[Dylan, writes reviewer Foye of this new coffee table-size book,
"is sweeping out the ashes from the cave of a long career. He is
casting a light on the Jungian shadows of popular song, examining both
mechanics and metaphysics." ]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BOOKS BOB DYLAN’S THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG  
[[link removed]]


 

Raymond Foye
November 1, 2022
The Brooklyn Rail
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Dylan, writes reviewer Foye of this new coffee table-size book, "is
sweeping out the ashes from the cave of a long career. He is casting a
light on the Jungian shadows of popular song, examining both mechanics
and metaphysics." _

,

 

_The Philosophy of Modern Song_
Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 9781451648706

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze once described Bob Dylan in a suitably
curious and contradictory way: “The opposite of a plagiarist, but
also the opposite of a master or a model. A very lengthy preparation,
yet no method, nor rules, nor recipes. Nuptials without couples or
conjugality. Having a bag into which I put everything I encounter,
provided that I am also put in a bag. Finding, encountering, stealing
instead of regulating, recognizing and judging. For recognizing is the
opposite of the encounter. Judging is the profession of many people,
and it is not a good profession, but it is also the use to which many
people put writing. Better to be a road-sweeper than a judge.”1

In _The Philosophy of Modern Song, _Dylan is sweeping out the ashes
from the cave of a long career. He is casting a light on the Jungian
shadows of popular song, examining both mechanics and metaphysics.
Entertaining and profound, Dylan’s philosophy runs along the lines
of Pascal’s _Pensées_, or the _Meditations_ of Marcus
Aurelius—personal ruminations on how to live with oneself, and the
universe. Dylan finds profundities where others find ditties, but he
always has. In the 1960s, Gloria Stavers was the editor of a teen
magazine called _16_. When she met Dylan she was surprised by his lack
of condescension: “You’re like the candy store,” he told her.
“But the truth is where the truth is, and sometimes the truth is in
the candy store.”

Dylan’s humor—always one of his most beguiling qualities, and in
short supply in later years—is everywhere evident, and it makes this
book the romp that it is. I lost track of the number of times I
laughed out loud. Some of the chapters offer practical insights into
singing, phrasing, songwriting and recording studio practices. Other
chapters take the song as a jumping-off point for stand-alone
meditations on art, money, war, religion, etc., In _Money Honey,_
performer Elvis Presley is mentioned only once in passing. What we get
instead is an extended musing on the illusion at the heart of all
money, on how value is assigned, on scarcity both real and
manufactured:

Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement. I like Caravaggio, you
like Basquiat. We both like Frida Kahlo and Warhol leaves us cold. Art
thrives with such spirited sparring. That’s why there can be no such
thing as a national art form. In the attempt, we can feel the sanding
of the edges, the endeavor to include all opinions, the hope to not
offend. It all too quickly turns to propaganda or rank commercialism.

Not that there’s anything wrong with commercialism but like all
things monetary, it’s based on a leap of faith; more abstract than
Frank Stella‘s geometrics. The only reason money is worth anything
is because we agree it is. Like religion, these agreements can change
according to country and culture, but those changes are merely
cosmetic, usually only name and denomination. The basic tenets remain
constant.

Dylan concludes that time is the ultimate currency.

_The Philosophy of Modern Song_ is designed as a coffee table book.
Dylan’s picture editing provides a compelling and offbeat visual
narrative of the history of modern song, always reminding us that this
is an art forged in the smithy of commerce. By refusing to include
captions the illustrations speak for themselves all the more
powerfully. Dylan’s droll humor even extends to the
illustrations—_Tutti Frutti_ offers a Cézanne still life with
apples, pears and lemons, opposite the gayest photo of Little Richard
(and friends) that I’ve ever seen.

Dylan’s view of life seems to be a lot of horror and a little bit of
joy, which is where the songs come in: they are a source of comfort
and hope for the downtrodden. They “take the sting out of life.”
Like Carl Sandburg or Edgar Lee Masters, Dylan emerges in this book as
a Mid-Western populist who stands for simplicity and thrift, honest
work for honest pay, and has no use for Wall Street bandits. You might
be poor, but as long as you could afford a radio (or knew someone who
could) the songs were free. And if you couldn’t, songs could still
be passed down and passed around by singing. Dylan eulogistically
acknowledges that his world of song is largely a thing of the past, as
technology infects society with monoculture, as even the means of
delivery diminish:

Today it is commonplace to stream a movie directly to your phone. So,
when you are watching Gloria Swanson as faded movie star Norma Desmond
proclaim from the palm of your hand, “I am big, it’s the pictures
that got small,” it contains layers of irony that the
writer/director Billy Wilder could never have imagined. Of course,
someone streaming something to their phone is most likely watching
something even shorter and faster paced on TikTok, certainly not
anything in black and white with a running time of 110 minutes. 

Dylan sees the world crowded with angels and demons, with songs as the
intercessors. Songs also represent a better life: you get there by
wishing, hoping, and dreaming. For three minutes you too can be a
king, a lover, or an outlaw.

This book probably brings you closer to being inside Dylan’s mind
than anything else he’s ever done. In many ways it is more
autobiographical than his memoirs _Chronicles_, and certainly a much
happier book. There are no scores to settle, no traumatic encounters
with fame, no reason to obfuscate or lie. Discussing Hank Williams or
Chuck Berry obviously brings out the best in him. The book is full of
unexpected assessments: when is the last time you heard someone sing
the praises of Perry Como?

