Context is everything, Bob Dylan says. As usual, he’s right. How does it feel to be ‘reviewing’ a book written by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature? No pressure, yeah? Well, let’s kill that angle. The award is a joke. The Nobel committee has zero credibility. When they gave the prize to Dylan, who benefited? Not Bob. If anything, recognising him burnished the Nobel Committee’s reputation. They needed Dylan much more than he needed them because he didn’t need that shit at all, and his delayed, begrudging acceptance eradicated any doubt. The Nobel Prize! Hell, a couple of years after Dylan received that dubious honour, they gave the award to Peter Handke, a genocide denier who gave an oration at Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s funeral. Nice, ha?
As for Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song – his first published prose work since Chronicles: Volume 1’, way back in 2004 when a Nobel for Dylan was just a pipe dream shared by a few widely-mocked academics – well, that title is a bit of a joke too. There’s very little of what we could sensibly consider ‘modern song’ in The Philosophy of Modern Song, and any ‘philosophy’ is strictly of the cracker barrel variety. That’s ok, though, because we’ve learned never to take Dylan at face value, and the title was just too pretentious to have been meant seriously. The book’s content, though, is another matter. The puzzle facing the reader as they wade through this text is whether the ‘essays’ within are intended entirely or only partly as a piss-take.
The 66 chapters in The Philosophy of Modern Song are mostly split into two distinct segments: one offers a fairly ‘straight’ account of the song or the artist, although tangential digressions (the origins of velcro; the history of the Nudie suit, etc.) are common; the other one presents what the publisher calls ‘riffs’, often written in the second person, in which Dylan indulges in free-associative musings whose relation to the song at hand ranges from spurious to nonexistent. According to the flyleaf blurb, these “dreamlike riffs” cumulatively amount to “an epic poem”, and “add to the work’s transcendence”. Transcendence, yet! Come on, Simon & Schuster, don’t sell your man short. Not every chapter contains straight and riff sections – some consist of just one or the other – but most are structured this way, with the wild and wooly riff preceding the more (but never wholly) straight writeup.
You’ll have seen other reviews, no doubt. Most have been raves. This book’s 66 chapters may just constitute the most effusively received numbered list since Moses came stumbling down the hill with his stone tablets. Spoiler alert: if you’re the sort of Dylan fan who cannot bear to think of anything he does as undeserving of 5-star reviews, look away now. Go flick through the Mondo Scripto catalog, or give Modern Times a spin. Personally, Bob Dylan is my favorite artist, from any field, from any era. However – and I’m conscious this can be a controversial statement – he’s a human being, and his work is of varying quality. There, I said it. Critics are falling over each other to compete for superlatives to garland this book. The reality, though, is that it just isn’t very good.
The length of each ‘essay’ varies quite a bit, the quality even more so. Some are quite interesting if only inasmuch as anything Bob Dylan chooses to write for publication is quite interesting. Some of these essays seem to have had some thought put into them; many feel phoned in. The riffs, in particular, are written in prose that comes across as sloppy, undisciplined, and dashed off. Atmospherically, they often read like sub-par noir pastiche. The sort of thing Raymond Chandler might have scribbled down if he’d suffered a concussion during a bad acid trip.
As we’ve said, context is everything. The context here is one in which Dylan, once written off as a has-been, is now so universally exalted that he has long since transcended objective criticism and achieved a sort of artistic deification. This process began quite suddenly in the late 1990s. With the release of Time Out of Mind in 1997, directly following a widely publicized health scare where Dylan had reportedly ‘almost died’ of histoplasmosis, the entire mainstream media performed an abrupt, en masse volte-face, and began pretending they’d never regarded Dylan as a washed-up old has-been after all.
For long-term fans, this process was bittersweet. Watching the media turn turtle and prostrate themselves at the knobbly feet of Robert Allen Zimmerman offered endless entertainment (and no doubt gave Dylan a lot of laughs too). There was a flip side: not only did the media’s accounts of Dylan switch from being completely unreliable because they failed to appreciate him to completely unreliable because they had now begun to worship him with blind devotion. This tended to stick in the craw of those of us who had stuck with him throughout the ’80s and ’90s. As Michael Gray, who has for decades been far and away the most perceptive Dylan critic, wrote, we couldn’t help finding it “exasperating to be preached at” by the (Murdoch owned, UK) Sunday Times in 1997 “about how important an artist Bob Dylan was, after they’ve spent the last twenty years deriding hm and anybody who had kept faith with him”.
