![]() His essay on the Temptations’ “ Ball of Confusion” paints scenes of societal collapse: “Blood running in the streets, earthquakes on the next block, women getting raped on the corner, spaceships taking off. For Dylan, songs aren’t just artworks to be analyzed and explicated they’re visions that beget visions, prompts for his own madcap and macabre yarn-spinning. ![]() More often, though, Dylan is in a different dimension altogether, cruising the space-scape of his imagination. The most recent recording he considers, from 2004, is a rendition of a Stephen Foster song that was composed in 1849. and Jay-Z but doesn’t delve into the music. He mentions Run-DMC, the Notorious B.I.G. But it’s clear that Dylan’s definition of “modern song” does not extend into the hip-hop era. He also writes about ‘60s and ‘70s rock anthems - the Who’s “ My Generation,” the Clash’s “ London Calling” - and makes a couple of excursions into the ‘80s catalog of Willie Nelson. Nine were released in 1956, the year Dylan turned 15. Twenty-eight songs in the book date from the 1950s. Most of us fall hard for pop music as adolescents and never quite shake the stranglehold those formative hits have on our consciousness. There’s some soul - Ray Charles, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes - and several songs by the titans of early rock & roll, including Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Little Richard, Dylan’s hero in his teenage years. Dylan’s playlist in “The Philosophy of Modern Song” isn’t exactly surprising, but it is revealing. That formulation could be turned in a different direction: If you know a guy’s favorite songs, you gain understanding of his life. Tuesday’s performance felt like a gift: a thoroughly engrossing outpouring of roots music and folk-soul balladry, with Dylan in richly expressive voice. Music Review: A genius, of course, but a happy one? In concert, a generous Bob Dylan makes the case ![]() “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.” “Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song,” Dylan writes. That second person pronoun is noteworthy, a key to the author’s ideas - his philosophy, if you insist - about how songs work. “In this song you’re the Prodigal Son,” he writes. Dylan offers no introduction or contextualizing chit-chat, hot-rodding straight into an essay about “ Detroit City,” a 1963 hit by country singer Bobby Bare. It isn’t a book that takes time to clear its throat. ![]() It is - for better and, alas, worse - a special kind of bonkers. But “The Philosophy of Modern Song” has its own wild flavor. There is the meditation on the Brecht-Weill song “ Pirate Jenny” in his 2004 memoir “ Chronicles: Volume One,” and the music-themed reveries scattered through his mid-’60s prose-poetry experiment “Tarantula.” The closest model may be the monologues Dylan delivered on “Theme Time Radio Hour,” the Sirius XM show he hosted from 2006 to 2009. Readers of Dylan have encountered writing in this vein before. In any case, “philosophy” is a useful term, vague and baggy enough to accommodate the mix of music criticism, beat poetry, wolverine snarls and Lear-on-the-heath tirades that comprise the book’s 66 chapters about 66 songs. The book title feels like a joke at their expense, and, maybe, a jibe at the pointy-heads in Stockholm who awarded him the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. For decades, Dylan has been laying boobytraps for his devotees, the Dylanologists who rake through his songs and scraps, seeking clues to the Riddle of Bob. It has a list price worthy of an opus, $45 - pretty steep for a volume that pads out more than one-third of its pages with, per the Simon & Schuster press release, “carefully curated photographs.”īut the title is also a wisecrack, too puffed up and self-important to be taken at face value. It asserts that the book is an important work, a tome that merits a place on your loftiest library shelf, up in the thin air where you keep the leather-bound, gilt-edged stuff. What should we make of the title of Bob Dylan’s new book? “ The Philosophy of Modern Song” is a mouthful, a phrase that puts on airs. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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