World of Bob Dylan 2023 – Page 2

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Mr. Tambo & Mr. Bones, Play a Song for Me: Foster & Poe in Dylan’s ‘Nelly Was a Lady’ Chapter.”

“Mr. Tambo & Mr. Bones, Play a Song for Me: Foster & Poe in Dylan’s ‘Nelly Was a Lady’ Chapter.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Graley Herren, Xavier University

Robert Hunter, longtime Grateful Dead lyricist and sometime Dylan collaborator, wrote an interesting foreword to David Dodd’s book The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. In his opening paragraph he observes, “When fans hear a song they like, they internalize it, dance to it, sing along. Tape it, collect it, trade it. When scholars hear a song they like, they annotate it” (Dodd xi). Now, if this were Dylan talking, I’d expect him to throw in a dig at nerds like us who waste our time annotating his songs. But instead Hunter offers a more sympathetic view: “There is more than one way to love a song. There are as many ways as there are listeners” (xi). Amen! Hunter appreciates that annotation – the shadow chasing of tracking down allusions to their original sources – isn’t an attempt to minimize, sterilize, or euthanize a song: it’s just another way to love it. The same holds true for The Philosophy of Modern Song. Writing the book is just another way for Dylan to love the songs of other artists. But sometimes his love speaks like silence: the art of the unsaid.

He devotes a chapter to “Truckin’,” a song written by Robert Hunter and performed by the Grateful Dead (and by Dylan in his 2023 Japanese and European tours). He describes Hunter as “steeped in the songs of Stephen Foster” (138). David Dodd identifies several Foster allusions in Hunter’s lyrics, including “the Doo-dah man” in “Truckin’,” a reference to Foster’s “Camptown Races” [“Camptown ladies sing this song / Doo-dah! Doo-dah!”].

Dylan is also steeped in the songs of Stephen Foster. He acknowledged his debts to Foster long ago. Readers of The Dylan Review are probably familiar with his touching rendition of “Hard Times” on Good as I Been to You (1992). In a 1985 interview with Robert Hilburn, Dylan reflected on his role models for songwriting: “But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years. I go back to Stephen Foster” (1337).

In that same interview, Dylan tipped his cap to another artistic mentor from the nineteenth century: “I had read a lot of poetry by the time I wrote a lot of those early songs. I was into hard-core poets. […] Poe’s stuff knocked me out in more ways than I could name” (1340). Maybe he couldn’t name it then, but he has been naming Poe lately. He name-drops the poet in “I Contain Multitudes”: “Got a tell-tale heart like Mr. Poe / Got skeletons in the walls of people you know.” Dylan may also be nodding in Poe’s direction by naming his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which sounds an awful lot like Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” a detailed explanation of how he wrote his most famous poem “The Raven.”

In Chapter 24 of The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan focuses on “Nelly Was a Lady,” composed by Stephen Foster in 1849. Like many chapters, this one is very brief, consisting of a five-paragraph riff followed by a two-paragraph commentary, accompanied by one full-page and two half-page pictures. There’s a lot more going on here than first meets the eye – lots of breadcrumbs left for us annotators to trace back to their sources. Dylan’s most explicit statement of what he’s up to comes in the first sentence of the commentary: “Stephen Foster is the counterpart to Edgar Allan Poe” (115). He just drops that stone in the water and lets it sink. But a sinking stone gathers ripples. I want to follow some of those ripples through a series of annotations connecting Poe and Foster to one another and to their counterpart Dylan.

Poe published “The Raven” to instant acclaim in 1845, and he wrote “The Philosophy of Composition” the following year. In the essay he asserts: “the death […] of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” Pretty creepy if you think about it – a beautiful woman must die in order for a man to mourn her loss beautifully. The canons of poetry and song are filled with countless examples, including “Nelly Was a Lady.” The opening verses depict this very same scenario:

Down on the Mississippi floating,
Long time I travel on the way.
All night the cottonwood a-toting,
Sing for my true love all the day.
Now I’m unhappy, and I’m weeping,
Can’t tote the cottonwood no more;
Last night, while Nelly was a-sleeping,
Death came a-knocking at the door.
Nelly was a lady.
Last night, she died.
Toll the bell for lovely Nell,
My dark Virginia bride.

Here is Dylan’s translation of the singer’s situation:

You’re hauling the timber on the grand river, the big river, river of tears, manifest destiny – you hoist the cottonwood logs, the silver bark poplars, that make bright shiny tables and furniture, but you’ve reached the station in life where the work is meaningless, and it’s been this way ever since grief came to knock. Knocking when the cock crowed – grief and gloom in the first light of morning, knocking out the bright lights of the heavens. (113, italics mine)

There’s a lot worth annotating here. Let’s begin with that knock-knock-knocking. We cannot miss the self-allusion to Dylan’s own song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” He does this repeatedly in The Philosophy of Modern Song, forging understated links between the songs he comments on and the songs he composed. I also hear strong echoes of Poe. Death comes a-knocking at the door in “The Raven,” too. The grief-stricken narrator first mistakes a person (or a ghost) rapping at his chamber door before realizing it is a bird at his window. Readers will doubtlessly hear another Dylan echo from the end of “Love Minus Zero / No Limit”: “My love she’s like some raven / At my window with a broken wing.”

Poe’s speaker grows increasingly frantic, interrogating the bird about its motives. He desperately seeks a message from his dead lover Lenore, some sign that they will one day be reunited. Unfortunately, he gets nothing from the raven but croaks, which he hears as “Nevermore.” Lenore, Eleanor, Nell, Nelly – it’s basically the same name. Both Poe’s “The Raven” and Foster’s “Nelly Was a Lady” dramatize the same circumstances: a first-person widower grieving for his dead wife. Dylan hears those intertextual echoes and writes a riff that at times could apply just as well to either work, as well as to some of his own songs. Poe, Foster, Dylan. I even wonder if he had an elegiac trio in mind when he inserted an image of three time-scarred mausoleums in Chapter 24.

“My dark Virginia bride.” Let’s pause over Virginia. After Poe’s father abandoned the family, his mother moved them to Richmond, Virginia. He briefly attended the University of Virginia but had to drop out because he couldn’t afford tuition. If you know anything about Poe, it’s probably that he wrote scary stories, was a drunk and drug fiend, and married his thirteen-year-old first cousin. You may also recall the name of his child-bride: Virginia Clemm. She died at the tender age of 24, and 40-year-old Poe followed her into the grave two years later in 1849, the same year Foster wrote “Nelly Was a Lady.”

“My dark Virginia bride.” Why dark? Because the singer and his lost love were slaves. What Dylan conspicuously neglects to mention in Chapter 24 is that “Nelly Was a Lady” was written by Foster for the minstrel stage and was originally performed in blackface and in dialect. Remember what Dylan told Hilburn when discussing his influence from Foster: “If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to” (1337). Dylan doesn’t explicitly reference Foster’s background and the minstrel roots of “Nelly Was a Lady,” but he did his homework and sneaks in obscure footnotes.

For instance, here’s an example of Dylan’s clever sleight of hand. This is from the Jeff Slate interview Dylan gave about The Philosophy of Modern Song. Slate asked him if it matters where you first hear a song. Dylan’s meandering answer makes you wonder if he’s lost his train of thought:

One of my granddaughters, some years back, who was about 8 years old at the time, asked me if I’d ever met the Andrews Sisters, and if I’d ever heard the song ‘Rum and Coca Cola.’ Where she heard it, I have no idea. When I said I’d never met them, she wanted to know why. I said because I just didn’t, they weren’t here. She asked, ‘Where did they go?’ I didn’t know what to say, so I said Cincinnati. She asked me if I would take her there to meet them. Another time, one of the others asked me if I wrote the song ‘Oh! Susanna.’ I don’t know how she heard the song, or when, or what her relationship to it is, but she knows it and can sing it. She probably heard it on Spotify.
(Slate)

Dylan is crazy like a fox. I suspect he knows that the Andrews Sisters are not from Cincinnati but rather from his old stomping grounds in Minneapolis – even an 8-year-old could Google it. I guarantee you the “Oh! Susanna” reference isn’t arbitrary. Stephen Foster worked as a bookkeeper for his brother’s shipping company in Cincinnati from 1846 to 1850. The offices of Irwin & Foster overlooked the bustling Ohio River wharf where goods were loaded and unloaded onto steamboats. Foster also frequented the bars and theaters of Cincinnati, where traveling minstrel shows did booming business. Inspired by what he saw on the wharf by day and the stage by night, he wrote several of his most famous songs while living and working in Cincinnati, including “Oh! Susanna” and “Nelly Was a Lady.”

