His Back Pages

November 4, 2022 1:05 PM

The Philosophy of Modern Song is a new book by Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan.

WaPo also has a review. [paywalled]

posted by OHenryPacey (34 comments total)

Ah this looks like it's worth reading. Someone linked a bunch of Bob Dylan Old Time Radio Hour episodes and listening to those is Bob waxing beat-poetry eloquent about music of all sorts and kinds. This books sounds like more of that, which is fun. Dylan has always been happiest talking about music when he's not talking about his own.
posted by hippybear at 1:44 PM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

(WaPo gift link)
posted by box at 2:03 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Here's a different review from Slate that isn't so warm. I've no strong feelings about Dylan personally, but I do find that writing about him is often coloured by hero-worship. Would be interested to compare other reviews of the book.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:14 PM on November 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

From the Slate review: 'There’s also no rap, a form Dylan influenced via the likes of Gil Scott-Heron'

I like Bob Dylan. But I also like rap. And even though Bob Dylan recorded 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' (and, somewhat less famously, had a feature on a Kurtis Blow album), I would say that his influence on rap is somewhere between minor and nonexistent.
posted by box at 2:38 PM on November 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Gil Scott-Heron isn't considered rap, is he? Spokane word, most definitely. But rap? Hrm.
posted by hippybear at 2:45 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yakima word, actually.
posted by kittensofthenight at 2:48 PM on November 4, 2022 [25 favorites]

Hahaha. Yes, Spoken word. Thank you.
posted by hippybear at 2:50 PM on November 4, 2022

hippybear, Only because I know you would get it!

My partner dislikes Dylan's music, but keeps copies of Tarantula and Chronicles. Tarantula was important to her growing up. I'm a big fan of his music, have seen him more than any other musician probably but have never read anything he's written. This sounds like a good fit for both of us.
posted by kittensofthenight at 3:10 PM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

My only question is -- is it as long as the Playboy Philosophy?
posted by Droll Lord at 3:21 PM on November 4, 2022

Chronicles was a fun read. It's Dylan so you have no idea what's true and what's not. It's supposed to be an autobiography but half of it is just Dylan going off on wild tangents. I remember there are a few pages talking about learning a new way to think about music from some other musician and I have no idea what it meant. I have a basic understanding of music theory but couldn't figure it out. I had a friend of mine who is a musician and music teacher and knows way more than me read it to see if he could make sense of it and he was just as lost. It could have been an elaborate lie Dylan threw in there. But that's just Dylan. This should be an entertaining read if not enlightening.

By the way if you're ever in Tulsa go to the Bob Dylan museum that opened up recently. It's fantastic. I spent half a day there and there was still so much left I didn't have a chance to explore.
posted by downtohisturtles at 3:45 PM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I would say that his influence on rap is somewhere between minor and nonexistent.

do the Beaties count?

I'm just chillin like Bob Dylan
posted by philip-random at 6:59 PM on November 4, 2022

Gil Scott Heron is in the mix for sure, but The Last Poets are usually given the nod as progenitors.
posted by rhizome at 8:39 PM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Bob Dylan wrote a most something list and many dislike it.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:39 PM on November 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

...Perhaps most striking is Huey P. Newton’s open, loud declaration of love. The leader and co-founder of the Black Panthers, the militant Afro-American political organisation from California, already stands out with the photo on the front of Listen, Whitey! The Sounds Of Black Power 1967-1974 (including Dylan’s “George Jackson” on it). Newton demonstratively holds his copy of Highway 61 Revisited, and that is no coincidence. The Black Panther adores Brother Dylan, and his admiration for “Ballad Of A Thin Man” borders on worship. Co-founder and bosom friend Bobby Seale publishes his book Seize The Time in 1970, while Newton is in prison, largely based on tape recordings Seale made during visiting hours in prison. One of the chapters is called “Huey Digs Bob Dylan” and deals extensively with Huey’s fascination with the song.

Seale remembers the early days of the Party Paper of the Black Panther movement, how Newton and he spent days working on that paper in San Francisco. And always Highway 61 Revisited plays in the background.

