The title of Bob Dylan’s new book, the first book published since receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, is a lie. It is called the philosophy of modern song. In reality, this collection of 66 short essays on many musical pieces contains very little philosophy, and even less modern songs: only two of the 66 selected titles were composed in this century. Illustrated with rich and majestic images (artist portraits, advertising posters, stills from movies, landscapes, comics, and iconic photographs) whose relation to the analyzed compositions is often beyond the reader’s grasp, the book does not deliver what its name promises. , but that doesn’t mean that what it offers isn’t as valuable. With sharp thoughts, sarcastic observations, hallucinatory cutscenes, historical notes, exaggerated similes, and aphorisms as sharp as a trapper’s knife. Philosophy of… provides a strange but fascinating introduction to Dylan’s world, a landscape of impenetrable darkness momentarily illuminated by blinding bursts of brightness. After more than a decade of working on it, Dylan doesn’t even bother to explain why the book or the criteria he followed when choosing the songs, if anything beyond his personal whim.
Neither the Beatles nor the Rolling Stones
With a few exceptions, the choice is essentially North American, and Robert Zimmerman, as a musician, prioritizes genres already in vogue when he’s teething: blues, country, primitive folk, rockabilly, bluegrass… There are also pre-pop standards and Bing Crosby, There is generous space reserved for singers like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and twice Bobby Darin, whom he considers the “most flexible” of all singers of his time. “The man, if he was anybody, was everybody,” she says of him. As is usually the case with this type of work, the most noticeable are the shortcomings. The Beatles (which contributes some to the modern song concept) or the Rolling Stones or any other British band from the 60s are not on the list, with the exception of The Who, where Dylan’s My Generation devoted so much to Dylan’s hymn. a strange brilliance that opens with a frame sentence: “This is a song that doubts everything and does no one any favors.” Three other non-American songs are available, two in English (Elvis Costello’s Pump Up and The Clash’s London Calling) and one in Italian (Domenico Modugno’s Volare). Writing about the latter, Dylan says, “There’s something very liberating about listening to a song in a language you don’t understand.”
It’s not something I take into account when choosing. The other major shortcoming of the book is the ridiculous female presence. Of the 66 recordings, only four are performed by women: Cher’s Gypsies, vagrants and thieves; Come on home, by Rosemary Clooney; Written by Judy Garland, rain or shine, and don’t let Nina Simone be misunderstood. The insufficient quota is exacerbated by the inclusion of some improvised considerations, such as the author’s defense of prostitution – “when you pay for sex, it’s perhaps the cheapest price there is” – and polygamy: “What an oppressed woman, a future without the whims of a cruel society, Wouldn’t she be better off as one of the wives of a rich man? She was properly cared for rather than being alone on the street at the expense of the state.”
50s
In Dylan’s defense, it could be argued that the entire book appears to have been written from temporal and geographic coordinates, and that such statements should not come as the slightest surprise. A time and place where country singers drove lawnmowers to the liquor store because their wives hid their car keys. It’s not surprising that nearly half (28) of the songs reviewed here belong to the 50s, when the adolescent Zimmerman decided to change his name after discovering blues, country, rock and roll, folk, and poetry in that order. So the world.
Judging by the content of his philosophy, everything that comes after it seems like a long and relentless fall. “Rock and roll has moved from a window-based brick to the status quo: from slicks on leather jackets that record rockabilly to stickers with the motto Thug Life… 81-year-old Bob Dylan is definitely a man from another era. And he’s right. It’s hard not to succumb to the flood of atomic images that the author has chained up with Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas, for example. Or Dylan’s parallels drawn between bluegrass and heavy metal, “two musical forms that haven’t changed visually or audibly for decades.” Don’t laugh. Finally, the new book from the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature contains little revelation but a lot of joy and wonder.