South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Hornby links 2 creative geniuses
Nick Hornby has been writing about pop culture since the 1990s, most famously his obsessive love of soccer in 1992’s “Fever Pitch” and of music in “High Fidelity,” three years later. Now he has yoked together two more objects of his intense fandom, Charles Dickens and Prince, to explore the similarities between creative geniuses separated by an ocean and nearly 150 years.
On the face of it, they are an odd couple — a white
19th-century British writer and a Black 20th- and
21st-century American musician. What prompted him to link the two in this extended essay was the
2020 rerelease of Prince’s
1987 album, “Sign o’ the Times.” Unlike the typical boxed set treatment of an iconic album, “Sign o’ the Times” included 63 songs that weren’t on the original album.
“When I read about the boxed set,” Hornby writes in the introduction, “I thought, Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. … Dickens worked that way.”
For the rest of this slim volume, Hornby doubles down on his thesis that no other artists have ever produced “such a staggeringly enormous body of work” even as he acknowledges in the next breath that someone might invoke the examples of Wagner or Picasso. It doesn’t really matter if his theory is true — his voice on the page is so charming and affable, you are willing to go along with the conceit.
Beyond their virtuosity, what makes them Hornby’s heroes is the way they approached the creative life. Neither one was a perfectionist, agonizing over every stray comma or note. They just banged it out — until they died.
“What matters to me is that Prince and Dickens tell me, every day, Not good enough. Not quick enough. Not enough. More, more, more. Think quicker, be more ambitious, be more imaginative. And whatever you do for a living, that’s something you need to hear.” Hornby has pictures of them both on his office wall. — Ann Levin, Associated Press
Bob Dylan’s third book,“The Philosophy of Modern Song,”
promised to offer Dylan’s insights into the nature of popular music. Actually, the breezy book is more like a late-night, old-school, once-hipster DJ riffing on dozens of songs you may or may not know.
The Nobel Prize winner for literature has given us a photo-heavy hodgepodge that is part criticism, part social commentary, part pulp fiction, part comedy, part rebaked Wikipedia, and, indeed, part philosophy. It’s informative, sometimes fascinating, occasionally insightful, generally entertaining and, of course, totally Dylanesque.
In the book, contemporary music’s greatest songwriter offers his take on 66 tunes, ranging from
Stephen Foster’s notexactly-modern “Nelly Was a Lady” (1849) to Warren Zevon’s “Dirty Life and Times” (2003). Dylan tackles pieces by big names like Little Richard, Ray Charles, The Who, the Clash and Cher, as well as standards and blues, bluegrass and country numbers.
Dylan’s short essays sometimes read like pulpy two-page movie treatments inspired by the lyrics. But that kind of imaginer is probably not what readers expect from this book.
Oftentimes he offers background on the artist, sometimes relevant and sometimes not, gleaned by his researchers. Sometimes Dylan actually analyzes a tune or the recorded version of it. And Dylan, the critic, is mostly polite toward the artists but takes a few shots.
“The Philosophy of Modern Song” is not the long-promised sequel to 2004’s “Chronicles: Volume One,” Dylan’s formidable but not comprehensive, scattershot memoir. And this new effort is not likely to lead to any distinguished literature awards. But it could take Dylan back to the top of the charts — the bestselling book lists, that is.