Intrigued by Foster’s local connections to my adopted hometown, I went downtown to walk in his footsteps. He lived at a boarding house on Fourth Street. For many years afterwards, the building was converted to the Guilford School, and today it contains corporate office space and a fitness center. I found a commemorative plaque on the front of the building that reads:

On the site of this school between the years 1846-1850 lived Stephen C. Foster, master of the art of song, composer of ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ‘Swanee River,’ ‘Old Black Joe,’ and many others. In native ballad form and melodic strain distinctively American, he sang of simple joys and pathos to all the world.

We know that Dylan sometimes likes to visit homes where songwriters he admires lived in their youth. I don’t know if he ever visited the Guilford School building, but it would have been easy to do. Walk a couple blocks northwest from Foster’s former residence and you’ll run into Taft Theatre, where Dylan played his first concert in Cincinnati in March 1965, and where he returned to play in 2007. I made that short stroll myself, and on the way I was delighted to pass by the Edgar Apartments building. Total coincidence, of course, but a delicious one. Even the streetscape of Cincinnati invites connections between Foster, Poe, and Dylan.

Foster is sometimes called “the Father of American Music,” but much of his legacy now seems offensive and destructive. He perpetuated derogatory racist stereotypes through his so-called “Ethiopian melodies.” Foster frequently indulged the myth of slaves pining with nostalgic affection for Southern plantation life. Hell, he more than indulged it: he was one of the myth’s chief architects, and he cashed in on the popularity of this fraud through his popular minstrel songs. But, if you study blackface minstrelsy in any depth, as Dylan clearly has, then you’ll also learn that it’s more complicated than that.

Readers of this journal may be familiar with the 1993 book published by Eric Lott titled Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Dylan was apparently familiar with at least the title, since he borrowed the idea for his 2001 album “Love and Theft”, a collection of songs steeped in the minstrel tradition. While fully acknowledging the fundamental racism of blackface minstrelsy, Lott also finds other economic, ideological, and psychological forces at play in the tradition, including envy, class-conscious anxiety, and desire – in short “love and theft.”

Foster penned many famous minstrel songs, but Dylan’s choice to focus on “Nelly Was a Lady” is telling. Scholars often credit this song as a turning-point in Foster’s career, where he pivoted away from racial mockery in favor of sentimental ballads designed to elicit sympathy. The singer demands dignity for Nelly. She is not a figure for ridicule. She is a lady, and she deserves respect and commemoration. Dylan makes a redemptive gesture of his own by spotlighting Alvin Youngblood Hart’s version of the song. Hart is an African American blues singer, and his sensitive interpretation isn’t tarnished by blackface appropriation. “Alvin sings the song in its pure form,” as Dylan puts it (115).

But. There’s only so far one can go to purify “Nelly Was a Lady.” We shouldn’t pussyfoot around by whitewashing out the burnt cork. You might accuse Dylan of laundering Foster’s reputation, giving him a free pass and an undeserved promotion, by setting him up as counterpart to Poe, instead of minstrel patriarchs like Daddy Rice or Dan Emmett. If Dylan wants to put Foster’s work in conversation with Poe’s, it seems worth mentioning a fundamental distinction, namely that “Nelly Was a Lady” is “The Raven” in blackface.

As composed by Foster and sung by Alvin Youngblood Hart, it’s a genuinely moving ballad. “A lot of sad songs have been written,” writes Dylan, “but none sadder than this” (115). However, viewed in its original context – published in Foster’s Ethiopian Melodies and performed by the Christy Minstrels – the song was tangled up in blackface. No matter how sympathetic Foster’s intentions may have been, he was working within a denigrating theatrical form dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.

Now let me dismount my high horse and give Dylan some credit. In certain subtle but unmistakable ways, he signals his awareness of the problematic minstrel history behind “Nelly Was a Lady.” Let’s return to a line I quoted earlier and reconsider it from another angle. “You’re hauling timber on the grand river, the big river, river of tears, manifest destiny” (113, italics mine). As a student of nineteenth-century American history, Dylan knows that the concept of “Manifest Destiny” had specific significance for that era. American nationalists believed it was the divinely ordained mission of the United States to expand its dominion over the continent, spreading democracy and capitalism, and seizing land from indigenous people and people of color. Manifest Destiny was the driving force behind the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) which greatly expanded U.S. territory out west. Stephen Foster stayed back in Cincinnati and helped run the office while his brother Dunning went south to fight in the Mexican-American War.

Another sign that Dylan is conscious of context comes in the final paragraph: “The guitar turnarounds are a slow cakewalk between heartbroken verses, loss shared on the front porch” (115, italics mine). The cakewalk originated as a Black dance tradition in the U.S. South around the mid nineteenth century. Blackface minstrels soon recognized that the cakewalk made for a highly entertaining spectacle in live performance, however, and started working these numbers into their shows. By the late nineteenth century, cakewalks were routine on the minstrel stage. Dylan’s cakewalk reference isn’t accidental here. But it’s not elaborated upon either. He gestures obliquely in the direction of minstrelsy, but he doesn’t spell it out, leaving us annotators to lift that barge and tote that bale.

In my book on Time Out of Mind, I interpret the songs recorded for that album as a series of dreams working on multiple levels. In the final chapter, I argue that, on one level, the singer dreams his way into the experiences of a fugitive slave. This imaginative exercise may be what prompted Dylan to start considering his own work in relation to the minstrelsy tradition with greater scrutiny and urgency. Something certainly sent him down this path, because it kept reappearing in various guises in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I’ve already mentioned the minstrel show influence on 2001’s “Love and Theft”. In 2003, Dylan co-wrote and starred in the film Masked and Anonymous, which includes his performance of the minstrel staple “Dixie” and an encounter with the ghost of a minstrel performer (Ed Harris in blackface). In 2006, he extended the pattern on the album Modern Times, lifting several lines from the so-called “Poet of the Confederacy” Henry Timrod, and reworking an old minstrel song into the haunting ballad “Nettie Moore.” [My friend Rob Reginio has an excellent chapter on this song in Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World.] Then his fascination for the subject seemed to fade. Or maybe it just got channeled into the descendants of the minstrel legacy: the songs of Tin Pan Alley, Dylan’s major musical interest in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Now in the century’s third decade, he reminds us that minstrelsy is a recessive gene in the DNA of modern song. Dylan focuses his final chapter on “Where or When.” The song was written by Rodgers & Hart for their 1937 musical Babes in Arms, but Dylan pays particular attention to the 1939 film adaptation, which includes a blackface performance by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Dylan describes America’s sweethearts “slapping on the blackface and mugging incessantly through a simulacrum of a traditional minstrel show, with Rooney portraying Mr. Bones, Garland portraying Mr. Tambo, and Douglas McPhail portraying the straight-man interlocutor. All three characters were minstrel show mainstays, which explains but does not excuse their presence” (332). He neglects to mention that Rooney and Garland’s grotesque travesty opens with a performance of Foster’s “Oh! Susanna.” The phrase “explains but does not excuse” applies to Foster’s troubling entanglement with minstrelsy in “Nelly Was a Lady” as well, and to some of Dylan’s own excursions into this cultural minefield.

Eric Lott devotes a chapter to Dylan in his 2017 book Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. Lott speculates, “I would guess that Dylan regards minstrelsy, say, whatever its ugliness, as responsible for some of the United States’ best music as well as much of its worst” (201). Lott further asserts that Dylan “wants to step up and face the racial facts of one of the traditions he inherited” (202). Does Dylan “step up and face the racial facts” of “Nelly Was a Lady” in The Philosophy of Modern Song? Not exactly. He foregrounds the things he loves about the song while remaining largely silent about its more disturbing elements. That said, while hopscotching his way through Chapter 24, he purposefully drops tell-tale clues that point towards the skeletons in Foster’s walls. He draws circles around his own omissions and calls attention to things he avoids confronting directly – presumably so that annotators like me have something to write for journals like this. In his signature style for the book – the art of the unsaid – Dylan makes furtive glances and winking innuendos to insinuate connections between Foster, Poe, and his own work. Then he leaves the shadow chasing to us.

Works Cited

Dodd, David G. The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

—. “Hard Times.” Good as I Been to You. Columbia, 1992.

Dylan, Bob. “I Contain Multitudes.” Rough and Rowdy Ways. Columbia, 2020.

—. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Columbia, 1973.

—. “Love Minus Zero / No Limit.” Bringing It All Back Home. Columbia, 1965.

—. “Love and Theft.” Columbia, 2001.

—. “Nettie Moore.” Modern Times. Columbia, 2006.

—. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.

—. Time Out of Mind. Columbia, 1997.

Foster, Stephen C. “Camptown Races.” Songs of America.

https://songofamerica.net/song/camptown-races/.

—. “Nelly Was a Lady.” Songs of America. https://songofamerica.net/song/nelly-was-a-lady/.