“This record played after we stayed up laying out the paper. And it played the next night after we stayed up laying out the paper. I think it was around the third afternoon that the record was playing. We played that record over and over and over.”

....Almost literally the same words that Brother Bobby uses a few times in 1978 to announce “Ballad Of A Thin Man”… making pretty clear what book the thief of thoughts has on his bedside table during this tour.

So then Dylan also read how Huey P. Newton continues to spread the gospel of the Thin Man. More brothers get infected. “Many times we would play that record. Brother Stokely Carmichael also liked that record.” And especially if you’re stoned or drunk, preferably under the headphones, Seare knows, it was something else!

“These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something, and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record. […] Old Bobby did society a big favor when he made that particular sound.”

Untold Dylan: Ballad Of A Thin Man Part II: Freaks and geeks and simples

Previously
posted by y2karl at 12:22 AM on November 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

Littered with many references to Bob Dylan, Chuck D gives a recollection of Public Enemy’s then-twenty year history in hip-hop, rephrasing The Beatles “The Long And Winding Road” with his own perspective as an elder in the genre.

Public Enemy - The Long and Whining Road
posted by y2karl at 12:40 AM on November 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

See also

STEREOGUM: 80 Artists Pick Their Favorite Bob Dylan Song For His 80th Birthday

PS. It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
posted by y2karl at 1:01 AM on November 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Mac idolized Bob Dylan: From Bob Dylan to Prince: Mac Miller's 25 favourite albums

also btw...
A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan [archive] - "What makes Dylan's career all the more remarkable is the way it has evolved, with peaks, declivities, crags—all in service to the music he began to revere in Hibbing..."

But kids knew what spoke to them, and it wasn’t “Lisbon Antigua.” Robert Zimmerman, a pompadoured fifteen-year-old living in the Minnesota Iron Range town of Hibbing, was one of countless kids who went out and put together a rock-and-roll band. He called his the Shadow Blasters.

In his childhood and adolescence, he stayed up through the night, his head by the radio, absorbing everything being broadcast from nearby Duluth and from fifty-thousand-watt stations throughout the Midwest and the Deep South: R. & B., gospel, jazz, blues, and rock and roll. He was fascinated, as well, with the storytelling tricks and aural mysteries of radio dramas such as “The Fat Man” and “Inner Sanctum.” “It made me the listener that I am today,” he told an interviewer many decades later. “It made me listen for little things: the slamming of the door, the jingling of car keys. The wind blowing through trees, the songs of birds, footsteps, a hammer hitting a nail. Just random sounds. Cows mooing. I could string all that together and make that a song. It made me listen to life in a different way.”

As he was rehearsing with the Shadow Blasters, the most thrilling song in the air was “Tutti Frutti,” sung by a flamboyant piano player from Macon, Georgia, who had once gone by Princess Lavonne and now performed as Little Richard. And what Zimmerman was hearing he wanted to make his own. His father ran an appliance store in town and kept an old piano in the back. When Bobby was supposed to be sweeping the floor or stocking the shelves, he was trying out hand-splaying boogie-woogie chords on the piano instead. [...] it was soon clear, as he put it later, that he’d been born in the wrong place. He was a middle-class Jewish kid far from everything he was tuned in to. He would need to leave town, change his name, and deepen his musical education to fulfill his outsized sense of destiny.

First in Dinkytown, the collegiate section of Minneapolis, then in Greenwich Village, Zimmerman, adopting the name Bob Dylan, shifted his attention away from rock and roll. He immersed himself in the vast lexicon of folk music and the blues: Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and the Dixie Hummingbirds; Odetta, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the Staple Singers; the Stanley Brothers, the Delmore Brothers, and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. Sometimes music further afield, such as “Pirate Jenny,” from “The Threepenny Opera,” caught his attention and fed his musical vocabulary. His hunger for the music was boundless, even larcenous. Ask the friends whose records he stole. Playing guitar now more than piano, he memorized the chord progressions, picking patterns, and lyrics for hundreds of songs: hillbilly songs, cowboy songs, traditional English and Scottish ballads, sea chanteys, church hymns, ragtime, barrelhouse, every variation of the blues. He was reading, too—Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues,” Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Homer, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Rimbaud. The Hit Parade could wait. “The thing about rock and roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough,” he said later. “ ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ were great catchphrases and driving pulse rhythms . . . but they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”

[...]