In writing about Bobby Darrin, Dylan may as well be discussing
himself: “Some people create new laws to hide their past. Bobby knew
that sometimes the past was nothing more than an illusion and you
might just as well keep making stuff up.” Willie Nelson’s “On
the Road Again” allows Dylan to discuss “dubious microwave
burritos, long hauls between laundry days, too much information about
the bus driver’s divorce,” but it also goes a long way towards
answering people’s questions as to why the endless touring:

And then there’s another song to be written about the real reason
you can’t wait to get on the road again. Nobody’s mad because you
didn’t take the garbage out, acquaintances don’t just drop in
unannounced, neighbors don’t give you the stink-eye every time the
wind shifts. The thing about being on the road is that you’re not
bogged down by anything. Not even bad news. You give pleasure to other
people and you keep your grief to yourself. 

At 340 pages the book is copious, although everyone will have their
qualms over those who are excluded. Obvious omissions are
Lennon/McCartney, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, perhaps his
closest peers. Townes Van Zandt emerges as a songwriter close to
Dylan’s heart, and recieves numerous compliments, from one craftsman
to another:

A big part of songwriting, like all writing, is editing – distilling
thought down to essentials. Novice writers often hide behind filigree.
In many cases the artistry is in what is unsaid. As the old saying
goes, an iceberg moves gracefully because most of it is beneath the
surface.

And later,

One way to measure a songwriter is to look at the singers who sing
their songs… Another way to measure a songwriter is, are their songs
still being sung?

For Dylan, authenticity is always the key, and that usually means
directness, simplicity. Overproduction is almost always the kiss of
death. “A record is so much better when you can believe it,” he
tells us. The spareness of Hank Williams’s production “will make
you examine yourself—all your actions.”

That’s the problem with a lot of things these days. Everything is
too full now; we are spoon-fed everything. All songs are about one
thing and one thing specifically, there is no shading, no nuance, no
mystery. Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put
their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless
environs.

And it’s not just songs—movies, television shows, even clothing
and food, everything is niche marketed and overly fussed with. There
isn’t an item on the menu that doesn’t have half a dozen
adjectives in front of it, all chosen to hit you in your
sociopolitical-humanitarian-snobby-foodie consumer spot. Enjoy your
free-range, cumin-infused, cayenne-dusted heirloom reduction.
Sometimes it’s just better to have a BLT and be done with it.

Dylan is not writing about songs in general, but in particular,
because every song is different—at least the good ones are. The song
itself is only a blueprint: the alchemy of time and place, of artist
and performance, is what brings it alive. The very same song performed
by another artist might be a miserable failure. This book is about
modern song, not popular song, so you will find non-commercial artists
like The Fugs and Native American poet and activist John Trudell
alongside Frank Sinatra or The Temptations.

In most cases a song gets two treatments, one imaginative (“riffs”
they have been called) and one discursive. For the former, Dylan has
created a hard-boiled Philip Marlow persona, an arch voice not unlike
what Kenneth Anger created for _Hollywood Babylon_. Short cinematic
film scripts, they are intentional works of artifice, _Dreamsongs_ to
use John Berryman’s phrase, some better than others. The latter
entries about the songs themselves are a thing of beauty, each one
different from the next. I often found myself reading sentences twice
just to see how he places a comma or semi-colon, or changes up the
rhythm. The writing is propulsive, engaging, packed with content and
reflection, but never overdone. They are modern-day encomiums, gallant
odes of praise for heroes and demigods.

The play of high and low runs through this book. When writing about
the song “War” (my favorite chapter) Dylan holds Thucydides in one
hand and Edwin Starr in the other. Stephen Foster is the Edgar Allan
Poe of song. Or consider “El Paso,” a simple cowboy song by Marty
Robbins. Dylan describes it as “mankind created in the image of a
jealous godhead,” before touching on transmigration, the primitive
self, the blood of Christian martyrs, and the atomic bomb. Dylan has
fun taking things over the top, but is he really? These songs are all
links in an invisible ancestral chain that includes myths, legends,
archetypes, fairy tales, nonsense rhymes, shapeshifting fables,
metamorphoses, and so much more. People who questioned Dylan receiving
the Nobel Prize revealed a very limited conception of literature. Song
is the oldest literary form, existing for tens of thousands of years
before any others arose. Like Orpheus in the underworld, Dylan is the
perfect guide.

With Dylan, a few words go a long way. Nothing is belabored. When you
are discussing songwriting, and you are arguably the finest songwriter
of your era, it needn’t be. I wouldn’t call it shop-speak, it’s
more insider knowledge. Dylan was a great fan of David Hockney’s
book _Secret Knowledge_, which posited the idea that there is a body
of unwritten knowledge in every field, known only to its
practitioners. This book is the _Secret Knowledge_ of song._ _

* Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, _Dialogues II_. Paris:
Flammarion, 1977. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
NY: Columbia University Press, 1987.

* Bob Dylan
[[link removed]]
* Music
[[link removed]]
* music criticism and appreciation
[[link removed]]
* popular music
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]