THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN SONG - BOB DYLAN

My most boomer-coded trait is my love for Bob Dylan. What can you do? I’ll have to stand before god and explain it one day, but, until then, it was exciting to find out that the local library had this one. It’s basically a playlist or a program for a radio show, 66 songs with short essays after each one. I was able to pretty easily make a playlist and listen along to the songs before reading the sections. I found some really good stuff I’d not heard, or not heard in a long time, like “Midnight Rider” or “A Certain Girl.” Dylan isn’t writing about only songs he likes, in the funniest section, on “The Whiffenpoof Song” he calls the song a “grinning skull” and talks about how profoundly evil the sort of old money Yale milieu that Whiffenpoofs represent is. But he certainly endorses most of the songs here and thinks they’re good or at least interesting. There’s no crazy left-field picks, there’s no dance music or hip-hop or very much after the early 90s. And fair enough, if Bob Dylan doesn't think he has anything to say about King Von or whatever, I’m inclined to trust him. As you might imagine, most of the writing is on the lyrics. He spends part of each essay thinking about the protagonist of the song and really investigates and extrapolates on the relationships and situations being sung about. There is much less about the music itself, not a lot of talk of key changes or instrument choice or melodic theories. I did find it intriguing that he at one point argues that lyrics aren’t really the same as written words and can’t truly be separated from music, which is interesting coming from a man who just won a nobel prize for literature based on the strength of his lyrics. I’d say this is a must for real Dylan-heads. It does seem like he could do this forever. His love and knowledge of popular songs is impressive and it seems like if he felt like it he could produce these indefinitely.