.
So here’s what the book is not. It’s definitely not what the dust jacket claims it is, “a master class on the art and craft of songwriting,’ which makes me think Simon and Schuster should make their editorial staff read the books before they assign them the task of writing the blurb. No, it’s not that at all, no matter how much maybe Bob’s editor hoped it would be. What it is instead, at least what it seems to be, is Bob woke up in the morning, had a cup of coffee and chose the first song that popped into his head, maybe a song he dreamed about that night, maybe some song he remembered from the radio back when he was a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, maybe just some song that has stuck with him over the years, and once he had it, he hammered out some random musings on the song maybe on a Smith-Corona, maybe longhand on a Big Chief tablet, again, I dunno. It would be fascinating to actually hear from Bob about what his creative process was or why he wrote this book in the first place or how he chose these songs, but nope, like I said, he gives us no clues.
Instead, as with Montaigne or Pascal, we get a collection of pensées from Bob, as variegated and diverse as Montaigne musing on cannibals one day, and then moving on to thumbs or smells or cowardice. It's a mixed bag. Sometimes Bob discusses what the song is about; sometimes he reflects on its historical context. From time to time he gives you a consideration of the artist or the writer or the arranger, but more often than not he goes on a free-wheeling, first-person stream-of-consciousness rap about what it is like to live inside the song itself. Like I’ve been implying all along, if you’re not a fan of Bob Dylan, this is probably not for you. And it won’t help convince you of his merits receiving the Nobel, either.
But then if that’s your attitude, you probably wouldn’t pick up this book in the first place, which would be too bad because even if it has nothing to do with the art and craft of songwriting, let along anything close to philosophy, it’s brilliant from start to finish, albeit baffling at times. Let’s be as random as Bob and just pick a page for example. Here’s how Dylan starts off his reflections about Perry Como’s version of “Without a Song”: “This song doesn’t really name the song that the world would be worse off if it never heard. It’s a mystery….Perry Como was the anti-Rat Pack, like the anti-Frank; wouldn’t be caught dead with a drink in his hand, and could out-sing anybody…Perry is also the anti-American Idol. He is the anti-flavor of the week, anti-hot list and anti-bling. He was a Cadillac before the tail fins; a Colt .45, not a Glock; steak and potatoes, not California cuisine. Perry Como stands and delivers….” And it’s all true and all good, delivered in a sort of rapid fire staccato here, but not what I’d ever call “philosophy” and not what anybody in 2022 would mistake for either “modern music” or “craft” (if we return to that blurb on the book cover). The only real craft here is the craft at work within the infathomable mind of Bob Dylan, daring you to figure out what he is all about again. And he then he goes and does it 65 more times.
Sometimes Bob will strike out on a tangent, saying almost nothing about the song or the performer, like when he skips over Webb Pierce and “There Stands the Glass” and spends most of the chapter spiraling off from an observation on Webb’s outfits to rap about fashion designer and country music enthusiast Nuta Kotlyarenko (Nudie Cohn, you might know him as), telling us about Nudie’s flamboyant fashion sense: “Nudie dressed four US presidents and two Popes. Two Oscar winners have picked up their awards in Nudie suits and Neil Armstrong is buried in one.” And that’s one of the supreme delights of this book, finding nuggets like that liberally sprinkled into his meditations, leading you to being a lot smarter when you close the book than when you started.
Even some of the odder choices (and what could be odder than the mildly offensive anthem to sexual grooming sung by Rosemary Clooney in her best Mario Brothers voice, “Come on-a My House”) have some profound insights to offer the reader. Of “Come on-a My House” Bob says, “this is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer," but despite that raw assessment, in the course of one page Bob will let you know that this novelty was written by William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian on a cross-country road trip and borrows from traditional Armenian practices of hospitality. And that Bagdasarian is unbelievably the same guy who did Alvin and the Chipmunks (under the name David Seveille) and Bagdasarian even plays the role of the piano player across the way in Rear Window, one of the neighbors spied upon by Jimmy Stewart in that film. And that’s the kind of “master class” you can expect here, some fascinating insights into the workings of Bob’s mysterious mind leaving you with some nuggets of wisdom and musical insights popping out on every page.
Just don’t expect coherence or training wheels or an index or any captions at all for the hundreds of fascinating photographs illustrating the book. And that’s the one gripe I have with this brilliant book…why oh why don’t they tell us what we’re looking at? On Spotify you can listen to the songs on a playlist with the book’s title. They are all accessible there except of course for a nineteenth century rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Nellie Was a Lady.” I’d recommend some serious listening before reading to get a sense of what Bob is talking about before you read each chapter.
Buying records by the Fugs was like buying some Sun Ra records; you had no idea what you would get. One record would sound pretty slick….Then you’d pick up another release and it sounded like it was recorded by a tomato can telephone on the end of a broom handle....They dared you to figure out what they were about.
And that’s a pretty humorous paragraph to encounter midway through The Philosophy of Modern Song because daring you to “figure out what they were about” has generally been the case with Dylan himself over the course of his long career and specifically what you’ll discover as soon as you crack open this book which lurches along over the course of Bob’s 66 short chapters devoted to the 66 songs (you think that number’s a coincidence?) he discusses here, careening from the absolutely brilliant to the totally baffling with no rhyme or reason for why he has selected these songs, how he’s ordered them, or what he wants to say about each.
Here in his new book Bob dares you to figure things out for yourself, and that’s often an impossible task based on some of the strange content. For example, how did Cher's “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” make the cut while there’s nothing here by Woody Guthrie? And if you really need to include the Eagles, of all the tunes you could pick, why choose “Witchy Woman,” especially when Santana's “Black Magic Woman” appears just a few pages later? Or “The Whiffenpoof Song”? Really, Bob…?
I’m not complaining, mind you. I’m a fan, and I have been since my grade school days, so I’m used to Bob being inscrutable. We’re talking about the guy who helped me develop a love of language, the guy who wrote “Highway 61 Revisited," “All Along the Watchtower” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” all those great tunes I listened to on the radio back in the '70s, but when by the time I had a job and earned some spending money of my own to take to the record store, he was putting out the insufferable Slow Train Coming or Shot of Love or Saved. That was a kick in the balls, but I rolled with it and although it took me decades, I can even listen to some of that stuff now. But he’s also the guy who long before that changed things up at the ’65 Newport Festival when he went electric, riling up all the folkies there, and then a year later went to England and got the Brits’ panties in such a bunch they called him Judas. Bob is so elusively mercurial that he was played by six different actors in the 2007 film I'm Not There, including Cate Blanchett. When you are least expecting, he’ll release an album of Christmas carols. And then he’ll go and put out a triple set of the dusty old tunes he enjoyed as a lad, whether anyone out there is interested or not.
So with Bob, you never know what you’re going to get, and that's how it is with the Jokerman. But unlike those folkies, I don’t feel betrayed, although still a lot of numbskulls today will attend a show on his Never Ending Tour and leave unhappy because they don’t recognize any of the songs he’s played. And then they see a playlist later and discover those mysterious tunes were actually some of their favorites turned inside out by a performer who likes to change things up. Bob don’t really care and I fully understand. Bob’s Muse is not subject to the simple whims of mere mortals.
Thus it is with The Philosophy of Modern Song, a book which contains precious little “philosophy” and hardly anything in the way of “modern song,” depending on your definition of that term. The most “modern” of the 66 songs is an obscure tune by John Trudell called “It Don’t Hurt Anymore,” which is already well over 20 years old by now. The earliest song of the bunch is by Stephen Foster, going all the way back to 1849. By and large, the table of contents reads like your grampa’s “Favorite Songs” playlist on Spotify set to “random,” if your grampa is still alive and knows how to use Spotify. Today’s casual reader will recognize far fewer than half the titles that appear. To make things stranger, on the cover is an image of Little Richard and Eddie Cochrane flanking Alis Lesley, the so-called “female Elvis Presley.” Why is she on the cover? I dunno, because Alis is never referred to in the book, as far as I can tell, although Little Richard gets two chapters (“Tutti Fruitti” and “Long Tall Sally”). Go figger.
The book opens with a discussion of Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” interpreted by Bob as a confessional from the Prodigal Son and closes with Dion’s “Where or When,” which gives Bob a chance to rap on and on about reincarnation, memory, and repetition, before moving to a discussion of the 1937 Broadway show Babes in Arms reincarnated and ruined by Busby Berkeley two years later for Hollywood and then on to Dion himself, a performer who went through a number of his own rebirths: “an earnest Teenager in Love to a swaggering Wanderer, a soul-searching friend of Abraham, Martin and John to a hard-edged leather-clad king of the urban jungle who was a template for fellow Italo-rocker Bruce Springsteen. Most recently, he has realized one of his early dreams and become some kind of elder legend, a bluesman from another Delta.” And that’s all true, and equally the case for the inscrutably ever-changing Dylan.
