The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan, Simon & Schuster, 2022, ISBN: 9781451648706, $45, but shop around
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
[TS Eliot ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent, with apologies for his assumption of maleness]
Few major 20th century artists are and were more immersed in their tradition than Bob Dylan, and few have done more to alter the ideal order than he. His career is a story of regularly going back to the well to draw inspiration and renew his voice.
This process begins with is first album and the other unrecorded, or recorded and not released until much later (like ‘No More Auction Block’) performances of the time, a tour of the folk songs he was immersed in that prefigures what was to come in his next six LPs, from the folk of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to the ‘Sad Eyed Lady’; it’s all there in kernel.
By the time Blonde on Blonde was released, Dylan had pretty much exhausted a vein, taken the kind of writing he was doing as far as he could. During the ‘motorcycle accident’ break, he embarked on what would turn out to be his most extensive and deepest dive into the tradition, starting with The Basement Tapes, in which he both provided a PhD level education to The Band and felt his way into a new way of making songs that was superficially simpler, but infused in the weirdness of the folk tradition. This continued through all the covers and tryouts included in Travelin’ Thru, Self Portrait, Another Self Portrait and 1970. Listening to these recordings, we hear a new style, or set of styles, emerging, opening to door to a string of records from ‘John Wesley Harding’ through his next collaboration with The Band all the way to ‘Street Legal’. Not to mention ‘Music from the Big Pink’, of course. It would take a whole other essay to tease this out in full, but if you listen to the vocals on ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ and ‘Sad Eyed Lady’, or play the piano version of ‘Spanish is the Loving Tongue’ followed by ‘The man in Me’ and ‘Romance in Durango’ you may start to agree.
The 1980s were, let’s say, somewhat mixed, with some fine songs and some real dross, and a general sense of loss of direction. So naturally, the 90s began with two more albums that represented another trip to the well, Good as I been to You and World Gone Wrong. These records led the way to the classic ModBob records that followed, just as Christmas in the Heart and the Sinatra trilogy, a foray into another aspect of the songwriting tradition, along with the Theme Time Radio broadcasts, lead to a remarkable recovery of Dylan’s voice and the late masterpiece that is Rough and Rowdy Ways, whose final track, ‘Murder Most Foul, contains another tour of the past.
The Philosophy of Modern Song is yet another engagement with tradition, but this time it’s less for Dylan the writer and more for Dylan and his readers as listeners. The 66 songs he writes about represent a wide spectrum of singers and writers, from Bing to The Eagles. A lot has been written about the omissions by those who appear to wish that the book might be something other than it is. Equally, the inclusion of ‘philosophy’ in the title has been the focus of much discussion, with many reviewers seeming to find it confusing or irrelevant. My position is that if we consider philosophy to be an attempt at understanding ourselves, the world and our relationships with the world and other selves, including such questions as what it means to be, to know and to act ethically in the world, then what Dylan is doing, one of the things he is doing, is looking at how songs can help us address these questions. Here’s an example, from the essay on Billy Jo Shaver’s ‘Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me’:
This song has a philosophical point of view. Keep moving, it’s better, let the train keep on rolling. It’s better than drinking and crying into your beer. Let’s go. Let’s go forever. Let’s go till the glacial age returns.
Or, as Heraclitus might have put it, ‘there’s nothing permanent but change’.
In his essay on Charlie Poole’s ‘Old and Only in the Way’, he quotes Confucius on filial piety while bemoaning the growing tendency to dismiss older people as ‘Boomers’ and ‘olds’. Other pieces touch on the philosophy of art:
Take two people – one studies contrapuntal music theory, the other cries when they hear a sad song. Which of the two really understands music better?
[on ‘Black Magic Woman’]
And:
Like any other piece of art, songs are not seeking to be understood. Art can be appreciated or interpreted but there is seldom anything to understand.
These thoughts on art chime with two references to MAGA in which Dylan claims that if you want to make America great again, you start with its art, with songs and movies. Those of us who feel that he never really abandoned politics will find much to support our position in the book.
The essay on Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ ends on a meditation on democracy, citizenship and responsibility:
As a people, we tend to feel very proud of ourselves because of democracy. We walk into that booth and cast our votes and wear that adhesive ‘I Voted’ sticker as if it is a badge of honor. But the truth is more complex. We have as much responsibility coming out of the booth as we do going in. If the people we elect are sending people to their deaths or worse, sending other people half a world away—whom we never even consider because they don’t look like us or sound like us—to their deaths and we do nothing to stop it, aren’t we just as guilty?
And if we want to see a war criminal all we have to do is look in the mirror.”
It may not be Wittgenstein, but this is a philosophical meditation on political ethics. It also contains a contrast between the wars carried out by Bush senior and junior which amounts to calling the latter a war criminal. And it reminds me that ‘1970’ includes a cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s ‘Universal Soldier’
The ‘War’ essay is also an extended commentary on ‘Masters of War’. Dylan has previously clarified that this is not an anti-war song, but an anti-profiteering-from-war one. Here he spells it out at considerable length:
One mark of civilization is the ability to increase the distance between yourself and the person you kill—the blade gave way to the gun, which gave way to the bomb, which gave way to any number of long-range killing machines. The more powerful you were the further you could be from the action. The most powerful were half a world away, snug in their bathrobes while nameless soldiers did their killing. Plausible deniability helped these warmongers sleep, with arrogance born of distance and an ignorance of specifics they believed kept their hands clean.