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song,
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along,
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn,
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ and it’s hardly been born.[*]

What happened next represents one of the great explosions of creativity in the twentieth century.

posted by kliuless at 1:49 AM on November 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

Gil Scott Heron is in the mix for sure, but The Last Poets are usually given the nod as progenitors.

The Last Poets existed, they had some classic lines, I'm a fan, and some early rappers were known to mention them, but they were, despite their best efforts, kinda highbrow, and rap is populist.

I think the real progenitors are mostly doing the dozens, dancehall toasting, and, if you want to go back further, griots and blues singers. This narrative lacks a Great Man to write biographies about and haul out for awards shows, but I think it's a more accurate description.
posted by box at 4:52 AM on November 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

I like sixties Bob Dylan quite a bit and can tolerate most of his stuff up through the early 70s, but he disappeared up his own ass at some point around Good As I Been to You. The title alone makes me suspect this is going to be a bunch of self-important puffery.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:24 AM on November 5, 2022

writing about him is often coloured by hero-worship

That's an understatement. I consider myself a Dylan fan, but I enjoy the music much more than the mythology.

I read a few excerpts of the new book, and there are some interesting insights here and there. But if it weren't Dylan, there's no way anyone would have published these scattershot ramblings.
posted by Fritz Langwedge at 7:31 AM on November 5, 2022

I’ve heard the Last Poets cited as a primary bridge to rap plenty of times, but largely by (probably) white boomers.

But on the other hand, Your Revolution.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:07 AM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, it's follow up, have a complicated back story. Both are collections of old blues and Appalachian and bluegrass standards by Dylan alone. They have merit.
posted by y2karl at 9:34 AM on November 5, 2022

He disappeared up his own ass at some point around Good As I Been to You.

I would say that Bob Dylan disappeared up his own ass in late 1969 while recording Self Portrait, then poked his head out in '75-'76 (Blood on the Tracks and Desire).

Despite boomer critics' increasingly labored efforts to anoint various later efforts a return to form (Oh Mercy, Good As I Been to You, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, 'Murder Most Foul,' etc.), the last time Bob Dylan was the whole way out of his own ass was almost fifty years ago.

(That said, the best of The Bootleg Series is better than a lot of people's whole careers.)
posted by box at 9:48 AM on November 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

But I hit post instead of preview on, so another time on that. Safe it to say, though, he put a lot of time and effort in on those. He chose great songs and his guitar playing on some of them -- acoustic, obviously -- are among his best efforts. No, really. There's a lot of albums he's done for which I don't care at all but those two are not on the list. And I would anoint those albums you mention, box, except the last which I have yet to hear. In part if not all. And, ahem,

Despite boomer critics' increasingly labored efforts...

One thing about this place that never ends is the ageism. Of all the isms constantly decried around here, that particular one is not on the list and hence casual and constant as a result. It's like a protected species. We'll, tough beans, young Jedi, Old is waiting for you, too.
posted by y2karl at 10:09 AM on November 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

increasingly labored efforts to anoint various later efforts a return to form

I stopped automatically buying his albums in the 80s and consider all his subsequent work extremely spotty, but I admit I thought Love and Theft was a lot of fun. There's a decent cut or two on his latest album, but I found "Murder Most Foul" deeply embarrassing.
posted by Fritz Langwedge at 10:28 AM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

One thing about this place that never ends is the ageism.

You're right, and I apologize.

I don't know that all the rock critics defending late-period Dylan (or the Grammy voters who gave Time Out of Mind Album of the Year over OK Computer) are of the same generation--they're almost certainly not. And it wasn't that generation that invented the practice of boosting legacy acts even when they're past their prime.

I'll try to be more mindful about generalizing.
posted by box at 10:41 AM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

See also What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Love and Theft in the 21st Century
posted by y2karl at 12:14 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

Now you too can be the judge:

Flying too high can be dangerous, one bad move leads to another, and that move is usually worse than the one before. Committing yourself too early can lead to disaster, but once you go, you go.

