The Philosophy of Modern Song
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The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One — and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over 60 essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyses what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.
In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years and, like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.
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Nobel-winning songwriter Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One) offers a marvelous survey of the recordings he loves. Across 66 chapters—each delving into a song recorded between 1924 and 2004—Dylan considers what a particular number might mean to listeners of many stripes: "Knowing a singer's life story doesn't particularly help your understanding of a song," he writes. "It's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important." The passage on Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede Shoes" pulls this off brilliantly, drawing a line from 1950s rockabilly through the past four decades of hip-hop and giving voice to the aggression required to protect one's "point of pride": "If you want to live and know how to live, you'll stay off my shoes." Chronicles: Volume Two this is not, but there's plenty of unfiltered Dylan; his entry on Johnnie Taylor's "Cheaper to Keep Her" swerves into a riotous screed on the divorce litigation industry, while his ode to the Grateful Dead's "Truckin' " praises Bob Weir's performance in a way that fans might describe Dylan himself: "The guy singing the song acts and talks like who he is, and not the way others would want him to talk and act." There's no end to the joy of joining this elusive and voracious artist in musical appreciation.