Which leads me to my second major conclusion about the book; Philosophy is, in a sense, the long-awaited Chronicles: Volume Two. Inevitably, a songwriter writing about other people’s songs will bring their own interests and concerns to the test. One striking example is that on turning the first page of the essay on ‘Old Violin’ by Johnny Paycheck the reader comes face-to-face with a photo of Albert Einstein playing the fiddle. If this doesn’t immediately call to mind the fifth verse of ‘Desolation Row’, then you’re probably not really part of the target audience for the book. The connection is reinforced towards the end of the essay by the use of the adjective ‘mercurial’.
And so, the attentive reader turns back to the opening paragraphs:
There’s lots of reasons folks change their names. Some have new names thrust upon them as part of religious ceremonies, coming-of-age rituals or arrival into new lands where the unusual diphthongs or combinations of consonants coupled with hitherto unseen umlauts and tildes force ethnic names to be shortened into blander alternatives.
And then there are those who change their own names, either on the run from some unseen demon or heading towards something else. Donald Eugene Lytle knew he was born for more than his birth name had in store.
As, thinks that same reader, did young Robert Zimmerman.
The book is full of slantwise personal references like this: in his piece on The Temptations’ ‘Ball of Confusion’ we are presented with part of the reason young Dylan abandoned ‘protest’; when discussing ‘If You Don’t Know Me by Now’ he ends by thinking about why people turn away from God, concluding that ‘Helping people fit things into their lives is so much more effective than slamming them down their throats.’ So that’s why he abandoned the dreary evangelicalism of the 1980s? And this quote from the essay on ‘Big Boss man’ by Jimmy Reed, a key figure for Dylan, could serve as a self-portrait:
He plays the harmonica through a neck rack. And you can’t do too much with a harp in a neck rack. But he found a way to pull it off and even today he can’t be imitated.
Equally, when he writes of Nina Simone’s version of ‘Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood’, the line ‘things lost in translation, people getting a wrong impression of what you’re about’ could have been written about any one of a number of Dylan classics:
People see me all the time
And they just can’t remember how to act
Their minds are filled with big ideas
Images and distorted facts
Even you, yesterday
You had to ask me where it was at
I couldn’t believe after all these years
You didn’t know me better than that
Sweet lady
~
The book is physically beautiful, the design, typography and treasure trove of old photographs make it as much a thing look at as a book to read. The text itself comes in two flavours, straightforward (to an extent) essays and what the dustjacket front flap text calls ‘dreamlike riffs’. Some songs only get a riff, some only an essay, and some get both. And the variation in length runs from half a page to half a dozen. It should be mentioned that the ‘song and dance man’ is as interested in specific performances of these songs as in the songs themselves; songs come alive when performed.
The riffs are invariably second-person narratives, inviting you, the reader, to participate in the world of the song. They are fictions to set against the oddly factual, informative, and often funny essays (all but one of the quotes above are from the essays), and need to be read as such. Some of the attitudes to women expressed in the riffs, along with the paucity of woman songwriters included have led to very understandable, but, I think, somewhat misguided accusations of misogyny. To support this, you need to read the riffs as Dylan expressing his own opinions, overlooking the nature of fiction; should we read the celebration of the adrenalin rush of gambling in the riff for ‘Viva Las Vegas’ as indicating that the author has a gambling addiction?
As for the inclusion of only a handful of women writers, I see that as part of a wider element of surprise omissions: on Joni Mitchell, but also no Neil Young or Leonard Cohen, to take one example. It’s equally worth noting the number of performers of colour that feature, part of Dylan’s career long commitment to criticising racism, a commitment that is foregrounded in the last essay, on Dion’s recording of ‘Where or When’, when he condemns the inclusion of a blackface seen in the Hollywood version of the musical (Babes in Arms) it was written for.
The fact is that the book is Dylan writing about 66 songs that he felt moved to write about, and criticising him for not writing about other songs is missing the point by a mile. One more quote seems apposite. In the essay on Pete Seeger’s ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’, he tells the story of how Seeger’s performance of the song was cut from the Smothers Brothers TV show in 1967 (Seeger had been excluded from television for his political leanings) because it was seen as critical of the Vietnam War. A year later, the tide of opinion was turning and he was invited back to sing it on the same show. The point being made is that in those days, everyone, pro, anti or indifferent to the war, tuned in to the same programme. Dylan bemoans the fragmentation that has replaced media forums where we were exposed to lots of views and kinds of cultural performances:
Turns out, the best way to shut people up isn’t to take away their forum – it’s to give them all their own pulpits. Ultimately most folks will listen to what they already know and read what they already agree with. They will devour pale retreads of the familiar and perhaps never get to discover they might have a taste for Shakespeare of flamenco dancing.
What a long strange trip it’s been.
Elliptical Movements 
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