REVIEW: The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (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. "Elvis had a hit with 'Always on My Mind'," points out Bob, following this observation with one of the wrongest sentences ever written: "All you remember now is the Willie version."

'MOON, JUNE, SPOON' SONGS

The author's enthusiasm is expended much more 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.