Writes Dwight Garner in "Bob Dylan Breaks Down 66 Classic Tunes in His New Book/'The Philosophy of Modern Song' offers commentaries on a range of music, written in the singer’s unmistakable lyrical style" (NYT)
I'm reading the book, and I've been asking myself, as I go, where's the philosophy? My working answer is the reader has to put together the philosophy. Dylan is providing a lot of raw material, but can't you see what he's saying?
You know there's a philosophy, but you don't know what it is, do you?
Mr. Garner writes:
These riffs, which he flicks like tarot cards through a distant cactus, sound a lot like his own song lyrics....
Much of the book is Dylan paraphrasing lyrics from songs, and it's only subtly obvious that Dylan's words are better, deeper, more mysterious. What I'm seeing is that for every song — or almost every song — he heightens the inward emotional structure of the main character in the song.
But Garner gets weary (book reviewers do get weary):
The tone becomes repetitive. In a lot of the cases, you could switch Dylan’s commentaries around, apply them to different songs and not know the difference....
But that's why there's a philosophy to be extracted by the reader. He's looking at different songs and seeing the same thing.
He suggests that the Who’s “My Generation” is sung from the perspective of an 80-year-old man in a nursing home, that Ricky Nelson and not Elvis was the true ambassador of rock ’n’ roll and that Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House” is about a pedophile mass murderer. There’s an analysis of Bing Crosby’s version of Yale’s “Whiffenpoof Song.” Sometimes you only hope he’s kidding.
Is this where it is? Sorry, I need to hand in my ticket and go watch the geek.
44 Comments on Althouse: "There’s no philosophy, not really, in 'The Philosophy of Modern Song.'"
Good one."
Not terrible but very uneven in the 6 or so chapters I read. Some interesting some gibberish.
One would have to be a hard core fan to shell out $16.99 for the book.
It seems like a bathroom book to me. Keep it on the tank, dip in at random while taking a dump. No disrespect intended. Just that it doesn't strike me as a book to read as anything other than a random bunch of loosely related observations.
I'd love to read it but not at that price.
John stop fascism vote republican Henry "
(Sorry, I have stuck song syndrome.)"
I recommend the audiobook, where key portions are read by Dylan. It has the feeling and rhythm of singing.
Other sections are written by famous actors — Steve Buscemi, etc."
We can't all have enough in common to see what's happening and interpret it the same way, be on the same page, if you will (Jan6, for example). Scott Adams calls it watching the same movie. It happens all the time and it's the source of much unnecessary trouble."
That's not correct. He starts out from the perspective of an insecure young man. Then he humorously changes it to the perspective of an old man. And he ties those two perspective together. That's what Dylan often does. He changes the perspective in the song by changing the protagonist or the propagandist's point of view."
Dylan talks about "On the Street Where You Live" as a stalking song:
"Maybe that’s as close as you can get with somebody. Being on the street where they live. Maybe you’re thinking that anytime that person could appear, you are that close. Maybe you just wait all night and all day too. Maybe a cop car would come by and ask you what you’re doing there. If you tell him the truth, that you’re just waiting to see somebody, you’ll probably be arrested for stalking. Depends on who it is. You could be stalking somebody in the South Bronx—being on the street where they live. How long you are going to be waiting there is anybody’s guess.""
I don't think he intended it as an "anti-stalking" song, as such. This suggests Sting intended and hoped for the song to inspire people to gather together in some way and do something to stop stalking, (as if there's much, if anything, that can be done).
He wrote a song about a stalker, from the stalker's point of view.
You're right that some (many? most?) people completely misunderstood the song. Frightening and sad."
I ran into a Garner the other day and (not kidding) almost called him "Get."
Brain worms are dangerous."
Funny. Now that song will be playing in my head all day."
…Wearing that same old shaggy dress, yeah, yeah"
what is Meade doing today? Tearing tickets again? ;-]"
OK, sure.
Can a second Nobel prize for lit be far behind."
Strange.
Now - take your 7th vaccine, please. Pfizer needs to pay more insiders. "
Because the population of successful people is stalling. Most all of them now have two or less children. But poor people in poor countries are rarely stopping at two."
Everyone else figured out that there was no philosophy in the book before you even finished reading it."
My mom used to sing that song when I was a kid. There goes another childhood memory..."
Since I have never heard or heard of many of the songs, and some of the artists listed, I think I'll stay ignorant.
"
...
Bagdasarian, as David Seville, went on to much fame with his Chipmunks recordings."
Now I'm going to have to listen to the audio sample.
Shakespeare is like that for me. Deadly dull to read but I always enjoy live performances.
I've been told the trick is to read him out lod but I've never been motivated to
John stop fascism vote republican Henry "
Sorry. Sorry."
At the time that was written, "philosophy" was a broad term that included what we would now call "science". Horatio has been off at the University, and Hamlet is mocking his book-learned materialism. Dylan may well be using "philosophy" to mean simply, careful and methodical investigation. "
Sting is too smart to not have known what he was writing. He certainly intended to write a lyric that seems like a love song in the first few seconds, but quickly becomes clearly the depiction of a stalker's obsession as it proceeds. That obsessed perspective is the point of the song."
Some people think this is a really frivolous activity. It's something I did a lot when I was young, and I've been around some individuals who when you try to examine a song like that will look at you with contempt for caring about something so stupid. Ironically, these people were big Dylan fans. I'm sure if they read the book and hear Dylan taking the character in the song seriously, they won't think of what an asshole they were to me... long ago."
I read a cool interview with Dylan where someone asked him how did he come up with all those great songs? And his answer was, I don’t know myself, I read those lyrics and I’m amazed.
I think the Muse took him."
Um, no. Sting was in the depths of despair and self-pity when he wrote "Every Breath You Take" -- at the time he was involved in a love triangle much like the one that inspired Eric Clapton to write "Layla" and other famous despairing love songs. The two songs that follow on Synchronicity, "King of Pain" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger," make clear his selfish state of mind. "
"Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I’d never heard him talk before — if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he’d been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to “mess around with other people’s lives” by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley “free speech movement” and said that he didn’t understand it. He said something like: “I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period.” If the capitalist PR machine wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn’t have made a better choice."
This quote makes me respect Dylan even more. Yay, capitalism! Yay, individualism!
As for Chomsky, while I laughed at his description of Dylan's speech, he remains a self-important left-wing asshole. "
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Standards change with time. Don't tell me that 60 years ago a young, lovesick Bob Dylan didn't walk down the street where someone he loved lived and look up longingly at her window and think the whole thing was romantic.
60 years ago Dylan wrote and recorded, “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," which isn't necessarily about nuclear fallout and isn't necessarily not about nuclear fallout. Today we are supposed to be closer than we have been to nuclear war than we have been at any time since. The celebrated "Atomic Scientists" had their meeting this month to reset the hands on the doomsday clock, but we won't know what they decided until January 20th. Hmmm ... they decide in November and it goes into effect in January. I wonder how they hit on that timetable."
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