—. “Oh! Susanna.” Songs of America. https://songofamerica.net/song/oh-susanna/.

Herren, Graley. Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. Anthem Press, 2021.

Hilburn, Robert. “Rock’s Enigmatic Poet Opens a Long-Private Door.” Los Angeles Times

(4 April 2004). Every Mind Polluting Word: Assorted Bob Dylan Utterances. Ed. Artur

Jarosinski. Don’t Ya Tell Henry, 2006, pp. 1337-43.

Lott, Eric. Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism.

Belknap Press, 2017.

—. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford University

Press, 1993.

Masked and Anonymous. Directed by Larry Charles. Written by Sergei Petrov and Rene

Fontaine (aka Bob Dylan and Larry Charles). Sony Pictures Classics, 2003.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ rticles/69390/the-philosophy-of composition.

—. “The Raven.” Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven.

Reginio, Robert. “‘Nettie Moore’: Minstrelsy and the Cultural Economy of Race in Bob

Dylan’s Late Albums.” Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the

World. Eds. Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss. University of Minnesota Press, 2009,

pp. 213-24.

Slate, Jeff. “Bob Dylan Q&A about ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’” (20 December 2022).

The Official Website of Bob Dylan. https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan-interviewed-by-wall-street-journals-jeff-slate/.

August 26, 2023/by Nicole Font

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘The future for me is already a thing of the past’”: The Philosopher’s Nostalgic Dilemma in The Philosophy of Modern Song”

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“‘The future for me is already a thing of the past’”: The Philosopher’s Nostalgic Dilemma in The Philosophy of Modern Song.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Jim Salvucci

Bob Dylan clearly loves the past, and The Philosophy of Modern Song is steeped in seeming nostalgia. Almost every song selection is old, a few very old. The photos and illustrations are mostly vintage, many in black and white. The prose itself is old-fashioned, harkening back to the hip rhythms of the Beats and the diction of the hard-boiled detective novel. Even the themes of the book are often backward looking – the casual sexism, the risible machismo, the dated references.

I could tell you the origins of the term nostalgia, that it was coined in the eighteenth century by a Swiss physician to document a mysterious madness associated with homesickness experienced by Swiss soldiers during deployment. Or that by now, no longer a malady, it has been reconceived as a mere a fondness for the past, particularly an idealized or romanticized past, or as Dylan describes it, “the sanitized versions of life.” I could tell you about all that, but I won’t. I will tell you that one problem nostalgics have is that to be truly nostalgic, one must eschew optimism. After all, to focus on the past as ideal makes moving forward undesirable if not impossible. The only future that nostalgics long for is one that replicates a past that never really was. This is the dead end of all retrograde ideologies, such as MAGA and other Lost Causes, and backward-looking trends, such as the vinyl revival. Unless you are willing to force a future based on a false past, there is nowhere to dwell but back in that misremembered past, and that past has passed if it ever existed. In the specific case of vinyl records, it has passed with a skip and a hiss and maybe another skip.

Yes, Dylan loves the past and lovingly pays tribute to it in The Philosophy of Modern Song. But for Dylan, as this book makes clear, the past is just fodder for the future. It’s merely a source that feeds the pastiche nature of his art and thinking. He builds anew from the pieces of the past. He assembles his philosophy from what we can preserve while always looking for the next thing. As has been established, particularly in the last quarter century, Dylan’s writing technique is roughly parallel to his approach to metallic sculptures: elaborate and wholly new constructions framed by old scraps, many unremarkable and otherwise forgotten. A newness literally assembled from the old. Moreover, his nostalgic tone furthers his irony and highlights satiric moments. If nostalgia is a fondness for an idealized past, Dylan cannot be a nostalgic, for, as a creator, he is an undoubted if cynical optimist.

Visuals

The Philosophy of Modern Song is quite deceptive. On its surface, it looks like a slightly undersized coffee-table book. The black and white cover features retro red lettering. The cover photo itself at first may seem familiar, one you have seen many times. But look again. Sure, there is Little Richard, but he is posing with whom? On the right is Eddie Cochran, a promising young rock musician who died in a car crash at age 21. In the middle, the only one with an instrument, is Alis Lesley, one of the many “female Elvises” who seem about as historically abundant as all the “new Dylans.” Her career also ended abruptly at the age of 21 when she quit. The photos and illustrations throughout are so old that some of the more modern ones can be a bit jarring, such as the sudden appearance of an ebullient Jackson Browne outside a tour bus that sports the image of a launching space shuttle for some reason. It’s a great full-color shot of Browne, but it does not fit with the flow of black-and-white vintage images, the old- time movie posters and advertisements, the retro postcards, the sideshow signage, the paparazzi snapshots, the myriad photos of random older folks doing older-folk things. The colorized photo on the back cover anticipates (if a back-cover photo can anticipate) the nearly dozen photos of record stores, record displays, record labels, record factories, and just plain records that are sprinkled throughout with nary an image of an 8-track, cassette, or CD, let alone an MP3 player.

Song Selection

It is much the same with the song selection, which skews old, older, and older still, challenging the implication of “Modern” in the book title. The second-most recent recording that appears is 2003’s “Dirty Life and Times” by Warren Zevon, itself a look back in time, albeit a more jaundiced and personal look than Dylan’s. By far the oldest composition in the book is “Nelly Was a Lady” by Stephen Foster. In a twist that is most fitting for this collection of turns, Dylan’s chapter on Foster’s song features bluesman Alvin Youngblood Hart’s version from 2004, a year after Zevon’s recording. Thus, the oldest song is represented by the most recent recording.

Diction and Style

In line with the hoary song selection is the diction and patter of Dylan’s prose, which sometimes reads like Raymond Chandler, the hipster years. It is a charming mélange – quick, quirky, canny, and occasionally cranky – that, as many have noted, recalls Dylan’s style from his Theme Time Radio Hour days. Here too, as with the illustrations, occasional contemporary references or language rip us from the patter of Dylan’s retro style. Here is just one example selected at random. It’s a from the middle of the “El Paso” chapter.

El Paso – the passageway, the escape hatch, the secret staircase – ritual crime and symbolic lingo – circular imagery, names and numbers, transmigration, deportation, and all in the cryptic first person, the primitive self. The stench of perfume, alcohol, a puff of smoke, the duel, the worthless life, pain in the heart, staying in the saddle, love in vain, the grim reaper, and a love that’s stronger than death, and other things. (108)

The paragraph continues for several more lines in that paratactic style that Dylan uses so much throughout the book with nary a predicate in sight.

As with the illustrations, sometimes more contemporary terms or references can be quite jarring in the context of the more old-fashioned yet not stale prose. One small example, in the chapter on the Osborn Brothers’ bluegrass number “Ruby, Are You Mad?” Dylan abruptly references heavy metal music and guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. He then compares the Osborns’ song to “speed metal without the embarrassment of Spandex and junior high school devil worship” (143-4). Such anachronistic shifting occurs throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song, including in one of the more flagrantly nostalgic chapters, the one addressing Sonny Burgess’s unreleased late 50s track “Feels So Good.” After Dylan laments “the late great country you grew up in,” he describes the origin of the term “rock and roll.” He identifies the term as a “thinly veiled euphemism for copulation” (223), which is of course itself a coy euphemism for “fucking” (a term he has no compunctions using elsewhere.). After that he pivots to 60s drug use, The Rolling Stones and then to Skype, Zoom, and Face Time, diverging by miles from the song’s 1950’s origin.

Specific Passages

It is extraordinary how many chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences in The Philosophy of Modern Song start with time designators such as “back in the day,” “in the past,” “today,” or “now days.” Even Dylan’s commentary on contemporary culture is steeped in a comparison with bygone days. One of my favorites is from the chapter on The Who’s “My Generation”:

Recently, we have entered a new phase, where anyone entering the age of twenty-two as of 2019 is now a member of Generation Z. While people make jokes about millennials, that group is now old news, as obsolete as all the previous generations –– the baby boomers, Gen X, the Fragile Generation, the Intermediates, the Neutrals, the Dependable, the Unshaken, and the Clean Slate. (43)

Dylan’s sardonic take on the industry of generational labeling distances him from bygone generations (even his own). It betrays no allegiance to any particular period, past or present. So much for the voice of his generation. In contrast, the nostalgia-soaked chapter on Burgess’s “Feels So Good” ends with this zinger: “This is the sound that made America great” (224). Your mind might have automatically added an “again” at the end, a phrase Dylan slyly employed in full earlier in the chapter: “maybe you’re wondering what happened to the late, great country you grew up with or how you can make America great again” (223). Dylan’s invocation of this charged slogan seems apolitical and, in fact once more, sardonic. You are not supposed to recoil in horror. Nor are you to pump your fist and chant “U S A!” Instead, he inspires a knowing smile and chuckle. At least that’s how it worked for me. On top of all that caginess, much of the chapter is an inexplicably a moral rant about drug use.

