Philosophy of Modern Song

You never know what you get with Dylan, and as much as his strength doesn't necessarily lie in prose, this book definitely fits that. So you know what you get with Dylan.

Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement.
[I paid $45 for this coffee table book.]

- You get a pretty good playlist. I skip the Grateful Dead song after about 9 interminable minutes, otherwise I'm good. Dylan's taste runs pretty much the way you'd expect it to, especially after the last 21 years of his career, but his point holds: They're good songs. It's a craft. It means something.

Though we seldom consider it, music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space. Music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transcend life by living it again and again.

- You get a fair amount of boomer whining. Not that he doesn't occasionally have good points, but by the time he gets to his second diatribe about divorce lawyers being the spawn of Satan, I really wish he hadn't.

Entertainers understand that a good story is a basic commodity, one they are not about to give away. The therapist is on the wrong side of that transaction - if you have a lurid story to tell, like you want to fuck your father or make love to your mother, why are you paying a shrink to listen to it? He or she should be paying you.

- You do get some really inspired essays, mixed with some that feels like any music blog ca 2001. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But he's constantly looking for something. It reminds me why, in my extreme Dylan fandom days, would go through entire tours of bootleg shows to see how a song evolves from night to night.

All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirize their lack of profundity only show their own limitations. They are as useless as the police officer reading the transcript of Lenny Bruce's act in the courtroom during his obscenity trial. Just as that police officer misses the essential spark in Lennys performance, so do the others miss the mgic that happens when lyrics are wed to music. Some would call that marriage chemistry, but chemistry seems to based in science and therefore replicable. What happens with words and music is more akin to alchemy, chemistry's wilder, les disciplined precursor, full of experimentation and fraught with failure, with its doomed attempts to turn base metals into gold. People can keep trying to turn music into a science, but in science one and one will always be two.

- Dylan swears. Quite a lot. Huh. He's also occasionally very funny. This is far less surprising.

We have as much responsibility coming out of the booth as going in.

- All these 65 essays, ranging from rejected Wikipedia summaries to free-form prose poetry, pretty much adds up to a story, full of the same sort of rogues' gallery characters he's made a career out of. Not a very focused one, perhaps not even a very modern one, but arguably that's the point; America is still working through the post-war trauma, you can read it through the music it's played itself.

Elvis is gone, the Colonel is gone, Doc Pomus is gone. B.B. and Dr. John are gone. Meanwhile Hilton now owns thirty-one hotels in Las Vegas. The house always wins.