Come with me, and let us
stand in the rain of the clauses and subclauses in Bob Dylan’s devious new
book, “
The Philosophy of Modern Song”.
اضافة اعلان
Dylan has rounded up 66 songs, from Bobby Darin’s “Mack the
Knife” and Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” to Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let
Me Be Misunderstood” and the Clash’s “London Calling,” and he riffs on them.
These riffs, which he flicks like tarot cards through a
distant cactus, sound a lot like his own song lyrics, so much so that part of
me wanted this to be a new record instead, wanted to hear these lines come
croaking up from Dylan’s 81-year-old lungs and past his buckshot, barb-wired
uvula.
Here are two selections, chosen half at random:
“This song kicks you down, and before you can get up, it
hits you again. This is the stuff to live for, and what you make of it all.
This is mankind created in the image of a jealous godhead. This is fatherhood,
the devil god and the golden calf — the godly man, a jealous human being. This
mode of life is an all-confrontational mode of life, the highs and lows of it,
what it actually is. Truth that needs no proof, where every need is an evil
need. This is a ballad of outrageous love.”
“This song is all about hypocrisy. Hitting and running,
butchering and exterminating, taking the grand prize and finishing in front.
Then being big-hearted, burying the hatchet, apologizing, kissing and making
up. It’s about the hustle.”
The first paragraph is about Marty Robbins’ “El Paso”; the
second, Mose Allison’s “Everybody Cryin’ Mercy.” Nearly all the entries sound
like this — they are oracular. Dylan walks through this book casting
aspersions, deadheading roses, calling down curses, scrounging for his next
meal, with no direction home, hiding on the backstreets (oops, wrong singer),
ringing them bells, not talking falsely now.
Who else sounds like this? Dylan slits open the underbelly
of American life; he pokes at the entrails; he draws a lot out of these songs.
It is total warfare against the humdrum, and it is completely great, except for
when it is not. The tone becomes repetitive. In a lot of the cases, you could
switch Dylan’s commentaries around, apply them to different songs and not know
the difference. By the end he seems spent; he is phoning some of the language
in.
You keep reading because it is Dylan, because there is
always an eerie little gas station, an Indian casino, an itinerant preacher or
a syphilitic old madam around the next corner. You want to know what condition
Dylan’s condition is in. Probably he is about to release a bladderful of PBR on
somebody’s grave.
God, this book is sly. Talking about “Key to the Highway,”
the Little Walter song, for example, he smuggles in this comment: “I have
gotten lots of keys to different cities but I’ve never really tried to inspect
anything yet.”
Dylan is helplessly epigrammatic. “No matter how many chairs
you have, you only have one ass,” he writes. About the Cher song: “Gypsies,
tramps, and thieves could easily be the answer to the question, ‘Name three types
of people you’d like to have dinner with.’”
The humor in “The Philosophy of Modern Song” trips over,
often enough, into full-on gaslighting. In a section about tailor Nuta
Kotlyarenko, aka Nudie Cohn, and his rhinestone-covered custom outfits, for
example, Dylan tells us that Neil Armstrong was buried in a Nudie suit, and
that Nudie himself used to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in a “10-gallon
yarmulke.”
Sometimes you only hope he is kidding. As other critics have
pointed out, this book has a woman problem. Only four of these 66 songs are by
women. There are weird arguments in favor of paying for sex (“It’s not perfect
love, but it’s less problematic”) and plural marriage (he says women should
partake as well).
Nearly every woman, in any song he mentions, is described by
him as a “hellcat” or a “she goat” or a “foxy harlot” or a “vamp” or a
“gold-digging showgirl” or “wolf-bait on mescaline.” To struggle to be fair to
Dylan, in the universe of this book, and in most of these songs, the men the
narrators confront are no better — sugarless daddies, jacks mistaken for kings.
Their personal pronouns are burnt matchheads.
“The Philosophy of Modern Song” is nearly the size of a
coffee-table book. It is been art-directed to its back teeth. The photo
researcher deserves all the best legal drugs for Christmas. It’s filled with
vintage movie stills and Life magazine covers and car ads and pulpy detective
images, some more clever than others, the kinds of things you might find on the
walls of a self-consciously retro diner.
I respect the work that went into it, but the photos
sometimes crowded me out. There should be two paperback options — one that
resembles a small, flimsy prayer book, published without chic, that has no
imagery at all, that looks like someone left it in the sun too long.
This is Dylan’s first book of new writing since “Chronicles:
Volume One” appeared in 2004 and since he won the Nobel Prize in literature in
2016. It’s dedicated to Doc Pomus, with special thanks to, among others, “all
the crew at Dunkin’ Donuts”.
There is no philosophy, not really, in “The Philosophy of
Modern Song”. There is, offhandedly, a lot of learning on display. Dylan seems
to know every outtake, every cover version and every performance on YouTube of
each song he discusses.
My first impulse was to make a playlist of the book’s songs,
but it is already done, several times over, on Spotify. It should be listened
to outside, with speakers wired in trees.
This book is about a genius recognizing unfiltered genius in
others, when he can find it. Often enough it’s an argument for simplicity.
“Enjoy your free-range, cumin-infused, cayenne-dusted heirloom reduction,”
Dylan writes. “Sometimes it’s just better to have a BLT and be done with it.”
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