So here’s what the book is not. It’s definitely not what the dust jacket claims it is, “a master class on the art and craft of songwriting,’ which makes me think Simon and Schuster should make their editorial staff read the books before they assign them the task of writing the blurb. No, it’s not that at all, no matter how much maybe Bob’s editor hoped it would be. What it is instead, at least what it seems to be, is Bob woke up in the morning, had a cup of coffee and chose the first song that popped into his head, maybe a song he dreamed about that night, maybe some song he remembered from the radio back when he was a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, maybe just some song that has stuck with him over the years, and once he had it, he hammered out some random musings on the song maybe on a Smith-Corona, maybe longhand on a Big Chief tablet, again, I dunno. It would be fascinating to actually hear from Bob about what his creative process was or why he wrote this book in the first place or how he chose these songs, but nope, like I said, he gives us no clues.
Instead, as with Montaigne or Pascal, we get a collection of pensées from Bob, as variegated and diverse as Montaigne musing on cannibals one day, and then moving on to thumbs or smells or cowardice. It's a mixed bag. Sometimes Bob discusses what the song is about; sometimes he reflects on its historical context. From time to time he gives you a consideration of the artist or the writer or the arranger, but more often than not he goes on a free-wheeling, first-person stream-of-consciousness rap about what it is like to live inside the song itself. Like I’ve been implying all along, if you’re not a fan of Bob Dylan, this is probably not for you. And it won’t help convince you of his merits receiving the Nobel, either.
But then if that’s your attitude, you probably wouldn’t pick up this book in the first place, which would be too bad because even if it has nothing to do with the art and craft of songwriting, let along anything close to philosophy, it’s brilliant from start to finish, albeit baffling at times. Let’s be as random as Bob and just pick a page for example. Here’s how Dylan starts off his reflections about Perry Como’s version of “Without a Song”: “This song doesn’t really name the song that the world would be worse off if it never heard. It’s a mystery….Perry Como was the anti-Rat Pack, like the anti-Frank; wouldn’t be caught dead with a drink in his hand, and could out-sing anybody…Perry is also the anti-American Idol. He is the anti-flavor of the week, anti-hot list and anti-bling. He was a Cadillac before the tail fins; a Colt .45, not a Glock; steak and potatoes, not California cuisine. Perry Como stands and delivers….” And it’s all true and all good, delivered in a sort of rapid fire staccato here, but not what I’d ever call “philosophy” and not what anybody in 2022 would mistake for either “modern music” or “craft” (if we return to that blurb on the book cover). The only real craft here is the craft at work within the infathomable mind of Bob Dylan, daring you to figure out what he is all about again. And he then he goes and does it 65 more times.
Sometimes Bob will strike out on a tangent, saying almost nothing about the song or the performer, like when he skips over Webb Pierce and “There Stands the Glass” and spends most of the chapter spiraling off from an observation on Webb’s outfits to rap about fashion designer and country music enthusiast Nuta Kotlyarenko (Nudie Cohn, you might know him as), telling us about Nudie’s flamboyant fashion sense: “Nudie dressed four US presidents and two Popes. Two Oscar winners have picked up their awards in Nudie suits and Neil Armstrong is buried in one.” And that’s one of the supreme delights of this book, finding nuggets like that liberally sprinkled into his meditations, leading you to being a lot smarter when you close the book than when you started.
Even some of the odder choices (and what could be odder than the mildly offensive anthem to sexual grooming sung by Rosemary Clooney in her best Mario Brothers voice, “Come on-a My House”) have some profound insights to offer the reader. Of “Come on-a My House” Bob says, “this is the song of the deviant, the pedophile, the mass murderer," but despite that raw assessment, in the course of one page Bob will let you know that this novelty was written by William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian on a cross-country road trip and borrows from traditional Armenian practices of hospitality. And that Bagdasarian is unbelievably the same guy who did Alvin and the Chipmunks (under the name David Seveille) and Bagdasarian even plays the role of the piano player across the way in Rear Window, one of the neighbors spied upon by Jimmy Stewart in that film. And that’s the kind of “master class” you can expect here, some fascinating insights into the workings of Bob’s mysterious mind leaving you with some nuggets of wisdom and musical insights popping out on every page.
Just don’t expect coherence or training wheels or an index or any captions at all for the hundreds of fascinating photographs illustrating the book. And that’s the one gripe I have with this brilliant book…why oh why don’t they tell us what we’re looking at? On Spotify you can listen to the songs on a playlist with the book’s title. They are all accessible there except of course for a nineteenth century rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Nellie Was a Lady.” I’d recommend some serious listening before reading to get a sense of what Bob is talking about before you read each chapter.
November 19, 2022
Bob Dylan is gloriously weird – in the best possible meaning of the word.
The writing in this book ranges from profound to vapid, from amusing to disturbing, from insightful to forgettable, and from meandering to straight-to-the-point. One thing it’s not: boring. Although the noir-ish language of the “prose poem” retellings of the lyrics can get a little repetitive (not to mention a little cringe), the essays are always surprising, as Dylan takes tangents that are akin to free association, or provides interpretations of some songs that are sometimes totally out of left field.
Some have pointed out that the title is a bit of a misnomer, if not an out-right Dylan joke (assuming Dylan chose the title, which is not necessarily a given in the publishing world). I would disagree. If we take philosophy to be one’s worldview, understanding of the zeitgeist, or subjective perception or observation of a shared reality, then this is certainly a philosophical statement on music...and pop culture in general. And if we take “modern” to mean modernity (as opposed to the "contemporary" or "postmodern," which would refer roughly to the post-1980s), then this is most definitely a statement on 20th-century American modern culture, as the bulk of the song choices were written from the 1920s through the 1970s in the United States.
But I do agree the title should be taken with a grain of salt, as Dylan is attempting to entertain as much as inform or enlighten – that much is clear from the prose poem sections. And so I urge readers to try to set aside their analytical side (a tough request of Dylan fans – speaking from personal experience!), and just enjoy this as a nostalgic trip through the quirky world of American song, film, and visual culture in the mid-20th century.
The writing in this book ranges from profound to vapid, from amusing to disturbing, from insightful to forgettable, and from meandering to straight-to-the-point. One thing it’s not: boring. Although the noir-ish language of the “prose poem” retellings of the lyrics can get a little repetitive (not to mention a little cringe), the essays are always surprising, as Dylan takes tangents that are akin to free association, or provides interpretations of some songs that are sometimes totally out of left field.
Some have pointed out that the title is a bit of a misnomer, if not an out-right Dylan joke (assuming Dylan chose the title, which is not necessarily a given in the publishing world). I would disagree. If we take philosophy to be one’s worldview, understanding of the zeitgeist, or subjective perception or observation of a shared reality, then this is certainly a philosophical statement on music...and pop culture in general. And if we take “modern” to mean modernity (as opposed to the "contemporary" or "postmodern," which would refer roughly to the post-1980s), then this is most definitely a statement on 20th-century American modern culture, as the bulk of the song choices were written from the 1920s through the 1970s in the United States.
But I do agree the title should be taken with a grain of salt, as Dylan is attempting to entertain as much as inform or enlighten – that much is clear from the prose poem sections. And so I urge readers to try to set aside their analytical side (a tough request of Dylan fans – speaking from personal experience!), and just enjoy this as a nostalgic trip through the quirky world of American song, film, and visual culture in the mid-20th century.
November 25, 2022
In just one entry of this book, Bob Dylan uses a 1928 Charlie Poole song to riff on:
- Billy Wilder's 1951 film noir Ace in the Hole
- The difficulty of making a good movie about mass tragedy
- Why the best war movies focus on individual stories
- Confucius's thoughts on filial piety in the Analects
- Japanese customs of elder-killing, as seen in the 1958 film The Ballad of Narayama
- The "OK boomer" phenomenon
- The virtues and drawbacks of John Prine and Joni Mitchell's youthful songs on aging
- Jerry Garcia's little-known side bluegrass band
- The ancient wisdom of Cicero
Look, either you want this in your life or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you.
- Billy Wilder's 1951 film noir Ace in the Hole
- The difficulty of making a good movie about mass tragedy
- Why the best war movies focus on individual stories
- Confucius's thoughts on filial piety in the Analects
- Japanese customs of elder-killing, as seen in the 1958 film The Ballad of Narayama
- The "OK boomer" phenomenon
- The virtues and drawbacks of John Prine and Joni Mitchell's youthful songs on aging
- Jerry Garcia's little-known side bluegrass band
- The ancient wisdom of Cicero
Look, either you want this in your life or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you.