Other passages throughout the book drip with longing for the bygone, whether it be his ongoing affection for old-time sociopathic outlaws, his fretting over the way religion is practiced nowadays (“as a thing that must be journeyed as a chore” (97)), or the passage on Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” that starts with “That’s the problem with a lot of things these days,” that everything now is too niche and “overly fussed with” (165). But even this curmudgeonly rant is offset by the next passage when Dylan, tongue-in-cheek, speculates about Williams singing all the hits of his day, such as “How Much Is that Doggie,” “Que Sera, Sera,” and “Stardust.” We will see this pattern again and again, a nostalgic romp juxtaposed to or immersed in humor, sarcasm, or jolting contrasts. That rant about religion these-a-days, morphs into a bizarre riff about the “excitement” Dylan experiences while reading the Book of Job, which wryly concludes with the seeming non sequitur, “Here’s another way to look at a love song” (97). As he says in that same paragraph, “Context is everything” (97). Dylan does make a strong argument, albeit not an original one, in favor of old media:

We all shared a baseline cultural vocabulary. People who wanted to see the Beatles on a variety show had to watch flamenco dances, baggy pants comics, ventriloquists and maybe a scene from Shakespeare. (325)

That shared experience opened minds to new realities and possibilities whereas he continues, “Today the medium contains multitudes and man needs only pick one thing he likes and feast exclusively on a stream dedicated to it” (325). It’s the old we-used-to-have-a-shared-national-knowledge-base-and-therefore-a-shared-national-discourse-which-we-have-diluted argument, not entirely untrue. He also expresses his fondness for old movies throughout. It’s hard, though, to not imagine that he included the Drifters’ 1964 song “Saturday Night at the Movies” solely so he could wax on about some of his favorite films, mostly in black and white (317). Indeed, not once does he mention the ostensible topic of Chapter 64, that being the Drifters and/or their song. He only discusses movies! The chapter ends with another sardonic MAGA reference: “People keep talking about making America great again. Maybe they should start with the movies” (317).

Dylan’s last chapter on Dion and the Belmonts summarizes his view of how the past informs the present. He lists items that have more-or-less remained the same over time and concludes, “you can be absolutely sure that it happened before and will happen again –– it’s inevitable … if it’s not happening now, it wasn’t happening then or ever” (329).

Not Nostalgia

So much of this sounds like nostalgia, right? That praise for the past that implicitly or explicitly deprecates the present and holds little hope for the future. It is important, though, to watch the juxtapositions of theme, word, image, and so on to catch the nuance of Dylan’s message here. For one small example of how this works, that chapter on “Saturday Night at the Movies” – when Dylan proposes making America great again by making movies great again – also features a black and white, World War II-era Weegee photo of a grabby sailor awkwardly groping a woman in a movie theater. The woman’s clothes are a bit disheveled, and while her face is largely obscured, she appears either indifferent or unconscious in the moment. The two other moviegoers in the frame are less interested in both the movie and the nearby maritime sounding than they are in the creepy photographer lurking in the dark. If this is the scene Dylan chooses to represent the superiority of erstwhile movie viewing, what does it really mean to make movies great again, let alone America?

A little more exploration of one chapter in particular will help illustrate what Dylan is up to. Chapter 25 on bluesman Johnny Taylor’s 1973 number “It’s Cheaper to Keep Her” is arguably the most sexist in The Philosophy of Modern Song and is one of several chapters where the song and the artist barely make a cameo. In it, Dylan uses the song to launch a broadside on divorce lawyers as a race of greedy manipulators who are “by definition in the destruction business” and who “feign innocence with blood on their hands.” He also approvingly notes that in bygone days, “God-fearing members of the community regularly gave divorced folks the skunk-eye” for their general untrustworthiness (118). Later he preaches about “the laws of God” that “override the laws of man” (119). He is out-and-out sententious about the duty of divorced parents to support a child, before determining that “Ultimately, marriage is for the sake of those children.” He then concludes matter-of-factly, “And a couple who has no children, that’s not a family. They are just two friends” (118). I generally recoil at commentators who drag Dylan’s biography into every discussion of his work, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that this man, Bob Dylan, has been married and divorced at least twice himself, which certainly explains his animus for divorce lawyers but not his preachy traditional-marriage screed. This, of course, is all a prelude to the noxious solution he will propose at the end of the chapter, and subsequently we are subjected to Dylan’s polygamist fantasy, which starts as an argument specifically for polygyny. He doubles down on his inherent sexism (and heteronormativity) with his assumption that it will typically be the husband in a divorce who has sole responsibility to pay support. Then he treats us to this anti-feminist, self- pitying salvo:

Women’s rights crusaders and women’s lib lobbyists take turns putting man back on his heels until he is pinned behind the eight ball dodging the shrapnel from the smashed glass ceiling. (121)

Notice that in this amalgam of wretchedness and mismatched metaphors he refers to the victim of all this feminist oppression as a generalized “man,” not “a man” in particular. But wait, there’s more! He then tinges his defense of his anti-feminism with misogyny, arguing any “downtrodden woman” would welcome a rich man’s protection by joining some sort of harem. It’s a statement worthy of Alex Jones minus the dietary supplements. In yet another twist, Dylan then helpfully points out that all along he never explicitly precluded the practice of polyandry before sarcastically declaring, “have at it, ladies. There’s another glass ceiling for you to break” (121).

And what does this have to do with nostalgia? Well first, there are the retrograde attitudes obviously. Is this Dylan’s pining for the casual sexism of yore? But what also of the language used? While “glass ceiling” is still a prevalent term, “women’s lib” is moribund, drolly archaic even. When was the last time you heard that phrase used in conversation? When I Googled it, all the first-page hits were explanations of the term, not actual usage in the vernacular. I will bet there are younger readers who don’t even recognize it. A reader who is affronted to distraction by Dylan’s sexist tropes may not even notice it slip by. As with other similar sections and passages, this obnoxiousness is accompanied by exaggerated language, extremist posturing, odd or comical images, and other hijinks. All this is to suggest that there is a wink-wink here, accompanied by a nod-nod.

In her book Irony’s Edge, Linda Hutcheon describes the “meta-ironic function” or marker, the textual or visual indicator that one is in the presence of irony or that irony will soon appear (154). The meta-ironic marker can take many forms – such as, “gestural,” “phonic,” or “graphic” (155). It is the equivalent of a tongue planted firmly in the cheek or finger to the nose. The markers of irony can be structural too (154) or meta-ironic and structural (156). The oddball factoids Dylan includes, the jarring juxtapositions, the sly illustrations, the knowing tone, the sudden reversals, and even the curmudgeonly voice that pervades the text operate meta-ironically to enable us to “get” Dylan’s irony. So how does his irony work? I would argue that Dylan’s irony here is meant sometimes just to amuse and sometimes to further a satiric point. I am not suggesting that The Philosophy of Modern Song falls into the genre of satire, but it is, like much of Dylan’s output, a work that contains satiric elements without being fully satiric. Case in point, “It’s Cheaper to Keep Her” is all by itself a fairly knuckleheaded song, a churlish novelty number, the product of a clueless era that may induce a mordant grin or a low groan. Meanwhile Dylan’s riffing on women’s lib and the mechanics of polygamy ultimately punch up the song’s ideological shortcomings – a subversive commentary that exposes the arguably offensive foibles of the song. In other words, satire. Then, after four pages without having once mentioned the subject matter of the chapter, Dylan seemingly out of the blue ends it with, “It’s cheaper to keep her, indeed,” thus at last connecting his commentary and the song. Dylan employs flagrantly sexist tropes in other chapters as well – notably the one on the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” (253). But meta-ironic markers arise there too, my favorite being an illustration featuring a too-literal portrait of a five-member band of eagles.

So, this is the philosopher’s dilemma in The Philosophy of Modern Song. How can you simultaneously honor the past, critique the past, and build the future upon it? Dylan loves the past, but he is not delusional about its shortcomings. The past is a component, an ingredient in the farraginous recipe that Dylan is whipping up in his Promethean kitchen. That he uses boorish jokes, odd and deflating juxtapositions, a few bizarre choices, and even flagrantly outdated thinking at once obscures his mission and marks it. People often talk about Dylan’s overlooked humor, but he is even less recognized for his considerable accomplishments as a satirist. In The Philosophy of Modern Song, when he plays the curmudgeon, the fuddy-duddy, the stick in the mud – shaking his harmonica rack at the neighborhood kids and yelling, “get off my private beach!” while carping on the nation’s decline – he is evoking a faux nostalgia that serves a more complex purpose. Dylan is no philosopher, at least not any more than he is a nostalgic. He is not out to write a philosophy of song any more than he is out to write a full- length satire. Instead, he seeks to tease out the philosophy in the songs he addresses, but – not interested in academic exegesis – he opts instead for a more subtle, dangerous, and interesting approach, using style and form to subtly make his substantive points. In all his work, Dylan regularly traffics in humor, irony, and satire – perhaps just for the fun of it. His seeming nostalgia in The Philosophy of Modern Song is one part of the mix. All this old stuff, though, is merely material for Dylan’s next work, be it a song, book, or whatever. Dylan loves the past as it serves and informs his creative future.

