The Philosophy Of Modern Song
By Bob Dylan
Simon & Schister – £35.00
Art is a disagreement. Money is an agreement.
I like Caravaggio, you like Basquiat. We both like Frida Kahlo and Warhol leaves us cold. Art thrives with such spirited sparring. That's why there can be no such thing as a national art form. In the attempt, we can feel the sanding of the edges, the endeavour to include all opinions. The hope to not offend. It all too quickly turns to propaganda or rank commercialism.
('Money Honey – Elvis Presley')
The problem with halls of fame is that they celebrate sanitized versiona of raw life. Country music finds itself in the church on Sunday morning because it spent Saturday night in a back-alley knife fight and trying to convince the barmaid to hike her skirt up around her hips. Without the dynamic tension of the guilt over the bacchanal, it becomes either joyless proselytizing or empty-headed carousing.
('Poison Love – Johnnie and Jack').
Marriage and divorce are currently played out in the courtrooms and on the tongues of gossips; the very nature of the institution has become warped and distorted, a gotcha game of vitriol and betrayal.
('Cheaper To Keep Her – Johnnie Taylor')
In one fair and mighty literary swoop, The Philosophy Of Modern Song thoroughly encapsulates as to why Bob Dylan has always been, and will always remain the (unquestionable) guvnor of modern-day-music. Modern day, as in the best part of the twentieth century, which is the nigh irresistible and sparkling span of what this altogether superlative book almost covers.
From Mose Allison to Frank Sinatra, from Elvis Costello to Willie Nelson, from Nina Simone to The Drifters, these 337 pages handsomely bequeath the intrepid, serious music fan as well as general everyday reader with a most acute, congenial and forensic foresight.
Replete with a breadth of knowledge that is at times, simpy/astonishingly hard to fully comprehend (not ot mention idiosyncratically inspiring), it does invariably take several eye-and ear-opening pennies to empatically drop. Drop that is, from an oddly overt, great intellectual height; before a complex contemplation does indeed, come home to fully roost – as it were.
For at the end of the day, not to mention at the end of this tantalisingly entertaining book, we do need to fully realise and understand that we are dealing with an author whose name just happens to be Bob Dylan. A genie like genius, whose nigh inexorable mythical status of such hi-octane and frenzied fortitude, really is second to none.
The Philosophy Of Modern Song is testament to as much.
A book that is altogether aligned with intransigent wit and very wry and imperial wisdom, whereby an unequivocal understanding (let alone über understanding) can only ever essentially be second guessed.
Or something that is undeniably professed to be adamantly adhered to.
Yet never molly-coddled – let alone simply assumed.
As such, one really could deconstruct Dylan's words of any of the sixty-six songs herein, and still come up trumps each and everytime.
Oh what a surprise eh?
So in relation to the groove induced, semi-inflammatorey little number, 'Feel So Good' by Sonny Burgess for instance (1957/8), who else but Dylan would remorely have any form of such colourful, clinical, chutzpah as to remotely muster the following:
''You're the boogie man, the menace from outer space, bloody, neat, and sharp like a surgeon's scalpel – kingly, soul deep in the eye of the world. You're flying low and got your landing lights turned off. You're gonna boogie on back to where it began, to the birth of creation, unlock the laws of the universe – bone shaking and burning liquid fuel, you're lathered up, electrified and leaving nothing un-licked. You're the lavender leading man, the black sheep, perfect gentleman in a tailcoat and you got a gal who's sky high, stretched out and wild, two-faced beauty, your gold-digging showgirl, full skirted in a cocktail dress. Wolf-bait on mescaline, your catty just folks' gal and she's breathing down your neck.''
So she is.
But so is Dylan; imploring you to wholly dismantle any visitation rights you may have believed were rightly yours. And undeniably (rightly) earnt – in earnest might I add.
Reason being, just when you believe you're in the intellectual pink, and you're kinda off da hook, off relatively scot free, Sir Bob then goes on to clarify:
''If you want to hear a political record, play this one. Put it on repeat, play it over and over, night and day, and maybe if you're wondering what happened to the late, great country you grew up with or how you can make America great again perhaps this record can give you some idea. But whatever you do, keep your windows shut and don't tell anybody, most especially your friends, that you're playing it unless you want them to judge you.
This is a record of extremes, more black than black, more white than white. There was no shame for this kinda thing in the fifties, so nobody knew how to sell it until the Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed purloined the term ''rock and roll'' from a bunch of earlier risque records, Black and white country boogie and rhythm and blues, both sides of the fence using the same term as a thinly veiled euphemism for copulation. Needless to say, once a name like that was attached, selling the music became a whole lot easier.
Of course, this was before America was drugged into a barely functioning torpor. Sure, the seeds of abuse were sown as so-called wonder drugs rolled out of the labs and into the streets […]. The use of drugs went from casual to cavalier and soon even the legal prescription drugs couldn't meet the demand. And there were plenty eager to fill the need. If you're wondering how a nation will fall, look to the drug dealers. Drug dealers in every city with bull's-eyes on their backs, daring anybody to shoot them.
[…].
It's probably lost to the sands of time whether Sonny Burgess came to this song himself or if canny Sam Phillips recycled a Little Junior Parker Sun record in the same way he did with ''Mystery Train'' for Elvis Presley. His records could only be made by a sweaty, sinewy band that played behind chicken wire night after night in a series of off-the-highway bucket-of-blood joints.
This is the sound that made America great'' (Chapter 45).
And this is the book that will make popular song(s) great.
Once again.
From truth to dawning, melancholy to passion, a thunder-struck vision and almost all points inbetween, The Philosophy Of Modern Song is the very intrinsic antidote that is currently craved by all those who long to be saved from the vile world of Simon Cowell's hysterectomy of what once made music great.
After all: '[…] so it is with music, it is of a time but also timeless; a thing with which to make memories and the memory itself. Though we seldom consider it, music is built in time as surely as a sculpter 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'' (Chapter 66).
David Marx
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