November 21, 2023
I think a more appropriate title for this book would be Bob Dylan Blathers Out Some Really Stupid Crap About a Bunch of Songs. “There Stands the Glass” by Webb Pierce has long been a favorite of mine. It's pretty much the granddaddy of all the country songs that tied together drinkin’ and heartbreak. Its progeny ranges from classics like “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” by Kitty Welles to to this century’s “Mama Needs a Margarita” by Zoe Muth. Wouldn’t it be interesting to talk about the prevalence of country drinkin’ songs? Maybe the… I don’t know… the philosophy behind the phenomena? Here’s what Dylan does instead. He decides to make up a little story behind the song’s protagonist; he’s a Vietnam vet who slit open a little girl during the war. Jesus Christ, man! Who the hell wants to hear that? What’s wrong with you? Every now and then Dylan will actually say something interesting about the song in question or the artist who recorded it, but too much of it is an absolute waste of time. In honor of that brave literary stance, the rest of this review will have absolutely nothing to do with this book. Instead, I’m going to ramble on and on about the first Dylan tape I bought.
In May of ‘85, my high-school crush asked me if I wanted to go on a shopping trip with her to Kansas City. To say that I was eager to participate would be a vast understatement! I casually said “Yeah, that would be great,” as I casually tried not to break into a sweat.
Part of our shopping journey involved trips to the record stores. In my area of the country, Kansas City was Record Store Mecca. I’d even go so far as to say that KC had better record stores than 1980s Dallas. I already racked up some pretty good purchases that included Bowie’s Young Americans album and a Velvet Underground T-shirt I still wear almost 40 years later.
I was sifting through the cast-offs in the cutout bin at one of the stores when I ran across a two-cassette Dylan collection for $5.99 It said Musica Especial or something like that above his name. Turns out it was a Spanish import, which wasn’t surprising. Spain seemed to be the place to go if you wanted to release recordings that could skirt copyright laws. This collection was so much better than Dylan’s Greatest Hits collection that was released in America. Each of these cassettes contained a double-album’s worth of material, so it was four albums of Dylan songs. Its depth and breadth was amazing. The tracks ranged from some of his very first folk recordings all the way to “Hurricane” from the 1970s Desire album. The hits sat right next to deeper cuts that would usually be skipped by a white-bread “approved” collection. I had never really paid much attention to Dylan, but my best friend was a fan and I trusted his judgment. That collection made me a Dylan fan, as well. It served me for about five years until my car stereo managed to eat both tapes.
Oh, and my high-school crush? Sadly, that weekend would be the last time we would ever spend that much time together. I would move to Dallas four months later to manage my own record store. Unfortunately, it was a Musicland which was tedious and corporate and in fucking Texas so I came back home two years later. Not long after I moved back to our hometown, it was her turn to leave… but she didn’t come back. She ended up getting married instead. Oddly enough, when I moved away from our hometown a second time, I ended up in the same state she lives in, only about three hours away. But we haven’t spoken in almost 25 years.
Sigh. Your book sucks, Dylan.
In May of ‘85, my high-school crush asked me if I wanted to go on a shopping trip with her to Kansas City. To say that I was eager to participate would be a vast understatement! I casually said “Yeah, that would be great,” as I casually tried not to break into a sweat.
Part of our shopping journey involved trips to the record stores. In my area of the country, Kansas City was Record Store Mecca. I’d even go so far as to say that KC had better record stores than 1980s Dallas. I already racked up some pretty good purchases that included Bowie’s Young Americans album and a Velvet Underground T-shirt I still wear almost 40 years later.
I was sifting through the cast-offs in the cutout bin at one of the stores when I ran across a two-cassette Dylan collection for $5.99 It said Musica Especial or something like that above his name. Turns out it was a Spanish import, which wasn’t surprising. Spain seemed to be the place to go if you wanted to release recordings that could skirt copyright laws. This collection was so much better than Dylan’s Greatest Hits collection that was released in America. Each of these cassettes contained a double-album’s worth of material, so it was four albums of Dylan songs. Its depth and breadth was amazing. The tracks ranged from some of his very first folk recordings all the way to “Hurricane” from the 1970s Desire album. The hits sat right next to deeper cuts that would usually be skipped by a white-bread “approved” collection. I had never really paid much attention to Dylan, but my best friend was a fan and I trusted his judgment. That collection made me a Dylan fan, as well. It served me for about five years until my car stereo managed to eat both tapes.
Oh, and my high-school crush? Sadly, that weekend would be the last time we would ever spend that much time together. I would move to Dallas four months later to manage my own record store. Unfortunately, it was a Musicland which was tedious and corporate and in fucking Texas so I came back home two years later. Not long after I moved back to our hometown, it was her turn to leave… but she didn’t come back. She ended up getting married instead. Oddly enough, when I moved away from our hometown a second time, I ended up in the same state she lives in, only about three hours away. But we haven’t spoken in almost 25 years.
Sigh. Your book sucks, Dylan.
November 2, 2022
This is amazing! It's like picking up Jack Kerouac or Tom Pynchon for the first time and having your mind totally blown! What a unique fireworking blast! Now everyone has to go and fetch these songs from somewhere and give them a good listen while reading Dylan before and after. Bob has been DEEPLY into American music all his life, and it shows. He's also deeply into the old "Weird American" culture and has lots of names to name. Not so much "analyses" of the songs, but no-holds-barred riffs on what each song stirs in his mind. The illustrations are a hoot. There's also a moral compass woven into the mix, which we need. But Bob is not concerned about being PC, so be forewarned.
I accidentally ordered two copies. So I stopped off at an Amazon Whole Foods where they do returns and the kindly woman there stared at it and asked "Why are you returning this?" I explained my mistake and we chatted. "Weren't there two Bob Dylans?" she asked. "Wasn't one a poet?" "Nope," I said, "same guy. It's really very interesting and funny." "I just might have to get this for myself," she said. Made my day.
One best example in them all is his thoughtfully spaced-out take on Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho & Lefty." If ever there was a song that took you through saloon doors into the dire heart of the West . . . and Dylan nails it down!
I accidentally ordered two copies. So I stopped off at an Amazon Whole Foods where they do returns and the kindly woman there stared at it and asked "Why are you returning this?" I explained my mistake and we chatted. "Weren't there two Bob Dylans?" she asked. "Wasn't one a poet?" "Nope," I said, "same guy. It's really very interesting and funny." "I just might have to get this for myself," she said. Made my day.
One best example in them all is his thoughtfully spaced-out take on Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho & Lefty." If ever there was a song that took you through saloon doors into the dire heart of the West . . . and Dylan nails it down!
November 2, 2022
Major disappointment: stream of consciousness jibberish--not insightful, not informative.
February 6, 2023
Did I think this was a transcendent work of indescribable genius? No, I did not. Did I think this was as good as Chronicles I? Nope, not that either. But it's worth five stars because it is worth five stars to me, a lifelong Dylan fan, to know what Bob Dylan thinks about popular music and sundry other topics, ranging from the natural advantages of polygamy and the bland evil of divorce lawyers to the radical complicity of average citizens in war crimes, from the evolution of the "witchy woman" archetype to the disgrace of HUAC, from Tin Pan Alley to Laurel Canyon. It's an enormous mess, a rambling assortment of insights and semi-fictionalized factoids. In other words, it's classic Bob Dylan.
So what if some of the more fact-based passages (e.g., the list of classical compositions whose motifs were incorporated in famous pop songs) could have been (and quite possibly were) lifted more or less verbatim from Wikipedia pages and other public sources? Bob Dylan has the soul of a magpie. He understands that to be distinctively American is to be a gypsy, a tramp, and a thief (one of several songs he surprised me by writing about).
I'm glad my generous friend Phoebe gave me the audiobook; I loaded the CDs into iTunes and, over a few weeks, listened to Bob Dylan read his own words, along with a weird but effective collection of guest readers, including Helen Mirren, Renée Zellweger, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Alfre Woodward, and Sissy Goddamn Spacek, of all people. I know there will be listeners who will want more of Bob's voice than they get, but to me it made perfect sense to have such a diverse array of readers interpreting his sentences for him. That's more or less the theme of the book: the philosophy of modern song, you might say.
A great song inhabits a different space, or it creates a new world. It both exists within time and beyond it, in our minds, after it has transformed us. Dylan loves to quote Whitman's iconic "I contain multitudes" line (which I understand, having fallen back on it many times myself when writing record reviews). He even wrote the song "I Contain Multitudes" a few years ago. He clearly dgaf if you think his intertextual approach is a form of cultural or artistic appropriation, and I guess when it comes right down to it, neither do I (sorry, anonymous Civil War poets et al.). If he's a plagiarist, he's the generous kind who returns on the intellectual-property investment tenfold.
Love and theft indeed.
So what if some of the more fact-based passages (e.g., the list of classical compositions whose motifs were incorporated in famous pop songs) could have been (and quite possibly were) lifted more or less verbatim from Wikipedia pages and other public sources? Bob Dylan has the soul of a magpie. He understands that to be distinctively American is to be a gypsy, a tramp, and a thief (one of several songs he surprised me by writing about).