Works Cited

Dylan, Bob. The Philosophy of Modern Song. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York: Routledge, 1995.

August 26, 2023/by Nicole Font

Dylan Review Vol. 5.1, Spring/Summer 2023, World of Bob Dylan 2023

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘The Laws of Time Didn’t Apply to You’: Bob Dylan and the Zeitgeist of the Discontent”

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“‘The Laws of Time Didn’t Apply to You’: Bob Dylan and the Zeitgeist of the Discontent.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Court Carney, Stephen F. Austin State University

At first glance, Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, published in late 2022, overwhelms. The book features so many different songs and interpretations. Like a giant puzzle or, from a different perspective, a Joseph Cornell box. Intricate and mysterious. Where was the key? There also was a flurry of great immediate takes along the lines of “Can you believe what this song you’ve never heard says about our history?” Yet, something throbbed from the pages, less connected to the specific songs and more akin to a threat, sadness, or dissonant inchoate hum. I began to think of the book less in terms of songs and what Dylan likes (and, by extension, via omissions, what he dislikes) and certainly removed from the language used, authorial identity, or an accounting of demographics. All worthy, important topics. And topics that will continue to spin out thoughtful and engaged work. But I kept being drawn to something else in the book’s totality. A new song began to emerge, but one of loss, searching, ambivalence, anti-modernism, or at least its cousin, ambi-modernism. I began to situate Dylan’s book within a more significant age of discontent. From films and books and infinite news pieces, the past couple of years has been defined by a particular form of cultural discontent. A gloominess brought about by the modern condition and then, of course, reflected and refracted by it. We have lost a lot along this road toward progress as defined by late-stage capitalism. And traditionalism, whether good faith or not, has collapsed too, under a shift away from decorum politically, socially, and culturally.

A look at The Philosophy of Modern Song through this lens and somewhat detached from the songs themselves allows for a perspective at once defiant and driving. None of this is new, of course, and much of this modernist contempt leeches into the soil of the blues songs and motifs that defined large parts of Dylan’s career. Greil Marcus, in a timely reprint of an old column on World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been to You: “On both records, the music is all about values: what counts, what doesn’t, what lasts, what shouldn’t.” As Dylan himself notes: “it’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite, flood control – watching the red dawn not bothering to dress.”[1] Dylan has long walked through this undergrowth of dissatisfaction and world-weariness. And in some ways, this entire discussion dates back to the various waves of postindustrial fears. As we have seen, nostalgia plays a role here but also something thornier. Still, I think something newer and more specific is happening. Throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan checks in with this pulse of ambi-modernism – a concept that gets at a certain vibe. I don’t see Dylan as offering a gauzy-eyed and uncritical tribute to the past, or that there was necessarily some eternal truth in 1949 or 1957 or 1961 that forever was corrupted. He’s more nuanced than that. But there is a sense of loss or a feeling that something has been lost in terms of options or, as Marcus notes, “what counts, what doesn’t, what lasts, what shouldn’t.”

We see this throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song.

On “Detroit City”: “Like thousands of others, he left the farm, came to the big city to get ahead, and got lost.”[2]

On “Pump it Up”: “Why all the monotonous and lifeless music that plays inside your head?”[3]

On “Take Me From this Garden of Evil”: “But you’re in limbo, and you’re shouting at anyone who’ll listen…you want to be emancipated from all the hokum. You don’t want to daydream your life away, you want to get beyond the borderlands and you’ve been ruminating too long.”[4]

On “Money Honey”: “People with no discernable income buy flawless knockoff watches with one letter misspellings to thwart copyright. And then wealthy people buy the same “Rulex” [sic] so their six-figure real watches won’t get stolen when they are out at dinner.”[5]

On “My Generation”: “Every generation gets to pick and choose what they want from the generations that came before with the same arrogance and ego-driven self-importance that the previous generations had when they picked the bones of the ones before them.”[6]

On “Nelly was a Lady”: “You’ve reached the station in life where the work is meaningless….Now you live life absent-minded and distracted, but you won’t give in to emotions, if you did you’d be sunk.”[7]

On “Ruby Are You Mad?”: “But people confuse tradition with calcification. We listen to an old record and imagine it sealed in amber. A piece of nostalgia that exists for our own needs, without a thought of the sweat and toil, anger and blood that went into making it or the thing it may have turned into….A snapshot can be riveting and artful, but it is the choice of the single moment plucked from the stream moments that makes it immortal.”[8]

On “Your Cheatin’ Heart”: “That’s the problem with a lot of things these days. Everything is too full now; we are spoon-fed everything…Perhaps this is why music is not a place where people put their dreams at the moment; dreams suffocate in these airless environs.”[9]

On “Blue Bayou”: “You’re looking forward to contentment and happiness on Blue Bayou, although right now you’re friendless, all by yourself, and feel marooned, ill at ease and edgy.”[10]

On “Midnight Rider”: “The midnight rider wants to return things back to a pre-corporate economic order and wipe the slate clean….The midnight rider has sympathizers.”[11]

On “Everybody’s Crying Mercy”: “[This song] offers a jaundiced view of the current state of the world – both when the songs were written and, sadly, now.”[12]

On “Feel So Good”: “Put it on repeat….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….Of course, this was before America was drugged into a barely functioning torpor…but it’s always hard to recognize yourself in someone else’s photo.”[13]

On “Big Boss Man”: Modern man is your employee – servile and hypercritical, he’s the informed citizen, the rational being, the yes man and the ass kisser, and his temple is the movie theater. He’s working for you around the clock, and he’s dehydrated. It would take oceans of water to cleanse him from his previous lives. He needs his rivers of poetry and music, but you won’t let him pause or stand down for a second from his chores…. You’re the Cyclopean giant – you’re on the right side of history. The supreme oligarch, the Generalissimo, the over-the-top Overlord who treats the whole world like butlers and chambermaids. You’re a man of distinction. You should be happy that people want to emulate you.”[14]

On “Strangers in the Night”: “Tramps and mavericks, the object of each other’s affection, enraptured with each other and creating an alliance – ignoring all the ages of man, the golden age, electronic age, age of anxiety, the jazz age. You’re here to tell a different story, a bird of another feather.”[15]

On “Saturday Night at the Movies”: “Sequels and remakes roll off the assembly line nowadays with alarming frequency and astronomical budgets but they still can’t recapture the wonder and magic of the originals….Those who dismiss movies from before their time as merely simplistic are missing out.”[16]

On “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”: “This song is a remembrance of things past, you’re looking back to olden times, to things that have happened before now.”[17]

You have these constant repetitions here: the unconventional life destroyed by normalcy – the constriction of creativity. The fear of being hemmed in, of being suffocated, vitality snuffed out by all the thou musts and thou shalts. It’s all about escape, reinvention, obsolescence, out-of-date, despair, suffering, mistranslation, generational shifts, generational static, and desperation. The noise of the Now drowning out the What Could Be or Could Have Been. Not negative, nor positive, optimistic, nor pessimistic: a more self-assured Zen take on loss. What have we lost? And who are the heroes? The deserter, the outlaw, the hobo, the maverick, the tramp. The enduring heroes of Dylan – no surprises here – but clearly, this book has a thumb on the scale in terms of values and needs and desires. Early reviews of the book took the title as a joke or an oversell. How do these songs cohere to something resembling a philosophy? And yet, from a distance, at least one perspective yields something definitive. How do we deal with the modern world? Here are several dozen songs that perhaps provide a path.

