Bob Dylan has just announced that he’ll have a new book for us this November, the first since his delightfully/insightfully odd book of autobiographical fragments, Chronicles, Volume One (2004), and that its title will be The Philosophy of Modern Song. To my mind especially, that’s a most promising title, as my one published piece (for Modern Age) on Dylan, “What Bob Dylan Means to Literature, and to Song,” particularly emphasized his impact on songwriting:
The most significant aspect of Bob Dylan’s achievement is the revolution he unleashed in songwriting. Prior to Dylan, popular songwriting was far more formulaic, both in its selection of subject matter and its approach to it. This was especially the case with the songs that came from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, even with the better ones we call the “standards” of the Great American Songbook. Their lyrics avoided literary elusiveness, philosophic depth, and controversial political statement. The love song was the commonest kind of song, and it focused on certain universal features of the love affair without the baggage of confessional reflection.
Folk traditions white and black allowed a substantially greater range of topics and expression, but even here, song patterns were fairly set. True, the most artful songwriters might hint at hidden depths; Dylan suggested, for example, that bluesman Robert Johnson regularly did so. Still, scanning the landscape of pre-1963 songwriting, there were very few songs that confronted the listener, as Dylan’s songs did on a regular basis, with prophetic protest, philosophic reflection, psychological analysis, or real poetry.
As I stressed later in the piece that Dylan’s art was not poetry in the strict sense, and would be better described by a tag like “literary pop song,” I should not have let an editor talk me into using that “real poetry” phrase. But anyhow, you can gather why my mouth waters at the prospect of Bob seeking to share his “philosophy of modern song.” The rest of my essay, while jumping off from the controversy about his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, sought to sketch the main outlines of his departure from previous patterns of songwriting, and to meditate on what we gained, and what we lost, by the change he initiated there.
The other news, which you’ve already noticed if you’re a fan, is that over the last two years, accelerating rapidly in the last half-year, Dylan’s original recordings have been made available on youtube. It looks like every last one of them. Back in 2017, when writing my essay, if you wanted to hear a certain lesser-known Dylan-song, you either had to purchase the relevant album, or hope that someone had shared a passable live version. For Dylan was the major artist who held out longest against the sharing of his studio recordings on social media, and he had the means to enforce his wishes. His deal with Sony, only recently revealed, was likely the key to that dam breaking.
I suppose that’s good if you write about songs, as I have long done with my Carl’s Rock Songbook series. For various reasons, I did not write much on Dylan-song, even though, as my Modern Age piece indicates, the new approach to songwriting he began, initially within the folk genre, became one of the key elements, if not the main one, of the genre and idea of rock music. (A key premise of my Songbook, BTW, is that rock per se is not the same thing as the rock ‘n’ roll, even though it grew out of it, continued to overlap with it, etc.) Rock is not as much a “series of footnotes to Dylan” in the sense in which philosophy really might be—as A.N. Whitehead put it—“ a series of footnotes to Plato,” but, it’s pretty close!
I did do a Songbook entry on “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and a related—and quite critical—one on “Masters of War,”. And years later, as part of a special songlist-essay for IM-1776, I made a few interpretative stabs at one of Dylan’s excellent 2020 songs, “Crossing the Rubicon.”
However, the Dylan song that’s most been on my mind lately is “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,” and not because of the now-more-real-than-it’s-been-since-1991 threat of nuclear war, but because of what we are gradually learning about the “vaxxes,” and how there may be much starker lessons about them to come:
As I said in the Modern Age piece, that’s also the song that first displayed the revolution in songwriting gathering within the young Dylan, which would fully blossom in his fourth and fifth albums, Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Bringing It All Back Home.
I look forward to gaining more insights about this shift from his promised book, but even if it just turns out to be his thoughts about how particular songs by other artists work—we’re told it includes essays on songs by Elvis Costello and Nina Simone, for example—, it’ll be worth reading.