I'm glad my generous friend Phoebe gave me the audiobook; I loaded the CDs into iTunes and, over a few weeks, listened to Bob Dylan read his own words, along with a weird but effective collection of guest readers, including Helen Mirren, Renée Zellweger, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Alfre Woodward, and Sissy Goddamn Spacek, of all people. I know there will be listeners who will want more of Bob's voice than they get, but to me it made perfect sense to have such a diverse array of readers interpreting his sentences for him. That's more or less the theme of the book: the philosophy of modern song, you might say.
A great song inhabits a different space, or it creates a new world. It both exists within time and beyond it, in our minds, after it has transformed us. Dylan loves to quote Whitman's iconic "I contain multitudes" line (which I understand, having fallen back on it many times myself when writing record reviews). He even wrote the song "I Contain Multitudes" a few years ago. He clearly dgaf if you think his intertextual approach is a form of cultural or artistic appropriation, and I guess when it comes right down to it, neither do I (sorry, anonymous Civil War poets et al.). If he's a plagiarist, he's the generous kind who returns on the intellectual-property investment tenfold.
Love and theft indeed.
February 2, 2023
This was so frustrating and disappointing.
I was curious to see what Dylan wrote about these songs, but at the first essay I was surprised to see there were no lyrics listed in the book. Even for the most famous songs in here I don't remember the lyrics off the top of my head. I'm not going to read this book next to the computer and look up every single song. What a weird decision to immediately exclude anyone who might be interested in this topic but doesn't already know all of these songs.
The writing itself is all over the place. Some songs get a third of a page. Some get three pages. Some have sidebars, but the design of the book is bizarre, and sometimes it's not actually a sidebar, just that part of the essay has huge flowery margins for absolutely no good reason. And again, the essays weren't particularly interesting to me and just rambled.
Finally, all the photographs and reproductions of posters that I heard were throughout the book... had no captions. No dates, no description. Like with the song lyrics, if you aren't already a member of this club you aren't welcome to read this book. You must already know this, how dare you try to learn.
Also I got really annoyed at how the essay about the Nina Simone song essentially didn't talk about Nina Simone at all. It's been pointed out how badly women are represented and written in this book and boy is this true throughout, but for some reason absolutely ignoring Nina Simone in the writing about her pushed me over the edge.
I hope people who are deep into these songs and their history get more out of this book than I did.
I was curious to see what Dylan wrote about these songs, but at the first essay I was surprised to see there were no lyrics listed in the book. Even for the most famous songs in here I don't remember the lyrics off the top of my head. I'm not going to read this book next to the computer and look up every single song. What a weird decision to immediately exclude anyone who might be interested in this topic but doesn't already know all of these songs.
The writing itself is all over the place. Some songs get a third of a page. Some get three pages. Some have sidebars, but the design of the book is bizarre, and sometimes it's not actually a sidebar, just that part of the essay has huge flowery margins for absolutely no good reason. And again, the essays weren't particularly interesting to me and just rambled.
Finally, all the photographs and reproductions of posters that I heard were throughout the book... had no captions. No dates, no description. Like with the song lyrics, if you aren't already a member of this club you aren't welcome to read this book. You must already know this, how dare you try to learn.
Also I got really annoyed at how the essay about the Nina Simone song essentially didn't talk about Nina Simone at all. It's been pointed out how badly women are represented and written in this book and boy is this true throughout, but for some reason absolutely ignoring Nina Simone in the writing about her pushed me over the edge.
I hope people who are deep into these songs and their history get more out of this book than I did.
December 16, 2022
Yikes. I was quite disappointed. Dylan’s “unique writing style” is pretentious, flowery, anecdotal but good? I didn’t like the way this book was formatted at all which led to a lot of my discontent. There is probably about 200-250 pages of actual text. Each essay was between 1-10 pages of text. I feel Dylan’s wrote so much but said nothing. He’s a fine writer and was captivating enough but I expected a lot more and for it to ultimately be a lot better.
August 18, 2023
I love his music and was excited to read this book. Unfortunately this book is completely pointless, he has some little dull (often borderline misogynistic) musings accompanying each song and then an even less interesting paragraph or two about the artist.
The photos are really nice though.
The photos are really nice though.
March 9, 2022
Wow what a thrilling ride through modern song from the perspective of history’s greatest monster!
November 16, 2022
You are a songwriter, a performer, a traveler, a troubadour. You have been on the road as long as you can remember, and now you find yourself with time on your hands, forced to think of another way to stave off facing whatever it is that’s kept you doing this for so long.
They trust you, they think you are a philosopher, they expect you know exactly how you made those songs so powerful. They believe so fervently you hold the deepest secrets to life itself that they’ve dug through your garbage bags hoping there would be the tiniest clue to what they really want from you. You’ve rarely told them anything directly, and you’ve hidden the truth with wild stories and obfuscations from the day you first changed your name all those years ago until the latest song you’ve offered with a title phrase you like to use about containing multitudes.
That’s another thing. You ain’t no spring chicken. You’ve lived long enough to know things were better before than they are now, especially the ways you learned to do things. You want those kids off your lawn, and you want them to realize that there was once a much better way to avoid walking on it in the first place. You know how to make America great again. It’s all in the records by Little Richard or Ricky Nelson. Speaking of Ricky Nelson, you know he did the best thing any performer has ever done, showing up on stage in front of adoring fans who wanted to hear their favorite songs, and rather than disguising them in dramatically different arrangements, he sang brand new material and then wrote a hit song about how they didn’t like it.
You decide to call your book The Philosophy of Modern Song, and then shape it as a collection of essays inspired by 66 different songs from the 20th Century. That ought to get them expecting something like insight into what is happening to make each record special, and sometimes that’s what you offer. More often, though, you parapharase the lyrics, drilling deeper into the actions of the characters in each song, sometimes imagining what might be happening before, after, and in between the actual lyrics. Then you hide nuggets of your own beliefs about music in off-hand comments. For instance, you don’t trust people who understand the mechanics of music. Who feels it knows it, as Bob Marley said, is what matters.
Bob Dylan’s latest book is one of the weirdest, most intoxicating, most frustrating, funniest, and sometimes most disconcerting on the subject of popular music. Dylan loves to play tricks on people’s expectations, and it’s best to go into this book not thinking you know what’s going to happen. I realize that makes moot the very concept of writing a review of the book, but just consider this another level of ironic distance from the title.
Dylan really does offer tidbits of real insight into the process of music. The reasons certain words work so much better when they are sung than when they are printed on a page. The importance of belief in the song being sung by a singer, and the ways in which a song can be extra-meaningful without stretching any syllable across more than one note. The ability of a single musical choice being made at a single recording session to become immortal. The role of nuance, of mystery, of not revealing a single, straightforward meaning in a song. The use of an arrangement to provoke a song without distracting from it. Of course, many of the times he does this, he points out that they don’t do these sorts of things much any more. Dylan is fixated on tradition, on individualism with a connection to the past; despite bigger ears than almost anybody his age, not to mention a wider range of musical awareness than most people in general, he doesn’t want to look too far outside what happened before he turned 40 years old. I don’t think any song here save “Dirty Life and Times” by Warren Zevon came out after 1979.
The writing can soar at times. An essay on “Money Honey” talks about the song and its performance, but it goes much wider into the nature of capitalism and how it works. The essay on “Volare” is about the role of language one can’t understand, as well as the sumptuous sound of the record itself. Sometimes, it goes deep into the ditch. Writing about “Witchy Woman” by the Eagles, as Jody Rosen pointed out in his perceptive review of the book, Dylan’s never far below the surface misogyny becomes as clear as it possibly can be. (As if the fact wasn’t enough that there are only six women singers featured out of 66 songs covered.) Or, his perverse sense of humor goes into overdrive – the chapter on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her” devotes not two sentences to the record, and goes on for pages about the nature of divorce and the advantages of polygamy.
But, it’s a book to be read more than once. There are clues into Dylan’s own reasons for doing things – read about Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” and you’ll know a lot more about the need Dylan has for constant touring, even at his age. There are descriptions of amazing musical prowess – Roy Orbison’s voice, Little Richard’s sheer outrageousness, the emotional punches of Johnny Ray. These essays, even some which end abruptly, as if he always meant to go back and write some more but suddenly the deadline loomed and the book had to be published, zoom in close and pull out far and wide. They are not simply one thing, even if sometimes they will drive you crazy.
I should point out, especially since I rarely care about such things, that the art direction is brilliant. So many photos and art examples, 95% of which I had never seen before, are carefully placed throughout the essays. Most of them, though not all, relate specifically to what he’s writing about. Most of them could stand by themselves in a book devoted to showing the nature of music and its relationship to commerce in popular culture during the 1950s and 60s. There are no captions, as they are meant to be representative rather than specific, but of course, so many are of musicians and it’s frustrating when you know some but not all the people in a specific photo. Oh, well, nobody ever said anything to do with Bob Dylan had to be simple.