At the end of 2022 and into 2023, several prominent media pieces began to build a constellation of sameness: something was going on with Gen Z. After years of millennial handwringing over millennial destruction of all things holy, such as dairy to doorbells, a new culture of Not For Us, we demanded something different, something new, something that was commonplace 25 years ago. In December 2022, the New York Times ran a piece on “Luddite” teens. Every new generation discovers Kerouac, but now it’s poetry and flip phones. The Luddite club, which wanted a reprieve from constant connection and social media, soon encountered the Privilege Backlash. “You follow your kids now,” one parent said, “you track them. It’s a little Orwellian, I guess, but we’re the helicopter parent generation. So when she got rid of the iPhone, that presented a problem for us, initially.” “Well, it’s classist to make people need to have smartphones, too, right?” Mr. Lane said. “I think it’s a great conversation they’re having. There’s no right answer.”[18] Just a few weeks later, in January of 2023, the New York Times, featured teens who craved standalone digital cameras – not quite reliving the Polaroid/Lomography craze of the 00s and 10s. “Over the past few years,” the reporter notes, “nostalgia for the Y2K era, a time of both tech enthusiasm and existential dread that spanned the late 1990s and early 2000s, has seized Generation Z.”[19] “When I look back at my digital photos” – from his actual camera – “I have very specific memories attached to them,” Mr. Sondhi said. “When I go through the camera roll on my phone, I sort of remember the moment and it’s not special.”[20]

Two moments help show the way Dylan taps into moments of explosive historicism. Songs tether to particular moments but then vector backward and forward to highlight the past’s impact on the present and the Now’s imprint on the Then. The expansive nature of a song connected to a popular culture moment is slotted through the lens of Dylan. The movie that best captured the tensions here was Jordan Peele’s Nope. From its opening title card to its plot protection of analog cameras and vinyl records, to its questioning of 1990s media and nostalgia, to its provocative climax at the “Winkin’ Well,” the “old-timey” non-electric large format camera, Nope prods the audience to examine, horrifying monster or not, the cultural oxygen of modern life. Peele prefaces his film with the rarely quoted minor prophet Nahum: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”[21] Seeing these words offers a call back to Dylan’s speech in 1991 after accepting a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award:

My daddy, he didn’t leave me much, you know he was a very simple man, but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said …He said, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own father and mother will abandon you, and if that happens, God will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.[22]

In Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan uses remarkably similar language in discussing The Temptation’s “Ball of Confusion” from 1970:

Everything is rotten and tainted, even your punch-drunk brother, he keeps talking about love, but what’s that to you? The more you think about it, the less sure you know what it means. The new Beatles record intoxicates you – but you’ve no idea what you heard. [23]

Every ten seconds another news flash, another scandal, more headlines, more news commentators and they’re giving you the creeps. Everything is spoilt dirty, everything you touch on. [24]

But then again, things might not be so simple, you may be hallucinating, making too much of it all, blowing everything out of proportion. You just might be a difficult person to get along with. [25]

This idea that everything is “spoilt dirty” resonates. Back to 1991. Back to 1971. Back to the 7th century BCE. The promise of the past shaking the foundation of the present. And the Nope trailer? Set to “Ball of Confusion.”

A similar argument can be made with a connection between Dylan and the television show Mad Men. A Dylan motif runs through the entire series. Sometimes overtly: the use of his music, two characters plan to see him in concert, and often through allusion as with assumed identities, masking, and a traipsing across a rather obdurate generational divide. Dylan: “Like with many men who reinvent themselves, the details get a bit dodgy in places.”[26] “There’s lots of reasons folks change their names,” Dylan writes in his chapter on “Old Violin,” “And then there are those who change their own names, either on the run from some unseen demon or heading toward something else.[27] In 2007, AMC aired the inaugural season of Mad Men, a television show set in the early 1960s and centered on the world of New York advertising. The pilot episode culminates with Vic Damone’s “On the Street Where You Live.” After living with Don Draper’s seemingly single, carefree Manhattan life, the audience is shown the bait-and-switch as he ends his day at home with his wife and children – the romance of Damone, then, in high contrast to the duplicity at the heart of Draper. In his chapter on Damone, Dylan writes, “maybe that’s as close as you can get with somebody. Being on the street where they live.”[28] Trouble is avoided through charisma, perhaps, but for how long? For Draper, about a decade.

The first season culminates famously with “The Wheel,” a poignant episode centered on the run-up to Thanksgiving 1960. The episode closes out with Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” a song released in 1963. Bob Dylan runs through the entire seven seasons of the series, if only at times as a glancing aside. Dylan’s appearance in the first season’s finale provides a multifaceted tableau of the (a)historical. The episode’s theme relates strongly to the dark gravity of nostalgia – both in terms of individual emotional life and packaging the potency of longing for an unobtainable past. As the main character imagines a Thanksgiving weekend with family and without strife, Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” slides into the soundtrack. The song works on several levels in the scene. A vital element of this conversation relates to the anachronistic aspects. The season ended in 1961, but Dylan would not release the song until 1963. Critics tended to get hung up on the inaccuracy. Still, it can help frame the discussion as the anachronistic nature of its placement allows for a meta-discussion of how popular culture projects history and historical tableaus to audiences. A straightforward plot discussion quickly unravels as the soundtrack pushes against these narratives.

All these vectors converge in the book’s final chapter in an essay centered on “Where or When” by Dion and the Belmonts. This particular song, so simple on the surface but endlessly deep on repeated listens, underscores the metanarrative of The Philosophy of Modern Song. “This is a song of reincarnation,” Dylan writes, “one repetitious drone through space, plugging the same old theme, nonstop over and over again…where everything is exactly alike, and you can’t tell anything apart.” “History,” Dylan argues, “keeps repeating itself, and every moment of life is the same moment, with more than one level of meaning.[29] Memory, too, matters in all of its fallibility and, thus, its potency. “But so it is of music,” Dylan writes, “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 sculptor or welder works in physical space.”[30] As a preface to the chapter, the book includes an uncited photograph of two young lovers on a bench beneath L’Heure de tous, a striking sculpture outside the Gare Saint- Lazare in Paris. Created by French-American artist Arman, the piece is a fusion of bronze clocks, each set at different times. Where or when?

The creaking ropes of the buried camera in Nope spit out chemical images of the metaphoric and real. The nostalgia of Mad Men, with its slide projector clicking and shuddering through personal memories, scatters psychic wounds against a blank screen. We see this, too, in two paintings that help set the scene. One is by Norwegian painter Harald Oskar Sohlberg, currently in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. And a second is by Bob Dylan, based on a film still. Sohlberg’s Country Road (1905) shows a dirt path bisecting a dark, twilight landscape of stillness. Yet, the eye is drawn to the telephone poles spiking the center of the frame. Sohlberg crushes the past and present (and anticipated communicative future) into one image of striking ambivalence. The painting’s deep purples, browns, and greens evoke a spectral scene of change and continuity. The poles pose both a threat and a promise. Seemingly built out of the wood from the trees surrounding the road, the telephone posts beckon and fade simultaneously. Dylan’s painting serves a similar purpose, though from a different direction. The scene in Texas Boneyard centers on a dilapidated drive-in movie theater with a wrecked screen and faded marquee standing as silent monuments to the entertainment of the past. The marquee sign in transition also shows up in The Philosophy of Modern Song, as a worker replacing Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis’s war picture Kings Go Forth (1958) leaves “FRANK SIN” in midair.[31] In their dreamy blues and greens, both paintings suggest time passing with technology spreading and dividing the scenes in challenging and complicated ways. Nostalgia. But for what? Perhaps anti-nostalgia. But to what end? The emotional sentiment (shy of sentimentality) of both paintings forces the viewer to register past/present/future while maintaining a grasp on their connection to their contemporary moment.

Dylan’s painting comes directly from the final scene in John Sayles’ Lone Star (1996), where the two main characters, following a rather uncomfortable moment of awareness of blood realization, stare into the ruined drive-in (the El Vaquero). Forget all that stuff. Forget the Alamo. A film obsessed with the falseness of memory ends with an admonition to forget everything that came before. Dylan, too, must have been struck by that scene and its fever of wistful forgetfulness, the ambiguity of the half-remembered. It’s the ambiguity here that must be evoked. Not new, but still, a nuanced ambivalence runs through this book – a theme and a mood that reaches back to earlier anxieties about earlier industries and technologies. Put another way, as Richard “Rabbit” Brown sang in “James Alley Blues,” a song caught on tape by a young Dylan on the cusp of fame: “Times ain’t now nothing like they used to be.” On a related note, in his discussion of John Trudell’s “Doesn’t Hurt Anymore,” Dylan hits directly at this point. “How do you identify with a world that has set you aside, a world that took everything from you without asking, a world that’s asleep, bedded down and deep into slumber- land taking one long endless siesta?” “You’ll go into the mythic land of rebirth,” Dylan argues, “stare up into the mirror of the night sky and talk to your ancestors. They’re wide awake.[32]

In his interview with Dylan in December 2022 for the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Slate asked how he listened to music. “I listen to CD’s, satellite radio and streaming,” Dylan replied:

I do love the sound of old vinyl though, especially on a tube record player from back in the day. I bought three of those in an antique store in Oregon about 30 years ago. They’re just little, but the tone quality is so powerful and miraculous, has so much depth, it always takes me back to the days when life was different and unpredictable. You had no idea what was coming down the road, and it didn’t matter. The laws of time didn’t apply to you.[33]

With its specificity and invocation of the magical, this response sums up much of the discussion in The Philosophy of Modern Song. So much of the book focuses on this connection of life to music via technology, and however complex and even infuriating the technology piece is, it remains the bridge between lived experiences and memory and art and existence. Writing on “Where or When,” Dylan argues that “music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transcend life by living it again and again.”[34]

The laws of time didn’t apply to you.