One of the weirdest aspects of this phenomenon, in hindsight, is that it didn’t fizzle out, leaving a blip in Dylan’s later career where he’d briefly been flavor of the month. Instead, it endured and intensified as time passed, to the point where today, a quarter of a century after the release of Time Out of Mind, Dylan is more universally acclaimed than in his ’60s heyday.
Indeed, Dylan is now the single most lauded, unimpeachable artist alive. Maybe even the single most unimpeachable person alive. Who could compete? Queen Elizabeth II of England might have given Dylan a run for his money had her reputation not been tarnished by standing by her egregious offspring Prince Andrew after his sleazy friendship with billionaire nonce Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein, as we know, had been exposed and had to reach an expensive out-of-court settlement to avoid going on trial to face charges of raping a teenager. Anyway, the Queen passed away recently, so all bets are off. Close, Liz, but no tiara.
Enough preamble. Let’s sample some of Dylan’s ‘poetic’ riffs. (One of these is fake: can you spot it?)
Around the globe you skyrocket, through the labyrinth. No wonder your happy heart sings. Sings the melodies with all the tonality and vibrations of the senses, Ragtime, bebop, operatic and symphonic. The sounds of violins, it’s buzzing in your ears, and it’s all in tune, in tune with your mercurial self, the bright lights of the great millennium, nowhere to go but up.”
– Bob Dylan on Domenico Modugno’s “Volare“
Your desire and imagination are weathering thin, and the longer your lifeline is, there’s less guarantee that either will hold up. You question everything about yourself, but you don’t know what you’re questioning – renounce and relinquish all your thoughts, thoughts that crash into a heavy cloud of fog – thick as a brick wall, split into a million pieces and goes missing – powerful thoughts that explode like the big bang!
– Bob Dylan on John Trudell’s “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore“
In this song you’re hemmed in, going round and round the loop, doing full turns – empty-headed, blind to where you’re going and stumbling through the dark. You’re loaded to the rafters, smacking and slapping at things, buttoned down, no holds barred, going nonstop in a direct line, and everybody’s patting you on the butt.
– Bob Dylan on Mose Allison’s “Everybody Cryin’ Mercy“
In this song, you’re flying solo. No turning back. The rear view mirror is just a void. You trusted her, but she flew the nest first. Left you holding your dick. So now it’s just you. Help ain’t coming, and neither is rest. No cigar-chomping cops, no nightingale nurses out here amid the burning stars. No competition – except yourself. This song is feline, and its claws are out. It’s roadkill, a landslide, history’s portents spiraling in its snake eyes. She’s out there somewhere, and you just have to hope she has the faith to ring true, your treacherous little vixen.
– Bob Dylan on Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird“
Long Tall Sally was twelve feet tall. She was part of the old biblical days in Samaria from the tribe called the Nephilim. They were giants that lived back before the cataclysm of the flood. You can see shots of these giants’ skulls and such. There were people as tall as one-story buildings. They’ve uncovered bones of these giants in Egypt and Iraq. And she was built for speed, she could run like a deer. And Uncle John was her counterpart giant. Little Richard is a giant of a different kind, but so as not to freak anybody out he refers to himself as little so as not to scare anybody.
– Bob Dylan on Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally“
That’s the entire ‘essay’ on “Long Tall Sally”, by the way: one paragraph of irrelevant twaddle. Little Richard, a titan of rock ‘n’ roll and one of Dylan’s great heroes, actually gets two entries in the book. The other one, on “Tutti Frutti”, is again very brief, makes much snickering play on the word ‘fruit’, as slang for ‘male homosexual’ and is accompanied by a photo of Carmen Mirada (the Chiquita Banana Girl) and a Cezanne still life of, you guessed it, fruit. Ho ho! It’s all a bit sophomoric and stale: is there anyone alive who likes early rock ‘n’ roll but needs to be apprised of Little Richard’s erotic proclivities or the song’s overtones of non-vanilla sex?