They trust you, they think you are a philosopher, they expect you know exactly how you made those songs so powerful. They believe so fervently you hold the deepest secrets to life itself that they’ve dug through your garbage bags hoping there would be the tiniest clue to what they really want from you. You’ve rarely told them anything directly, and you’ve hidden the truth with wild stories and obfuscations from the day you first changed your name all those years ago until the latest song you’ve offered with a title phrase you like to use about containing multitudes.
That’s another thing. You ain’t no spring chicken. You’ve lived long enough to know things were better before than they are now, especially the ways you learned to do things. You want those kids off your lawn, and you want them to realize that there was once a much better way to avoid walking on it in the first place. You know how to make America great again. It’s all in the records by Little Richard or Ricky Nelson. Speaking of Ricky Nelson, you know he did the best thing any performer has ever done, showing up on stage in front of adoring fans who wanted to hear their favorite songs, and rather than disguising them in dramatically different arrangements, he sang brand new material and then wrote a hit song about how they didn’t like it.
You decide to call your book The Philosophy of Modern Song, and then shape it as a collection of essays inspired by 66 different songs from the 20th Century. That ought to get them expecting something like insight into what is happening to make each record special, and sometimes that’s what you offer. More often, though, you parapharase the lyrics, drilling deeper into the actions of the characters in each song, sometimes imagining what might be happening before, after, and in between the actual lyrics. Then you hide nuggets of your own beliefs about music in off-hand comments. For instance, you don’t trust people who understand the mechanics of music. Who feels it knows it, as Bob Marley said, is what matters.
Bob Dylan’s latest book is one of the weirdest, most intoxicating, most frustrating, funniest, and sometimes most disconcerting on the subject of popular music. Dylan loves to play tricks on people’s expectations, and it’s best to go into this book not thinking you know what’s going to happen. I realize that makes moot the very concept of writing a review of the book, but just consider this another level of ironic distance from the title.
Dylan really does offer tidbits of real insight into the process of music. The reasons certain words work so much better when they are sung than when they are printed on a page. The importance of belief in the song being sung by a singer, and the ways in which a song can be extra-meaningful without stretching any syllable across more than one note. The ability of a single musical choice being made at a single recording session to become immortal. The role of nuance, of mystery, of not revealing a single, straightforward meaning in a song. The use of an arrangement to provoke a song without distracting from it. Of course, many of the times he does this, he points out that they don’t do these sorts of things much any more. Dylan is fixated on tradition, on individualism with a connection to the past; despite bigger ears than almost anybody his age, not to mention a wider range of musical awareness than most people in general, he doesn’t want to look too far outside what happened before he turned 40 years old. I don’t think any song here save “Dirty Life and Times” by Warren Zevon came out after 1979.
The writing can soar at times. An essay on “Money Honey” talks about the song and its performance, but it goes much wider into the nature of capitalism and how it works. The essay on “Volare” is about the role of language one can’t understand, as well as the sumptuous sound of the record itself. Sometimes, it goes deep into the ditch. Writing about “Witchy Woman” by the Eagles, as Jody Rosen pointed out in his perceptive review of the book, Dylan’s never far below the surface misogyny becomes as clear as it possibly can be. (As if the fact wasn’t enough that there are only six women singers featured out of 66 songs covered.) Or, his perverse sense of humor goes into overdrive – the chapter on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her” devotes not two sentences to the record, and goes on for pages about the nature of divorce and the advantages of polygamy.
But, it’s a book to be read more than once. There are clues into Dylan’s own reasons for doing things – read about Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” and you’ll know a lot more about the need Dylan has for constant touring, even at his age. There are descriptions of amazing musical prowess – Roy Orbison’s voice, Little Richard’s sheer outrageousness, the emotional punches of Johnny Ray. These essays, even some which end abruptly, as if he always meant to go back and write some more but suddenly the deadline loomed and the book had to be published, zoom in close and pull out far and wide. They are not simply one thing, even if sometimes they will drive you crazy.
I should point out, especially since I rarely care about such things, that the art direction is brilliant. So many photos and art examples, 95% of which I had never seen before, are carefully placed throughout the essays. Most of them, though not all, relate specifically to what he’s writing about. Most of them could stand by themselves in a book devoted to showing the nature of music and its relationship to commerce in popular culture during the 1950s and 60s. There are no captions, as they are meant to be representative rather than specific, but of course, so many are of musicians and it’s frustrating when you know some but not all the people in a specific photo. Oh, well, nobody ever said anything to do with Bob Dylan had to be simple.
December 12, 2022
I enjoyed this book a lot. Some reviewers were disappointed because I think they were looking for something more scholarly. I liked the levity and lightness of Dylan's essays. He takes songs from a wide range of artists and time periods (although mostly 20th century songs) and makes them come alive. On some of the songs, he introduces the song by retelling the lyrics in a casual paragraph style. In some of the essays, he gives interesting background on the composer and/or the performer and/or the history around the song. The book also has wonderful photos that add to the experience of the essays and lyrics. If you're looking for serious research, then maybe try something else. If you want an accessible, light, and engaging essay collection that features songs of the past, give this a spin. I don't think you will be disappointed.
November 3, 2022
I wanted so badly to love this book, but I found it difficult to get through.
There’s a lot to criticize, considering Dylan’s Nobel Laureate status. There are some patent untruths, easily google-able, and some uncomfortable opinions about women.
Most alarming is Dylan’s opinions on marriage. When I described the following to my husband, he stopped me and immediately googled how many times Dylan has been divorced - twice, for the record.
Bizarrely, he blames divorce lawyers for the downfall of society, writing at one point that they were to blame for uncounted suicides and serial killers. As if the real cure to society’s many complex ills is to just, at all costs, stay married to your spouse.
Which, as a child of divorced parents….no. Had my folks stayed together, one or both of them would be dead.
That aside, he goes on to suggest one cure is to legalize polygamy. He attempts to fend off the rabid feminist critics he knows are coming (as they always do when your ideas are ridiculous), by suggesting at the end of the chapter that these world-saving polygamous families didn’t HAVE to consist of one man and multiple women! It could go the other way around! Take that, feminists!
As other reviewers pointed out, there seems to be little organization of the songs Dylan analyzes.
More than that, the analysis is often either a retelling of the lyrics with no further insights, or an expansion of the stories told by the original songs. These expansions are tedious and told in second-person.
The original stories, as created by the lyricists who wrote the songs Dylan is “analyzing”, are not enhanced by these expansions. They come off as rambling and repetitive. I found them exhausting.
The audiobook is narrated by a slew of celebrities. They were delightful readers of content I wanted to like a lot more.
The book, overall, lacks cohesion. It could have done with some structure and a kind hand reigning Dylan in a little.
There were a few places where a bit of Dylan’s brilliance shines through (and listen - I didn’t like the book, but he IS brilliant).
Notably, the chapter on the Grateful Dead was fascinating. There is a deep understanding of the song “Truckin’” that Dylan imparts to the reader from the perspective of someone who has been on the road a lot. It feels different from the rest of the book in that, instead of trying to force a POV on you, he actually puts you in the moment. It’s one of the very few songs in the book that got a genuine analysis based on Dylan’s experience as their contemporary. I got the sense that he truly admired The Dead and it made me want to pull up their catalog.
And that’s what I wanted from the book. I wanted a Dylan memoir with good insights on storytelling that spurred a few nights with the Spotify playlist that share’s the book’s name. I wanted to hear about how these songs came about from someone who could offer a truly unique view on them.
For me, it fell short.
There’s a lot to criticize, considering Dylan’s Nobel Laureate status. There are some patent untruths, easily google-able, and some uncomfortable opinions about women.
Most alarming is Dylan’s opinions on marriage. When I described the following to my husband, he stopped me and immediately googled how many times Dylan has been divorced - twice, for the record.
Bizarrely, he blames divorce lawyers for the downfall of society, writing at one point that they were to blame for uncounted suicides and serial killers. As if the real cure to society’s many complex ills is to just, at all costs, stay married to your spouse.
Which, as a child of divorced parents….no. Had my folks stayed together, one or both of them would be dead.
That aside, he goes on to suggest one cure is to legalize polygamy. He attempts to fend off the rabid feminist critics he knows are coming (as they always do when your ideas are ridiculous), by suggesting at the end of the chapter that these world-saving polygamous families didn’t HAVE to consist of one man and multiple women! It could go the other way around! Take that, feminists!
As other reviewers pointed out, there seems to be little organization of the songs Dylan analyzes.
More than that, the analysis is often either a retelling of the lyrics with no further insights, or an expansion of the stories told by the original songs. These expansions are tedious and told in second-person.
The original stories, as created by the lyricists who wrote the songs Dylan is “analyzing”, are not enhanced by these expansions. They come off as rambling and repetitive. I found them exhausting.
The audiobook is narrated by a slew of celebrities. They were delightful readers of content I wanted to like a lot more.
The book, overall, lacks cohesion. It could have done with some structure and a kind hand reigning Dylan in a little.