The outmoded camera, the rickety slide projector, the drive-in movie, the stacked clocks, the telephone poles bisecting nature, bisecting time. Is it a rejection of the new and a grasping of the old? Is it fetishistic? It is interesting that young people want to recover the cameras of the past – the cameras from 2008, from 1998, from 1958. They seem to seek better approximations of their lives in yesterday’s warped, woozy imperfect photos. Of course, in a generation, the filtered Instagram world of 2023 might seem hopelessly authentic to those similarly trapped in their current search for authenticity. The archive of memory rejects any simple cataloging. These images run through Dylan’s book, and it is here where he clearly delineates the contemporary moment of cultural discontent. The “philosophy of modern song,” indeed.

[1] Greil Marcus, “Days Between Stations” (December 1993).

[2] Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 5.

[3] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 8.

[4] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 15.

[5] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 35.

[6] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 43.

[7] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 113.

[8] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 144.

[9] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 165.

[10] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 170.

[11] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 174.

[12] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 209.

[13] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 223.

[14] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 259.

[15] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 301.

[16] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 314.

[17] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 319.

[18] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

[19] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/digital-cameras-olympus-canon.html

[20] nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/digital-cameras-olympus-canon.html. Of course, the rise of AI (especially across college campuses) has driven new conversations about old topics. Earlier this year, Medium published a piece: “AI and the New-Luddites.” https://medium.com/electronic-life/ai-and-the-neo-luddites-6e154260da28. But more noise was felt in art and film, for the films of 2022 defined much of this discourse. Tár’s take on generational critique and criticism. The Fableman’s take on childhood nostalgia/anti-nostalgia and film. And White Noise, released just a couple of weeks after The Philosophy of Modern Song with its satire, by way of 1985, of consumerism and consumption. LCD Soundsystem provides a mission statement of this feeling in their “New Body Rhumba,” written for the soundtrack (and featured in the film’s choreographed ending). “The distance is growing but so is the longing,” James Murphy sings, “which leaves the in-between.”

[21] Nahum 3:6.

[22] https://www.expectingrain.com/dok/int/grammiesspeech.html

[23] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 76.

[24] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 77.

[25] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 77.

[26] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 23.

[27] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 147.

[28] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 134.

[29] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 327. “Life in the wasteland, where there’s no tomorrow and it always seems like only yesterday, where we share the same faults over and over, where reincarnation overtakes you. Where the past has a way of showing up in front of you and coming into your life without being called….Where if it’s not happening now, it wasn’t happening ever.” Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 329

[30] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 334.

[31] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 337.

[32] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 196.

[33] https://www.bobdylan.com/news/bob-dylan-interviewed-by-wall-street-journals-jeff-slate/. “How do you discover new music these days? Mostly by accident, by chance. If I go looking for something I usually don’t find it. In fact, I never find it. I walk into things intuitively when I’m most likely not looking for anything….Obscure artists, obscure songs.”

[34] Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song, 334.

August 26, 2023/by Nicole Font

Dylan Review Vol. 5.1, Spring/Summer 2023, World of Bob Dylan 2023

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘Lame as Hell and a Big Trick’: Dylan’s Comment on Popular Art as Resistance in The Philosophy of Modern Song.”

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“‘Lame as Hell and a Big Trick’: Dylan’s Comment on Popular Art as Resistance in The Philosophy of Modern Song.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College

In Chronicles, Vol. One, when Dylan writes, “I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick,” it’s reasonable that he viewed mainstream culture “lame as hell” because it mindlessly affirmed hegemonic post-industrial values (Dylan 35). The “big trick” of mainstream culture is that those in control of the government, military, and economy in America, the “power elite” as C. Wright Mills designated them, exploit their positions of power and celebrity culture to distract and manipulate mass society. Mills writes, “As each of these domains has coincided with the others, as decisions tend to become total in their consequence, the leading men in each of the three domains of power – the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate – tend to come together to form an elite power in America” (The Power Elite 9). Particularly, in the post-World War II era when Mills wrote his seminal texts The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination, he argued that the “pace” at which contemporary society changed exceeded people’s ability to adjust or “orient themselves in accordance with cherished values” (The Sociological Imagination 4). It’s not only that American society was changing, but also the way in and the rate at which those changes occurred that caused a values crisis among Americans who felt their values threatened. Mills continues, “Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis” (The Sociological Imagination 4).

Dylan echoed Mills’ ideas in Chronicles when he described post-World War II America. He wrote, “The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and a new one beginning” (Chronicles 28). Part of that change was caused by atomic anxiety and the other was caused by the centralization of power via the power elite. Both led to the conformity of the 1950s, a homogenization of culture and society largely through mass media transmission and consumption. Dylan’s formative years in Hibbing, Minnesota, a town “that looked like every other town out of the 40s and 50s” provided little opportunity for rebellion due to its brutal climate and proximity to the Hull-Rust Mahoning Open Pit (No Direction Home 4:23). However, a radio with a turntable in the basement of his childhood home provided the escape he needed (No Direction Home 4:50). Listening to “Drifting too Far from the Shore,” Dylan describes that “the sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else” (No Direction Home 3:56). Radio stations streaming from across the country exposed Dylan to songs that weren’t played on mainstream radio stations. These were the songs that opened his mind to possibilities outside of and provided intellectual and artistic resistance against mainstream culture. In Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan states “It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important” and that “Ricky [Nelson] made rock and roll part of the family… magically transforming the image on a black and white television into the American Dream. But mostly it was the records that did it” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 9, 52). Subsequently, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan also demonstrates how the songs he included and deconstructed, many of which he likely listened to on that radio during his youth, challenge the zeitgeist of their social and cultural moments.

There are several ways in which Dylan employs Mills’ theories. First, he does so through an examination of how mass media serves the interests of the power elite. In Mills’ assessment, centralization of corporate media markets through radio, television, and movies diminished the quality of public discourse. As a result, “with the increased means of mass persuasion that are available, the public of public opinion has become the object of efforts to control, manage, manipulate, and increasingly intimidate” (Mills The Power Elite 310). This creates a single national media market that shares fluency in, is influenced by, and responds to the signs, signals, logos, slogans, and jargon of corporations and mass media. The result of this increasing influence, according to Mills, is that it gives people in mass society an “identity,” “aspirations,” technique to fulfill their aspirations, and “an escape” (The Power Elite 314). That ideal reinforced heteronormative, patriarchal, middle-class, consumer culture. It provided a template of how modern men and women should look, act, dress, what jobs they should have and what they should purchase. Mills asserts, “The chief distracting tension is between the wanting and not having of commodities or of women held to be good looking” (The Power Elite 315). Americans aspired to own a home in the suburbs, have a family, own the newest appliances, cars, or clothes based largely on the wave of new media in their lives. Simply stated: to “keep up with the Joneses.” That lifestyle was most successfully achieved through men securing a “good” or “stable” job, while women took care of the children and the house. This led to anxieties and frustrations as people attempted to achieve the ideal, of those who failed to “live up to” it, and alienation of those who failed or refused to conform. Second, by applying Mills’ theories to the songs in The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan demonstrates how ideas communicated through the songs – nearly all of which achieved success on one or several of Billboard’s charts – provided intellectual resistance to the power elite in plain sight.

To start, Dylan’s critique of the power elite centers on their exploitation of individuals and society’s institutions through their monolithic control of American life. He indicts them as “common criminals” in Chapter 10, “Jesse James”: writing “Criminals can wear badges, army uniforms, or even sit in the House of Representatives. They can be billionaires, corporate raiders, or stockbroker analysts. Even medical doctors” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 47). These figures possess institutional power in which they control laws, justice, the economy, and defense. They also benefit and profit from their relationships with each other and reciprocal protection of the institutions they control (The Philosophy of Modern Song 47). They are the “aristocratic establishment, the upper-class landowners” in Dylan’s chapter on “Pancho and Lefty” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 59). Similarly, Dylan’s analysis of Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” depicts the bourgeoisie middle-management using Mills’ language – “chieftain” and “overlord.” The boss man overworks his employees and is unphased by “labor unions, uprisings, revolts, empty threats” because he “is above it all.” In Chapter 4, “Take Me from This Garden of Evil,” Dylan again uses Mills’ language to describe the collapse of old values to moral ambiguity. He writes, “this song presses the panic button” and that the “newer beginning … is a garden of corporate lust, sexual greed, gratuitous cruelty, and commonplace insanity” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 17). The “masses of people” Dylan refers to have undoubtedly been “hypnotized” by mass media, consuming it without considering its meaning or the consequences of their mindless consumption (The Philosophy of Modern Song 17). The characters in these songs recognize the ubiquitous influence of the power elite and either reject participation outright or ask to be “delivered” from it.