The song selections are eccentric. Sure, nobody expected Dylan, if he’s going to write about 66 songs, to just dutifully tick off all the obvious choices. Nonetheless, there are some perplexing inclusions. Eclecticism is all very well, but: Perry Como? Cher? Ricky Nelson? The Eagles? Come on! Odder still are the exclusions. Hank Williams makes the cut, as do Elvis and Johnny Cash. Yet here’s no Woody Guthrie, no Leadbelly, no Robert Johnson, no Chuck Berry, no Buddy Holly, no Blind Willie McTell. Very little blues, folk, or traditional song. What there is, is a surfeit of middle-of-the-road mid-century crooners. The chronological range is extremely limited. Song after song is from the ’50s. Again, critics love that this book exists not just as a text but also as a playlist. It’s perhaps surprising there is no official Spotify playlist, but there are several put together by fans, so you can listen along. Frankly, the songs discussed in The Philosophy of Modern Song don’t make for a great collection. Yes, Dylan has done the expected by doing the unexpected, but I’d rather he wrote about a much more obvious list of artists, and I’d rather listen to them too.
Eddie Gorodetsky, the Los Angeles television writer and producer who worked with Dylan on Theme Time Radio Hour and who was widely believed to have had a significant hand in writing Dylan’s scripted patter for those shows, not to mention compiling the playlists, gets a gnomic nod on the book’s dedication page: “Special thanks to my fishing buddy Eddie Gorodetsky…” So far, we can only speculate about the extent of Gorodetsky’s role. Was he involved in choosing the songs here? Did he help write the text? There are certain aspects of the ‘straight’ sections that suggest a more thorough, research-driven writing method than we might expect Dylan to have the patience for, and the prose in those sections also exhibits much more rigor and coherence. Rumors are already circulating about who may have ghostwritten some of The Philosophy of Modern Song, which is a shame. Scripting Dylan’s words for Theme Time Radio was fair enough, and we all know now about the magpie patchwork method Dylan used – very skilfully and effectively – to construct Chronicles; but presenting as his own text that of a ghostwriter would be another step, for Dylan, down the path to inauthenticity.
A similar conjecture surrounds Dylan’s paintings. Particularly with the recent ones, which mimic film stills, we may wonder where Dylan somehow finds the time, and energy, to produce so many of them. Is Dylan actually painting them at all? Is it the work of Richard Prince posing as Dylan? Or is some kid in an 87th-floor apartment in Shanghai churning them out to order? The worst aspect of all this is that the real question becomes: does it matter?
There was a minor scandal around The Philosophy of Modern Song‘s publication when expensive signed copies had to be pulled from sale at the last minute because the ‘signatures’ turned out to be AutoPen fakes. While this could have been a publisher screwup or a retailer’s con job, it’s far from difficult to conceive of Dylan knowingly perpetrating such a scam.
If any ghostwriters were involved in the ‘riff’ sections, Dylan should – like the unfortunate early purchasers of those fake signed editions – be asking for a refund. Not only is this the worst prose ever produced by a recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, but it’s also safe to say that no novice, anonymous author would ever be able to get this stuff green-lit by a reputable publishing house.
The writing is formulaic, lazy, and repetitive. Particularly when you read many chapters in a row, you can’t help noticing this. Take, for example, that Little Richard entry and the claim that “so as not to freak anybody out, he refers to himself as little so as not to scare anybody.” There’s a lot of that sort of redundancy in these riffs, a lot of tautology. A few examples (there are dozens more): “Nobody needs to be in a quick rush, no emphasis on speediness”; “You want to be flung into a distant realm… You want to be piggy backed into another dimension”; “No other man could step into your shoes, no other man can swap places with you”; “obsolete and out of date”; “You’re never going to be sunk or go under”; “it’s time to pay, payment’s long overdue”; “Flashbacks from the past”; “Take your pick, and be selective”. Etc.
Ah well. We are still dealing with a Bob Dylan book here, and inevitably, there are some nuggets of gold hidden in the dung heaps. When not being a crusty old curmudgeon, Dylan is still capable of coining a pithy phrase or two, and his sense of humor seems intact.
“The thing about life is it keeps going even after the headlines stop.”
“Desire fades but traffic goes on forever.”
“He was wrapped tighter than the inside of a golf ball.”
“Because, ultimately, money doesn’t matter. Nor do the things you can buy. Because no matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass.”
Bob’s clearly been having a bit of a time at IKEA. One of the better entries is the chapter on Stephen Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady“. Addressing the topic of bereavement, Dylan writes: “All life’s colors have darkened, and your bones feel like they’re on the body of a ghost.”