There were a few places where a bit of Dylan’s brilliance shines through (and listen - I didn’t like the book, but he IS brilliant).
Notably, the chapter on the Grateful Dead was fascinating. There is a deep understanding of the song “Truckin’” that Dylan imparts to the reader from the perspective of someone who has been on the road a lot. It feels different from the rest of the book in that, instead of trying to force a POV on you, he actually puts you in the moment. It’s one of the very few songs in the book that got a genuine analysis based on Dylan’s experience as their contemporary. I got the sense that he truly admired The Dead and it made me want to pull up their catalog.
And that’s what I wanted from the book. I wanted a Dylan memoir with good insights on storytelling that spurred a few nights with the Spotify playlist that share’s the book’s name. I wanted to hear about how these songs came about from someone who could offer a truly unique view on them.
For me, it fell short.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 20, 2022
Nobel Prize winning singer-songwriter, musician, and American icon, Bob Dylan, pens his first book in nearly two decades. The Philosophy of Modern Song is a collection of more than sixty essays that breaks down big music hits, overlooked ballads, and music staples; from Elvis Presley to Elvis Costello and from Bobby Darin to The Clash - Bob Dylan shares musical knowledge, philosophy, and insight that he has accrued over the past 80 years. Each essay looks at a different songs lyrics, beats, history and more; written in Bob Dylan's signature rambling, fast paced style. While the book contains over 150 beautifully curated photos; the audiobook features an amazing full cast performance of celebrities. Jeff Bridges, Renée Zellweger, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, and Bob Dylan himself are just a few of the narrators in this all star line up which makes for some spectacular listening. Of the 66 songs discussed only 4 are sung by women - which is shame - but is also Bob Dylan's prerogative. Nearly half of the songs are from the 50's and the others songs go as far back as 1924 and all the way up to 2003 (after which presumably - good music stopped being made). This collection doesn't encapsulate Dylan's all time favorite songs - they are just strong songs that inspired him to write about them (and not always for good reasons!). Listeners won't necessarily agree with all the selections but will certainly enjoy learning about some obscure songs as well as some chart toppers. The all star narration makes this audiobook shine.
December 13, 2022
I listened to the audio version because Dylan read part of the book and several celebrity readers narrate the rest. I also read along with the traditional book, and I am glad I did, because I would have missed out on some amazing photographs that are included with the text. (And not one of them is captioned.) I have a mixed response to a book I anticipated would give me some insight into Dylan's take on important songs of the last several decades. Instead, the collection lacks cohesion and ends up being a mismash of ramblings, many of them cynical and mean-spirited. I am puzzled. Is Dylan a con man, a misogynist, a misanthrope, a swampy mess of a disillusioned man? I've been a sideline fan of Bob Dylan's music for many years - my husband is the true believer. Philosophy of Modern Song is a missed opportunity. It could have been so much more than a $600 a pop signed edition.
March 26, 2023
Dylan's rambling take on 66 songs reminds me of his maligned 1970 record SELF PORTRAIT. These aren't favorites or examples of the greatest songs of modern times by any means, but exhibits in the sideshow of the bard's cultural collage, the Old Weird America of THE BASEMENT TAPES or the interpretive music museum of WORLD GONE WRONG, facets of the 20th Century, mostly forgotten but not by Bob.
I had a ball reading these essays, learned quite a few things I didn't know, and came away from the book reminded of just what a unique character Dylan is. The carnival runs all through this book, in its text and in the found artifacts that illustrate it. Step right up!
Recommended.
I had a ball reading these essays, learned quite a few things I didn't know, and came away from the book reminded of just what a unique character Dylan is. The carnival runs all through this book, in its text and in the found artifacts that illustrate it. Step right up!
Recommended.
November 10, 2022
Im a big Dylan fan but found this utterly tedious. With some exceptions. Each of these 60 chapters would be really cool short pieces in a magazine spread over a year. As an audiobook at least (despite fantastic narrators) it got old real fast.
December 16, 2022
-1 star for the eagles track
November 15, 2022
“Like everything Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement,” says the publicity bumf from publisher Simon & Schuster. Is it, though?
Bob’s new book works best if you regard it as his version of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the entirely unlicensed compilation that he stole from a friend as a teenager, and which informed his career more than any other single document. That bootleg box-set compiled 84 folk, country and blues songs from 1926-33; this book creates a canon of its own, with essays on 66 recordings dating from 1924 to 2004, its accent falling particularly on early rock and roll. It arguably works better as a playlist than a book – alongside vaguely leftfield classics like Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ and Marty Robbins’ ‘El Paso', he includes obscurities such as ‘CIA Man’ by the Fugs, 'Detroit City' by Bobby Bare, and Johnny Paycheck’s desolate, gorgeous ‘Old Violin’ – but there’s enough in The Philosophy of Modern Song to make it worthwhile, at least for that stoic and balding band of Dylan obsessives.
STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Most of the book's essays consist of a freeform, stream-of-consciousness riff on the meaning of the song – inhabiting its world; frequently written in the second person – followed by a more matter-of-fact contextual section. The former, aside from the occasionally arresting, terse turn of phrase, is usually pretentious and tedious (editors don’t like to tinker with "momentous artistic achievements", especially when written by Nobel Prize winners); the latter tends to be more interesting, allowing for insights into Dylan’s own processes and prejudices – some of those revelations intentional, others unwitting – as well as inspiring some agreeably peculiar tangents. A Santana track turns into a recap of the career of screenwriter and sci-fi novelist Leigh Brackett, as well as incorporating a note about the invention of Velcro. Other songs lead to digressions on lemmings, Esperanto and the history of the Nudie suit. Good non-fiction has always been about connections.
Dylan is a curmudgeonly host, tediously "both sides”-ing every political question, complaining about people saying “OK, boomer” (OK, boomer) and, perhaps more reasonably, railing against the rise of niche marketing, which by definition narrows our artistic horizons. This broadly grouchy work, though, is saved by two things in particular: the author's transparent love of music, and the way the book shades in, subverts or enhances our understanding of his own life and legacy.
Whether he’s extolling the emotional directness of bluegrass ("the other side of heavy metal"), becoming transparently excited that Stevie Wonder plays the harmonica on the Temptations’ ‘Ball of Confusion’, or exhibiting a very nerdy, very male obsession with chart placings and discographical chronology, the sincerity of his enthusiasm about the music itself is rarely less than endearing. He'll tell you about a song he loves, and then he'll tell you why a certain live version is even more special.
And for Dylanologists, there is an almost endless amount to get your teeth into – not least his absolute hatred for you in particular; understanding music doesn’t enhance it, he says for the millionth time in his life, which broadly translates as, “Stop analysing my songs and fuck off.” Another endlessly-repeated Dylan mantra, that songs are merely captured in the studio, they don’t end there, is, like Highway 61 before it, revisited.
PROTEST SONGS
For those still nonplussed by Dylan's shrugging off of “finger-pointing songs” in 1964, he’ll spell it out for you, with that pronounced predilection for provocation that here bleeds into trolling. ‘Ball of Confusion’ is “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness,” he says. “Writing a song like this can be deceptively easy. First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment." He follows this with an unexpected, barely-veiled ad-hominem attack on Tom Lehrer.
In 1966, Dylan pretended to placate his audience in Manchester in 1966 with one of the funniest pieces of trolling in history, announcing to his audience of disgruntled folkies, “I'm going to do a protest song... this is called ‘I Hear You’ve Got Your Brand New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’.” His essay on ‘War’ by Edwin Starr is a fascinating counterpoint to perhaps his first great protest song, ‘Masters of War’. War is “often the only solution”, he says baldly now, while still raging at the attendant profiteering, pomposity and pride. Whereas Robert Caro’s recent book, Working, included a chapter on Pete Seeger’s song, ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’, notable for its piercing clarity on the subject of Vietnam, Dylan’s waffly, pointless discursion on the track turns into a peculiar rumination of the ethics of old Disney documentaries. It had been Woody Guthrie – allied perhaps to boundless ambition – that first opened Dylan’s eyes to music as a vehicle for social change; Guthrie who was once his lode star. There are no Woody Guthrie songs in the book.
Surely the oddest and most disquieting element of The Philosophy of Modern Song, though, is Dylan’s women problem. If we’re playing count-the-faces identity politics, then 62 of the 66 songs are by men, and the cover photo seems a hollow joke, but that’s not even the point. While most of the strange things he writes about women in the book are said essentially in character, he chose the songs, which include I Got a Woman, Black Magic Woman, and the execrable Eagles track, Witchy Woman). Taken at face value – which in this instance seems reasonable – Dylan is trapped as a product of his time, his inspirations and his own oeuvre in a disastrous madonna/whore dichotomy, forever desperate to escape from an awful world of terrifying, sexualised harpies to a simpler, more old-fashioned place and time in which a submissive and pliant woman will bring him snacks. A lengthy digression on the subject of divorce lawyers also seems less an objective and reasoned treatise about a societal ill, and more a highly public admission that he has just got divorced.
