The Philosophy Of Modern Song

Bob Dylan

Dylan’s engaging singular observations of a selection of other people’s songs.

Of all the many, many delights that have come from late-period Bob Dylan, his sideline as an up-andcoming author is up there with the best. 2004’s Chronicles Volume One (don’t even think about asking where volume two has got to) was a mischief-drenched autobiography that managed to say both everything and nothing. Some of it might have even been true.

Ten years in the writing, the heroically bonkers The Philosophy Of Modern Song is a collection of beautifully illustrated miniessays, loosely (or tightly; it’s difficult to predict) bound to 60 songs of varying provenance by other people. Because he’s Bob Dylan, he can do precisely what he pleases. Because he’s Bob Dylan, there’s no point quibbling with any of his selections, from Uncle Dave Macon’s 1924 bluegrass tickler Keep My Skillet Good & Greasy (“this song contains multitudes”) to London Calling (“The Clash were always the group they imagined themselves to be”). Because he’s Bob Dylan, there’s no order, no chronology or indeed any reason for any of it. And, of course, it’s wonderful. But not just because he’s Bob Dylan.

Some lucky songs get two essays, one about the song, one where Dylan steps into, say, Hank Williams’s Your Cheatin’ Heart: “your cheatin’ heart had unlimited power, was unreliable, corrupt and treacherous” and gives it an implausible

(or plausible; it’s difficult to predict) back story. You’ll even be familiar with some, so there’s the Eagles’ Witchy Woman

(“the lips of her c**t are a steel trap”), Santana’s Black Magic Woman (“barebreasted, blue-eyed, short, powerful and ugly”) and The Who’s My Generation

(“what exactly is a generation?”).

And there are the less familiar, such as Jimmy Wages’s demented, turbo-charged Take Me From This Garden Of Evil (“a garden of corporate lust, sexual greed, gratuitous cruelty and commonplace insanity”) and Johnnie & Jack’s Poison Love (“too radical for whatever is called country music”). And as we’ve long known, Dylan adores schmaltz, hence Perry Como’s Without A Song: “Perry is anti-flavour-of-the-week, anti-hot-list and anti-bling”.

There is only one way to consume this book: by playing each song while reading each chapter. The result is sensory overload, whether Dylan musing on Carl Perkins’s actual blue suede shoes (“they can foretell the future, locate lost objects, treat illnesses, identify perpetrators of crimes”), or recasting the Allman Brothers’ midnight rider as one “who wants to return things back to a pre-corporate economic order”.

Read it and weep with joy.