The modern song according to Bob Dylan: American, masculine…and a little bit modern

Title new book Bob Dylan, the Minnesota singer-songwriter’s first post since receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, is a lie. Modern song philosophyAnd the its name. In fact, in this group of 66 vignettes on as many pieces of music as possible There is very little philosophy (what Dylan cares to share with the world about the process of writing or performing songs is almost negligible) and even fewer modern songs: Of the 66 titles chosen, only two were written in this century, and their authors are no longer John Trudell and Warren Ziffon with us until we thank the appreciation.

Illustrated with a rich palette of Amazing Photos whose relationship to the analyzed installations is often beyond the reader’s understanding (artists’ portraits, advertising posters, stills from films, landscapes, comics, and iconic portraits of photographers such as Dorothea Lange and William Klein), the book is far from giving what it has. The title promises, but that Not that what he offers is not of the same value. With a collection of sharp musings, wry observations, hallucinatory digressions, historical observations, hyperbolic similes, and poems as sharp as a hunter’s knife (“Gypsies, vagabonds, and thieves”) the answer to the question might be: “What are three kinds of people with whom you’d like to go out to dinner?” dinner’ & rdquo;), Modern song philosophy Provides A strange but wonderful immersion in the world of Dilanianthis landscape of impenetrable darkness fleetingly illuminated by bursts of writing of blinding brilliance.

Singer “Everybody Was”

After working on it for more than a decade, Dylan never bothered to explain, if anything, the reason for the book or the criteria he used for selecting songs beyond personal whim.

With very few exceptions, The team is American to the core And the main genres that were already in vogue when Robert Zimmerman had his first teeth as a musician in his days as a student at Hibbing High School: BluesAnd the countryprimitive folk rockabillyAnd the bluegrass… There’s also ample space dedicated to and for the standards of the pre-pop era singers Like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como, Vic Damon, and twice, Bobby Darinwhom he considers “the most flexible & rdquor; of all the singers of his time. He was the man of all, if anyone”, he says of him.

As it usually happens in this kind of work, the most noticeable is the absence. in the list The Beatles do not appear (who made some contribution to the modern song concept) neither the Rolling Stones nor any other British group of the 1960s except Lone, whose hymn jelly Dylan assigns a very strange gloss to it that begins with a framing phrase: “This is a song that questions everything and doesn’t do anyone any favors. jelly she is one from Four non-US songs are included in Catalog of 66. The other three are two English (pump itby Elvis Costello London asksfrom The Clash) and Italian (I will flyby Domenico Modugno). Writing about the latter, Dylan asserts that “there’s something very liberating about listening to a song in a language you don’t understand.” It’s not something I took into account when choosing.

Where are the women?

Another big deficit Modern song philosophy Do you Ridiculous female presence. Of the 66 recordings he refers to, only four are performed by women: Gypsies, tramps and thievesfrom Share; come to my houseby Rosemary Clooney. Come rain or come shineWritten by Judy Garland W Don’t let me be misunderstoodD, by Nina Simone. The meager portion is exacerbated by the inclusion of some rather external ideas, such as The author’s defense of prostitution – “When you pay for sex with money, it’s probably the cheapest rate out there.” – and polygamy: “What downtrodden woman, without a future, battered by the whims of a cruel society, would not be better off as one of the wives of a rich man? Properly maintained than alone in the street at the expense of government aid”.

In Dylan’s defence, it can be said that the entire book seems to have been written from chronological and geographical coordinates in which such statements should not cause the slightest surprise. A time and a place when mothers warned their daughters that a man’s shoes say a lot about him and country singers rode lawn mowers to the liquor store because their wives hid their car keys.

It is not strange that Nearly half of the songs dissected here (28) belong to the 1950s, which is when teenager Robert Zimmerman decided to change his name after discovering, in that order, blues, country, rock and roll, folk, and poetry. This is the world.

long retreat

Judging by the content Modern song philosophy Everything that has happened since then seems to have been a long, inexorable decline. “Rock and roll has gone from being a brick in the window to being the status quo: from the patches in the leather jackets that made rockabilly records to the Kiss-monogram belt buckles they sell in malls or posters with the slogan thug life. Music is relegated to the background as bureaucrats continually re-evaluate the risk-reward ratio for popular taste & rdquor; Dylan wrote in the chapter devoted to Toxic lovethe first Not connected From Tennessee duo Johnny and Jack.

Bob Dylan, at 81, is without a doubt A man from another era would not mind showing his anachronismMaybe he knows that in the end His genius ends up redeeming him. And he is right. It’s hard not to succumb, for example, to the atomic torrent of images the author restrains because of it Long live Las Vegas by Elvis Presley. Or don’t laugh at the parallels Dylan draws between bluegrass and heavy metal, “two musical forms that haven’t changed visually or aurally in decades” (from the Osborne Brothers’ fast-paced classic Robbie, are you crazy?from 1956, he writes: “This is speed metal without the embarrassment of lycra leotards and teenage satanism”). Or don’t admire his audacity when talking about Suede blue shoes By Carl Perkins, he notes: “These shoes are powerful. They can predict the future, find lost objects, cure diseases, identify criminals, and more.”

Finally, the new book for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature (the first book he has published since records. Volume 1for the year 2004) It bears little revelation but a source of much joy and wonder. He says it himself, in his old wisdom: “Stories are simple. We know them all. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy steals a piece of bread. Chico is murdered in the town square. Girl kills boy’s wife. Chico grows up looking for his father’s killer. Girl You marry the boy. Chico sets the town on fire.” The stories are always the same, yeah. What matters is how they are counted. And no one tells them better than Bob Dylan.

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