FIBS
In his only volume of memoir, Chronicles, Dylan defensively – and unconvincingly – suggested that his 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, had been based on a series of Chekhov plays, but had been misidentified by rock writers as exactly what it was, a break-up album in which he sounds alternately livid, sentimental and bereft. When he says in the first chapter here that first-person narration is often mistaken for truth, I took it as a threat that he’s warming up for another crack at that unconvincing lie.
There are smaller insights too, for those who care about such things. A chapter about Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ is is unexpectedly revealing as to the mundane details – and psychological facts – of Dylan’s own life on tour. ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ may be a strange vehicle for Dylan’s crotchety musings about mystery and nuance in art, but they’re valuable all the same. Elsewhere, he’s still low-key obsessed with Robert Ford, he loves old movies (though doesn’t write very well about them, and passes up the chance to engage in some much-needed Mickey Rooney revisionism), and touchingly refers to Pete Seeger throughout as “Pete”, their connection long-severed but not dead.
There’s some merit, too, in his observations from outside, though the level of insight – and interest – really does vary. He makes a fascinating, if confused, argument that how learning the back story of a song can either augment ('Old Violin') or obliterate ('Save the Last Dance for Me') its universallity. Once you know that Doc Pomus's lyric for the latter is about being in a wheelchair at his wedding, due to polio, that subtext overpowers anything the listener can bring to the song. The idea that our feelings of pure empathy for the song's narrator might create a different, even richer experience is, bizarrely, an angle that Dylan doesn't consider.
Bob's thoughts on country music are especially arresting (also sexist): the genre "finds itself in the church on Sunday morning becauuse it spent Saturday night in a back-alley knife fight and trying to convince the barmaid to hike her skirt up around her hips." Perceptively, he crystallises the glory of so much country music and the emptiness of its recent iterations: "Without the dynamic tension of the guilty over the bacchanal, it becomes either joyless proselytising or empty-headed carousing." That idea, though, clashes with the author's simplistic ideas of spirituality expressed elsewhere; Sam Cooke's undeniable gospel credentials are largely dismissed because ultimately he got "shot, bare-naked in a motel room". This as Bob grows misty-eyed over monotonous pig-tail wearer Willie Nelson, very much the Danny McBride of the songwriter world: adored and revered by his more talented contemporaries to the general bafflement of their fans.
'MOON, JUNE, SPOON' SONGS
That enthusiasm is spent particularly effectively righting wrongs. Dylan writes with a mixture of an old man's irascibility and a young man's idealism about the cynics who ridicule simple lyrics, particularly on paper (Brett Anderson talked about something similar when I interviewed him in 2019). Explaining that the words are written for the ear and not the eye (apologies to anyone who's bought the coffee table book of his own Nobel Prize for Literature-winning lyrics), and that prescriptive songwriting rules impair creativity, Bob takes aim at the naysayers with a critique that's at once petulant, adolescent and quite beautifully pure: "All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirise their lack of profundity only show their own limitations."
So he's appealing if repetitive when stanning Tin Pan Alley, penetrating if not necessarily correct as he delves into the world of ‘El Paso’ (“a ballad of the tortured soul… that resonates on every level with people on every level… a dark tale of indescribable beauty and death”), and extremely funny when describing Carl Perkins’ obsession with his Blue Suede Shoes. But he also reads way too much into Jackson Browne’s semi-laughable ‘The Pretender’, a song where events and what passes for motivation are determined entirely by things that happen to rhyme with ‘pretender’, including “begin and end there”, “legal tender” and, most regrettably, “ice cream vendor”. His fascinating essay on ‘Volare’ – which takes in psychedelia and foreign-language records – is followed by a confused chapter on ‘London Calling’ that contradicts itself and constantly misses the point, suggesting that Dylan understands neither punk nor England.
Perhaps only this author could reimagine the most innocuous songs as being so ineffably creepy – he depicts Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On-A My House’ as a grim fairytale, and cheerily informs us, of Eddy Arnold’s elusive ‘You Don’t Know Me’, that “a serial killer would sing this song” – and yet his phrasemaking is at times appallingly cringy. “Some may argue that there are better reasons to go to war than an unpaid patisserie bill’, he writes, replacing Roget’s Thesaurus on the shelf, before claiming that a Rodgers & Hart tune is “as complex as anything by Stephen Hawking,” a sentence that could only be worse if he’d referred to him as “Hawkings”. Similarly, the potted biographies of artists sometimes come with an interesting slant, and at others are largely meaningless, whether that’s because the claims made about their talent are so vague (Bobby Darin) or so preposterous (Perry Como). The final chapter – on space, time and Dion and the Belmonts – is, fittingly, this book at its most extreme: the most weird, the most nerdy, the most pretentious and ambitious.
A GRUMPIER BOB
Some have described The Philosophy of Modern Song as the print equivalent of Dylan’s now-defunct Theme Time Radio Hour, but while the world of the songs remains the same, his view of the wider world has intruded, and palled. This is a grumpier Bob, less playful, more resigned. There are still tall tales, but there are fewer of them, and his listing of song titles that share a word seems less like a fun experiment in genre and more like a boring old bloke who won’t leave you alone in the pub.
But like everything Dylan does, it is, if not a momentous artistic achievement, at least deceptively unusual, repeatedly illuminating – at times by accident – and in the end just about worthwhile.
Bob’s new book works best if you regard it as his version of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the entirely unlicensed compilation that he stole from a friend as a teenager, and which informed his career more than any other single document. That bootleg box-set compiled 84 folk, country and blues songs from 1926-33; this book creates a canon of its own, with essays on 66 recordings dating from 1924 to 2004, its accent falling particularly on early rock and roll. It arguably works better as a playlist than a book – alongside vaguely leftfield classics like Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ and Marty Robbins’ ‘El Paso', he includes obscurities such as ‘CIA Man’ by the Fugs, 'Detroit City' by Bobby Bare, and Johnny Paycheck’s desolate, gorgeous ‘Old Violin’ – but there’s enough in The Philosophy of Modern Song to make it worthwhile, at least for that stoic and balding band of Dylan obsessives.
STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Most of the book's essays consist of a freeform, stream-of-consciousness riff on the meaning of the song – inhabiting its world; frequently written in the second person – followed by a more matter-of-fact contextual section. The former, aside from the occasionally arresting, terse turn of phrase, is usually pretentious and tedious (editors don’t like to tinker with "momentous artistic achievements", especially when written by Nobel Prize winners); the latter tends to be more interesting, allowing for insights into Dylan’s own processes and prejudices – some of those revelations intentional, others unwitting – as well as inspiring some agreeably peculiar tangents. A Santana track turns into a recap of the career of screenwriter and sci-fi novelist Leigh Brackett, as well as incorporating a note about the invention of Velcro. Other songs lead to digressions on lemmings, Esperanto and the history of the Nudie suit. Good non-fiction has always been about connections.
Dylan is a curmudgeonly host, tediously "both sides”-ing every political question, complaining about people saying “OK, boomer” (OK, boomer) and, perhaps more reasonably, railing against the rise of niche marketing, which by definition narrows our artistic horizons. This broadly grouchy work, though, is saved by two things in particular: the author's transparent love of music, and the way the book shades in, subverts or enhances our understanding of his own life and legacy.
Whether he’s extolling the emotional directness of bluegrass ("the other side of heavy metal"), becoming transparently excited that Stevie Wonder plays the harmonica on the Temptations’ ‘Ball of Confusion’, or exhibiting a very nerdy, very male obsession with chart placings and discographical chronology, the sincerity of his enthusiasm about the music itself is rarely less than endearing. He'll tell you about a song he loves, and then he'll tell you why a certain live version is even more special.
And for Dylanologists, there is an almost endless amount to get your teeth into – not least his absolute hatred for you in particular; understanding music doesn’t enhance it, he says for the millionth time in his life, which broadly translates as, “Stop analysing my songs and fuck off.” Another endlessly-repeated Dylan mantra, that songs are merely captured in the studio, they don’t end there, is, like Highway 61 before it, revisited.
PROTEST SONGS
For those still nonplussed by Dylan's shrugging off of “finger-pointing songs” in 1964, he’ll spell it out for you, with that pronounced predilection for provocation that here bleeds into trolling. ‘Ball of Confusion’ is “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness,” he says. “Writing a song like this can be deceptively easy. First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment." He follows this with an unexpected, barely-veiled ad-hominem attack on Tom Lehrer.
