The Philosophy of Modern Song — Bob Dylan’s world of sound

When Bob Dylan published his superb memoir Chronicles: Volume 1 in 2004, he left dangling the tantalising promise of a sequel. But Volume 2 has yet to appear. Instead, the 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature has been occupied with a different book, which he has apparently been working on since 2010. It is The Philosophy of Modern Song, a handsome-looking, weightily titled compendium in which the most significant singer-songwriter in the history of recorded music turns his attention to other artists’ songs, like a Dylanesque version of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

There are 66 in total, each with its own chapter. Dylan writes about them in bursts of seemingly dashed-off prose that are optimistically labelled “essays” by the dust-jacket blurb. There is no explanation why he has chosen these particular songs, nor what their shared philosophy might be. The 66 records symbolise a Highway 66 of mainly American popular music down which we jounce and bounce and swerve in a jalopy ridden at breakneck speed and no little eccentricity by our author. The format is reminiscent of Dylan’s turn as a jive-talking disc jockey in his Theme Time Radio Hour series of radio programmes in the 2000s, whose producer gets a shout-out in the acknowledgments.

The choice of songs is connoisseurial: I relished listening to them while reading the book. Mirroring the musical direction of his recent albums, they are mainly drawn from a pre-British Invasion repertoire of country music, orchestral pop, rock ’n’ roll, doo-wop, blues and R&B. The earliest recording is a crackly 1924 bluegrass relic, Uncle Dave Macon’s “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”, which Dylan depicts as a proleptic blast of rock ’n’ roll.

Current acts are conspicuously absent. Fellow notables from the 1960s also get short shrift: The Who’s “My Generation” is the only classic from that era to be included. Dylan ignores its most arresting feature — the stuttered vocals, a lexical battering ram against the established order of things — and instead harrumphs about generational ingratitude.

His tone is variously jokey, hep, hard-boiled, folksy, grumpy and perceptive. Absurd truisms are invented (“As the old saying goes, an iceberg moves gracefully because most of it is beneath the surface”). Aphorisms are coined (“Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement”). Wisecracks are tossed out, such as this droll description of outlaw country singer Johnny Paycheck: “Like a lot of small men, he was wrapped tighter than the inside of a golf ball and hit just about as often.”

Free-wheeling glosses are given to song lyrics, tinged with surrealism. “You’re fairly certain you have become some kind of biological mutation, you are no longer a mere mortal”: this is Dylan’s unhinged interpretation of Domenico Modugno’s pop-operatic ditty “Volare”, the Italian entry in the 1958 Eurovision Song Contest. Some songs get more detailed commentary, others are dispatched in just a few sentences. The Drifters’ single “Saturday Night at the Movies” prompts such powerful feelings for old Hollywood that the song itself goes unmentioned.

That life was better in the old days is a repeatedly strummed chord. The chapter on “Feel So Good”, a ripsnorting 1950s rock ’n’ roller by Sonny Burgess, ends with Dylan giving Donald Trump’s Maga slogan a jitterbug somersault: “This is the sound that made America great.” His nostalgia is bolstered by scores of wittily chosen archive photos, which stylishly pad out the abbreviated passages of text.

He has an incisive ability to get inside a song and make its workings understandable to those of us who have not, like him, composed more than 600 of them

Chronicles showed how well Dylan can write about music. Although not always trustworthy as autobiography, in that respect it was revelatory. His generosity in thinking about other people’s songs has a doubled-edge quality, in that he has often been accused of making off with melodies and phrases for his own use.

But he has an incisive ability to get inside a song and make its workings understandable to those of us who have not, like him, composed more than 600 of them. “Take two people — one studies contrapuntal music theory, the other cries when they hear a sad song,” he writes while discussing Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”. “Which of the two really understands music better?”

The most generous moment in The Philosophy of Modern Song comes when he writes about a song called “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore” by the Native American musician and activist John Trudell, whose family was killed in an alleged arson attack in 1979. “Take a moment — read a little more about John Trudell than what is offered here,” Dylan writes. But there is a pronounced streak of ungenerosity in the book, and even cruelty.

Only four female singers are included among the 66 acts. Women mostly turn up in The Philosophy of Modern Song as magnetic objects of attention in songs sung by men. They throng its pages as a pulp-fiction line-up of “vamps, “hellcats” and “foxy harlots”.

The sexism is overblown to the point of comic absurdity, like the “thousands” of serpentine women that a delirious Dylan describes seeing dancing at Grateful Dead gigs: “Free floating, snaky and slithering like in a typical daydream.” But the imagery tips into outright misogyny in the chapter on The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”, when the singer who dismissed Sigmund Freud as one of the “enemies of mankind” on his latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways is overwhelmed by a Freudian terror of the vagina dentata.

Johnnie Taylor’s R&B number “Cheaper to Keep Her” triggers a zany diatribe about divorce lawyers, which concludes with Dylan advocating polygamy and conjuring a bizarre vision of “women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists” knocking “man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling”. A joke crawls out from the metaphorical wreckage; Dylan is having fun playing the curmudgeon. But the humour carries a sour tang.

The book’s unabashedly masculine slant shows scorn for what Dylan holds to be the milquetoast sensitivities of the modern age. “These people lack imagination and are fine throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” he comments, referring to those who denounce old films for “a two-minute sequence that changing times have rendered politically incorrect”. The stance is designed to provoke, but it also traps Dylan in a dead-end of contrarianism and iconoclasm. Amid the entertaining sallies and insightful remarks is a mounting sense of meanness and pettiness. There are more things in modern songs — women’s voices, for instance — than are dreamt of in The Philosophy of Modern Song.

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster, £35/$45, 352 pages

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