I Read a Book: The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan

It's not really philosophy, and it's not as modern as it could be, but it is concerned with song.

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.