In 1966, Dylan pretended to placate his audience in Manchester in 1966 with one of the funniest pieces of trolling in history, announcing to his audience of disgruntled folkies, “I'm going to do a protest song... this is called ‘I Hear You’ve Got Your Brand New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’.” His essay on ‘War’ by Edwin Starr is a fascinating counterpoint to perhaps his first great protest song, ‘Masters of War’. War is “often the only solution”, he says baldly now, while still raging at the attendant profiteering, pomposity and pride. Whereas Robert Caro’s recent book, Working, included a chapter on Pete Seeger’s song, ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’, notable for its piercing clarity on the subject of Vietnam, Dylan’s waffly, pointless discursion on the track turns into a peculiar rumination of the ethics of old Disney documentaries. It had been Woody Guthrie – allied perhaps to boundless ambition – that first opened Dylan’s eyes to music as a vehicle for social change; Guthrie who was once his lode star. There are no Woody Guthrie songs in the book.
Surely the oddest and most disquieting element of The Philosophy of Modern Song, though, is Dylan’s women problem. If we’re playing count-the-faces identity politics, then 62 of the 66 songs are by men, and the cover photo seems a hollow joke, but that’s not even the point. While most of the strange things he writes about women in the book are said essentially in character, he chose the songs, which include I Got a Woman, Black Magic Woman, and the execrable Eagles track, Witchy Woman). Taken at face value – which in this instance seems reasonable – Dylan is trapped as a product of his time, his inspirations and his own oeuvre in a disastrous madonna/whore dichotomy, forever desperate to escape from an awful world of terrifying, sexualised harpies to a simpler, more old-fashioned place and time in which a submissive and pliant woman will bring him snacks. A lengthy digression on the subject of divorce lawyers also seems less an objective and reasoned treatise about a societal ill, and more a highly public admission that he has just got divorced.
FIBS
In his only volume of memoir, Chronicles, Dylan defensively – and unconvincingly – suggested that his 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, had been based on a series of Chekhov plays, but had been misidentified by rock writers as exactly what it was, a break-up album in which he sounds alternately livid, sentimental and bereft. When he says in the first chapter here that first-person narration is often mistaken for truth, I took it as a threat that he’s warming up for another crack at that unconvincing lie.
There are smaller insights too, for those who care about such things. A chapter about Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ is is unexpectedly revealing as to the mundane details – and psychological facts – of Dylan’s own life on tour. ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ may be a strange vehicle for Dylan’s crotchety musings about mystery and nuance in art, but they’re valuable all the same. Elsewhere, he’s still low-key obsessed with Robert Ford, he loves old movies (though doesn’t write very well about them, and passes up the chance to engage in some much-needed Mickey Rooney revisionism), and touchingly refers to Pete Seeger throughout as “Pete”, their connection long-severed but not dead.
There’s some merit, too, in his observations from outside, though the level of insight – and interest – really does vary. He makes a fascinating, if confused, argument that how learning the back story of a song can either augment ('Old Violin') or obliterate ('Save the Last Dance for Me') its universallity. Once you know that Doc Pomus's lyric for the latter is about being in a wheelchair at his wedding, due to polio, that subtext overpowers anything the listener can bring to the song. The idea that our feelings of pure empathy for the song's narrator might create a different, even richer experience is, bizarrely, an angle that Dylan doesn't consider.
Bob's thoughts on country music are especially arresting (also sexist): the genre "finds itself in the church on Sunday morning becauuse it spent Saturday night in a back-alley knife fight and trying to convince the barmaid to hike her skirt up around her hips." Perceptively, he crystallises the glory of so much country music and the emptiness of its recent iterations: "Without the dynamic tension of the guilty over the bacchanal, it becomes either joyless proselytising or empty-headed carousing." That idea, though, clashes with the author's simplistic ideas of spirituality expressed elsewhere; Sam Cooke's undeniable gospel credentials are largely dismissed because ultimately he got "shot, bare-naked in a motel room". This as Bob grows misty-eyed over monotonous pig-tail wearer Willie Nelson, very much the Danny McBride of the songwriter world: adored and revered by his more talented contemporaries to the general bafflement of their fans.
'MOON, JUNE, SPOON' SONGS
That enthusiasm is spent particularly effectively righting wrongs. Dylan writes with a mixture of an old man's irascibility and a young man's idealism about the cynics who ridicule simple lyrics, particularly on paper (Brett Anderson talked about something similar when I interviewed him in 2019). Explaining that the words are written for the ear and not the eye (apologies to anyone who's bought the coffee table book of his own Nobel Prize for Literature-winning lyrics), and that prescriptive songwriting rules impair creativity, Bob takes aim at the naysayers with a critique that's at once petulant, adolescent and quite beautifully pure: "All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirise their lack of profundity only show their own limitations."
So he's appealing if repetitive when stanning Tin Pan Alley, penetrating if not necessarily correct as he delves into the world of ‘El Paso’ (“a ballad of the tortured soul… that resonates on every level with people on every level… a dark tale of indescribable beauty and death”), and extremely funny when describing Carl Perkins’ obsession with his Blue Suede Shoes. But he also reads way too much into Jackson Browne’s semi-laughable ‘The Pretender’, a song where events and what passes for motivation are determined entirely by things that happen to rhyme with ‘pretender’, including “begin and end there”, “legal tender” and, most regrettably, “ice cream vendor”. His fascinating essay on ‘Volare’ – which takes in psychedelia and foreign-language records – is followed by a confused chapter on ‘London Calling’ that contradicts itself and constantly misses the point, suggesting that Dylan understands neither punk nor England.
Perhaps only this author could reimagine the most innocuous songs as being so ineffably creepy – he depicts Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On-A My House’ as a grim fairytale, and cheerily informs us, of Eddy Arnold’s elusive ‘You Don’t Know Me’, that “a serial killer would sing this song” – and yet his phrasemaking is at times appallingly cringy. “Some may argue that there are better reasons to go to war than an unpaid patisserie bill’, he writes, replacing Roget’s Thesaurus on the shelf, before claiming that a Rodgers & Hart tune is “as complex as anything by Stephen Hawking,” a sentence that could only be worse if he’d referred to him as “Hawkings”. Similarly, the potted biographies of artists sometimes come with an interesting slant, and at others are largely meaningless, whether that’s because the claims made about their talent are so vague (Bobby Darin) or so preposterous (Perry Como). The final chapter – on space, time and Dion and the Belmonts – is, fittingly, this book at its most extreme: the most weird, the most nerdy, the most pretentious and ambitious.
A GRUMPIER BOB
Some have described The Philosophy of Modern Song as the print equivalent of Dylan’s now-defunct Theme Time Radio Hour, but while the world of the songs remains the same, his view of the wider world has intruded, and palled. This is a grumpier Bob, less playful, more resigned. There are still tall tales, but there are fewer of them, and his listing of song titles that share a word seems less like a fun experiment in genre and more like a boring old bloke who won’t leave you alone in the pub.
But like everything Dylan does, it is, if not a momentous artistic achievement, at least deceptively unusual, repeatedly illuminating – at times by accident – and in the end just about worthwhile.
April 4, 2023
Wow! Was not really expecting to love this book as much as I did. The title is a little misleading, as Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan), does not break down the mindset of modern songwriting. Instead, this book contains a collection of essays centered around songs that Dylan found captivating in the last century. In fact, in his essay on "Black Magic Woman," he suggests that perhaps the one which swells with emotion listening to music understands it better than the one who has studied it all his life. Each chapter spends the first half roughly describing the mood and feel of the song; Dylan sometimes is more poetic than the song itself. The second half of each essay goes into the history and culture behind the song, ending with why it was so great for its time. The genre of songs discussed ranges from the old country, to standards, to simple Rock & Roll. The dates range from 1924 to 2004; an impressive leap to time.
This book has opened my eyes to appreciate the music of the last century in a way I did not know I could. Even the songs I already loved, like Truckin', have been given an extra layer of depth. Currently, I am listening to more Elvis in the last week than I ever have before. I am also listening to 50's country regularly to hear the murder ballads and story tellers move me.
Favorite songs explored: "Truckin'" by Grateful Dead, "Big River" by Johnny Cash, "Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, "El Paso" by Marty Robbins, "War" by Edwin Star, "Viva Las Vegas" by Elvis Presley and "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins.
I will want a physical copy, however, the audio was fantastic. I highly suggest letting Dylan's voice be heard rather than read. After all, he's a music man, maybe the music man — he's the Jokerman.
This book has opened my eyes to appreciate the music of the last century in a way I did not know I could. Even the songs I already loved, like Truckin', have been given an extra layer of depth. Currently, I am listening to more Elvis in the last week than I ever have before. I am also listening to 50's country regularly to hear the murder ballads and story tellers move me.
Favorite songs explored: "Truckin'" by Grateful Dead, "Big River" by Johnny Cash, "Pancho and Lefty" by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, "El Paso" by Marty Robbins, "War" by Edwin Star, "Viva Las Vegas" by Elvis Presley and "Blue Suede Shoes" by Carl Perkins.
I will want a physical copy, however, the audio was fantastic. I highly suggest letting Dylan's voice be heard rather than read. After all, he's a music man, maybe the music man — he's the Jokerman.
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