More often, though, there are statements like this: “Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement.” It’s a good line, but does it stand up? Would it not work just as well if it were reversed? “Money is a disagreement. Art is an agreement.” One of the few chapters in The Philosophy of Modern Song that could conceivably be thought of as fitting the ‘modern song’ billing is about Elvis Costello’s “Pump it Up“. (I say ‘modern’, but it’s all relative. This is still a 44-year-old song.) Dylan manages to get in a dig at both Costello and Bruce Springsteen by suggesting that by the time he was writing this song, Costello had “obviously been listening to Springsteen too much.” By the same token, when reading instance after instance where Dylan throws out a one liner that sounds profound at first blush but ultimately leaves you wondering what – if anything – it means, you have to wonder if Dylan has perhaps been reading too much Greil Marcus.
Probably the most ridiculous of these non-sequiturs come during Dylan’s discussion of Edwin Starr’s “War“: ruminating on legacy, the sins of the father, etc. Dylan lights upon the George H.W. Bush family, which he calls “the only presidential dynasty we have had so far”. (What about the Roosevelts, Bob?) Praising – yes, praising – Bush the elder for being “swift and surgical in responding to Saddam Hussein’s aggression” (while ignoring the fact that Hussein was not toppled, and Iraq’s people, having been encouraged to revolt, were abandoned), Dylan laments that in the second Gulf War, Dubya Bush’s “eye was not as clear, nor his hand as steady as his father’s”. This then degenerates into a deeply embarrassing peroration about collective guilt, culminating in the ersatz aphorism: “And if we want to see a war criminal all we have to do is look in the mirror.” Heavy, man! It’s the sort of jejune bollocks that the ’60s Dylan would have yanked out of his typewriter, scrumpled into a tight ball, and tossed into somebody else’s trash. Maybe Donovan’s. Or Barry McGuire’s.
There are, very occasionally, sections in The Philosophy of Modern Song that touch upon the subject of songwriting, and insights can be found. “A big part of songwriting, like all writing,” Dylan tells us, “is editing – distilling thought down to essentials. Novice writers often hide behind filigree.” In the ‘straight’ section on Marty Robbins’ “El Paso“, there’s an interesting, if brief, discussion of song structure and the importance of “the pickup phrases between the end of the bridge and the next verse, short preludes that propel you into the ongoing story.”
The “El Paso” chapter may be the best entry in The Philosophy of Modern Song – one of the very few pieces of writing here that might repay prolonged analysis. One of the more intriguing aspects is how Dylan weaves the word ‘you’ in and out of the text, phasing back and forth between you as in ‘one’, you as in the second person protagonist, and you as in the listener. This, and the mixing of tenses, recalls the Norman Raeben-inspired ‘cubist’ narrative techniques Dylan employed so successfully in Blood on the Tracks.
Those more complex, thoughtful entries are the exception to The Philosophy of Modern Song, though, not the rule. Elsewhere, there are a lot of scatologies, violence, and general unpleasantness. Some reviews have hailed the prose as being of a piece with Chronicles, Theme Time Radio Hour, or even the gnarly, epigrammatic weirdness of the World Gone Wrong liner notes. None of those are very valid comparisons, though. Tonally, we are closer here to the more repugnant aspects of “Tempest”, or that batshit crazy interview Dylan gave to Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone in 2012, where he railed against “wussies and pussies” and blathered on about ‘transmigration’ (a word that crops up again here, in fact, along with reincarnation).
Dylan, for reasons best known to himself, spends the riff on Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” inhabiting, in third rather than second person this time, what appears to be the mind of a US soldier during and after the Vietnam War: “He sees shadowy figures in black pajamas and conical hats. He sees a little boy two years old and he murders him, he sees his buddies slit a little girl open with a knife, strip off her clothes and rape her, then he shoots her with an automatic, his horny buddy.”
You can argue that war is hell, that atrocities have to be acknowledged, and that such narratives ought not to be sugar-coated. Yes, these screeds are written ‘in character’. But the song has nothing to do with war, and the grisly narrative is purely a product of Dylan’s fevered imagination. Context is everything: writing this sort of thing in such an unserious book, one that may ultimately be nothing more than an elaborate joke, is extremely distasteful.
John Carvill
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