...There is something very freeing about hearing a song sung in a language that you don’t understand. Go and see an opera and the drama leaps off the stage even if you don’t understand a word. Listen to fado music and the sadness drips from it
Sometimes you can hear a song so full of emotion that you feel your heart ready to burst and when you ask someone to translate it the lyrics are as mundane as “I cannot find my hat”.

For some reason, certain languages sing better than others. Sure, German is fine for a certain type of beer-fest oompah polka but give me Italian with its chewy caramel vowels and melodious polysyllabic vocabulary.

...The song is a seduction in Italian beginning with a dreamy little piano vamp followed by Domenico’s vocal swathed in organ before the familiar swoop of the title’s hook comes in.

The sound of the record is sumptuous, full of disparate elements but never cluttered; a drummer who deftly switches from swinging brushes to the added impact of sticks, dancing pizzicato strings, space-age echoey organ. The vocal is all about dynamics – one moment soft whispers of intimacy, the next joyous exultation, an interlude of recitation followed by wistfulness that translates without language...

Telegraph: Bob Dylan exclusive extract: the catchiest tune you’ll ever hear
posted by y2karl at 6:53 PM on November 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don’t know why but that excerpt made the Dylan/Fiona movie resurface in my mind. Which…yeah.

(Flanagan, not Apple; though I would watch that remake.)
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:07 PM on November 5, 2022

Mod note: A couple comments deleted. If there's been an objection and apology between a couple of people (nice -- they handled it succinctly and gracefully without ruining the whole thread), please don't jump in to try to rekindle / up hostilities and derail the thread. Why do that?
posted by taz (staff) at 1:07 AM on November 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Here's a tip: Search the words Bob Dylan Philosophy of Modern Song Excerpt in Chrome or Google and you can read most of the book for free via excerpt. Some marketing ploy that.

And here's a caveat from David Hadju, author of Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña:

And just think of the countless artists not included: Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Dolly Parton, Pink, Solange, Taylor Swift. I promised myself not to get caught up in second-guessing every song choice Dylan made, because any person’s selection of 66 songs, including my own, would inevitably have innumerable holes and omissions. Still, Dylan’s refusal to acknowledge the depth of women’s contributions to American song is indefensible.

I so agree. Pink and Solange aside, all those names instantly came to my mind as well, not to mention Carol King's.

But remember you're dealing with a guy in his 80s who has been king of all rock star royalty for nearly 60 years with an estimated net worth of between $20 -- $500 million, depending on which search result upon which you click.

It's shameful but, considering his history, what do you expect and what are you going to do? /Homer Simpson. Even so, I hope criticism of these omissions bites him on the butt. Hard. Because from what Hadju has written, he so reads his reviews and he so deserves the negative attention.
posted by y2karl at 4:51 AM on November 6, 2022

The Allen Ginsberg Project has a nice link roundup about the book, including some reviews that call out the sexism.

An excerpt from those reviews:

Then there’s the chapter on Johnnie Taylor’s “Cheaper to Keep Her,” a funny soul-blues song about divorce that sends Dylan into a diatribe about polygamy: “It’s nobody’s business how many wives a man has. … But the screws already get tightened from all sides — women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists take turns putting man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the glass ceiling. … What downtrodden woman with no future, battered around by the whims of a cruel society, wouldn’t be better off as one of a rich man’s wives — taken care of properly, rather than friendless on the street depending on government stamps?”

posted by box at 5:31 AM on November 6, 2022

Well, his personal life has been a book far more open than he would wish -- I'd be surprised if they haven't already had a con with the luminaries of the Dylan Industrial Literary Trust, panels filled with the likes of Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, David Hadju and so forth as their numbers are legion, multiplying exponentially at that and oh, man, if not-- think of the cosplay possibilities alone! Get in on the ground floor now.
posted by y2karl at 4:41 PM on November 6, 2022

Last week, Cat Power recreated the 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert.

These are fan-shot videos made with a cellphone, but they sound pretty good.
posted by box at 9:12 AM on November 11, 2022