Similarly, throughout The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan highlights the centralized economic control of corporations in American life. During this period, national chains replaced local small businesses and local ads were replaced by national commercials. This consolidated brand identity, brand recognition, and consumer appetites. Additionally, corporations provided stable employment with opportunities for advancement, benefits, and a retirement plan. Each of the sixty-six chapters includes an aspect of American consumer culture. Dylan uses words like “merchandise” “manufactured,” and “cars” and refers to specific cars associated with affluence like “Cadillac,” designer watches like Rolex, smart phones, Les Paul guitars, record stores, movie theaters, and flat-screen televisions. His descriptions of products and fine clothing are accompanied by corresponding images. The readers’ mass media literacy aids in making those connections between image and word – sign and signified – effective. The title of the book’s first song, “Detroit City,” is paired with a photo of the Ford Motor Company factory that reinforces Dylan’s analysis. The character in the song left his rural hometown to secure employment and the American Dream in the city. Dylan writes “[w]hen this song was written, Detroit was the place to run to; new jobs, new hopes, new opportunities” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 5). However, the singer’s fantasy to “go home” and leave the monotony of his days in the factory and nights at the bar expresses his desire to escape modern life and return to something familiar and comfortable. The singer isn’t really a “dreamer,” but someone who is “caught up in a fantasy of the way things used to be” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 5). He is Mills’ modern man, the same person Dylan referred to in Chronicles affected by the swift changes in American life. The song “works,” as Dylan writes, because listeners can relate to the anxiety and disillusion expressed in it. This man could easily be Jackson Browne’s “pretender,” a man “who has sold himself for a bit of the American Dream,” whose “life is a broken record” of home and work, of “success depend[ing] on being someone he’s not,” of being “trapped in the lesser world” in which he abandons a life of passion, music, and art (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 61). Dylan describes the pretender’s middle- class life as “single-minded,” a “capitulation”: “buying everything in every window display and … commercial ad” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 63). Dylan’s version of “The Pretender” appears in “Ball of Confusion,” performing a prescribed role described as a “new form of oppression” and every symbol of institutional power is a corrupt failure (The Philosophy of Modern Song 76). In “Big Boss Man,” Dylan describes the overworked employee as “modern man,” “servile,” a hypocritical ass-kisser” a “yes man” who finds escape through movies – movies that reinforce images of who he should be, but who he is not. These figures depict unsatisfying or unfulfilling images of those who have achieved or strive to achieve success in post-industrial middle class America or the American Dream.

Conversely, Dylan romanticizes an outlaw’s rejection of mainstream culture and refusal or inability to conform to it as a more honest or authentic existence. His analysis of The Allman Brothers “Midnight Rider” depicts someone who once played a role in civilized society but became a frustrated vigilante. He is “[a] sworn enemy of political bureaucracy, power brokers, election fraud, decadent union leaders, party hacks, corporate parasites, sugar daddies and other bankrollers” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 173). The midnight rider challenges the accepted order and “wants to return things back to a pre-corporate economic order and wipe the slate clean” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 173-4). Similarly, Dylan’s other outlaws, Jesse James, Pancho and Lefty, outlaws like them, or those who sing songs about them, “[exploit] their [the middle class’s] false values, materialism, hypocrisy, and insecurities” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 59). They stand alone as figures of rebellion against the power elite and the conformity of the middle class.

Further, Dylan’s discussions on war expose the military industrial complex and underscore the connection between history-making events, the decision-makers, and the effects of those events on individuals. His analysis of Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass” focuses on a veteran who wrestles with the “degenerate and demonic things” he’s seen and done that reduced him to “mental bondage” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). Attending a “ritual celebration where he is being honored as a hero,” he feels he is “surrounded by the enemy” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 22). Dylan notes the veteran has “been betrayed by politicians” and “stabbed in the back by legislators and members of his own government” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). Here, Dylan’s interpretation focuses on the effects politicians’ decisions have on individual men and women who are deployed to the warfront. The veteran experiences a crisis due to his participation in war activities that have allowed him to become “unfaithful to the human spirit” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). Dylan raises the question of whether the veteran would regret or be haunted by his actions if he had been on the winning side. The passage’s opening – “It’s hard to be on the losing end of a lost cause, a lost enterprise, a cause with no object or purpose, unequivocally false from start to finish” – suggests a tenuous relationship between the abstract political decisions made to enter wars and the consequences of those decisions on individual lives (The Philosophy of Modern Song 21).

Dylan further develops this analysis in Chapter 43, Edwin Starr’s recording of The Temptations song “War,” which reads like an extension of Mills’ work, drawing a line from World War II to the veteran in “There Stands the Glass,” forward to both gulf wars. Citing a “sequence in the documentary The Fog of War,” Dylan explains how former defense secretary Robert McNamara and General Curtis LeMay would have been “prosecuted as war criminals” if they had lost the war (The Philosophy of Modern Song 214). Dylan notes, “For the rest of his life, McNamara wrestled with the question, “What makes it immoral if you lose, but not if you win?” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 214). This, too, is the question the tortured veteran who “has a lot to answer for” wrestles with in “There Stands the Glass” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 21). The war crimes explained in both songs’ chapters are similar – rape and brutal violence against civilians, including women and children. Dylan juxtaposes war propaganda employed to gain public support against the immoral, yet sanctioned, acts of war justified as the cost of national security.

Shifting to both Gulf Wars, waged by the power elite in and administrations of a single family (the Bush family), Dylan stresses the dubious justifications for both wars. Graley Herren’s analysis of Chapter 15’s “Whiffenpoof Song” for the Dylantantes substack illuminates that song’s reference to The Whiffenpoofs, “an independent a cappella group at Yale University” who counted as an early member Prescott Bush, “father of George H.W. Bush” and “grandfather of George W. Bush.” Herren also notes Dylan’s references to the more secretive and exclusive Yale society, Skull and Bones, whose “members are sworn to lifelong secrecy about the group … But: alumni from Skull and Bones have gone on to exert major power in the United States and across the globe.” Similarly, in The Power Elite Mills asserts that the link among the “institutions of modern society” – “families and churches and schools” – provide the basis for and support the centralization of power and that “these hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power” (6-7). Giving a bit of cover to George H.W. Bush because Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait prompted the first Gulf War, Dylan focuses on “post-9/11 paranoia” and false claims about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction underlying the 2003 invasion under George W. Bush as more problematic and indicative of the continued consolidation and centralization of power among America’s power elite in the twenty-first century. He concludes by returning to LeMay’s thoughts on war criminals, suggesting that both Bushes would be considered as such. To conclude the chapter, Dylan also indicts Americans as war criminals for supporting war propaganda, not asking questions and, more importantly, not acting to prevent or end the conflicts.

Though Dylan is cynical about the purpose of the song, arguing “[i]t’s clear that one answer to the question posited in this song is the bottom line,” and links it to the earlier Motown hit “Money,” he uses this point to make parallels to war-profiteering and the atrocities of war (The Philosophy of Modern Song 213). The analysis includes a reference to Smedley D. Butler whose speech “War Is a Racket” was “written by a Major General in the Marines who was an American military hero, but became disillusioned with the profiteering, propaganda, and injustice of the military-industrial and intelligence-foreign policy establishments, and came to oppose American involvement in foreign wars designed to benefit financial and industrial interests” (Butler 1). Butler “confessed to his own actions on multiple battlefronts that hurt large numbers of people to ensure the profits for a few” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 213). Here, we can imagine Smedley as the celebrated, yet tortured, veteran in “There Stands the Glass.” Dylan then cites labor leader and civil rights leader Asa Philip Randolph who “said in 1925… ‘Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible’” (The Philosophy of Modern Song 213). However, as long as war remains lucrative, news media, advertising, movies, and television will continue to romanticize it and promote it as necessary to national security.

Just as Dylan demonstrates how the songs in The Philosophy of Modern Song point to the adverse effects of media, government, corporations, and the military, he also shows readers the prescription for rebelling against the traps of modern post-industrial consumer society: art, love, and movement. Allusions to, references to, and quotes from poetry, literature, music, and visual arts stand in contrast to the over-commodified kitsch of most “mainstream culture.” His remedy for the “modern man” in “Big Boss Man” is “rivers of poetry and music” (Dylan The Philosophy of Modern Song 259). Poetry written by Poe or Rilke, literature penned by Kerouac or Burroughs, songs in The Great American Songbook, and jazz, blues, salsa, bluegrass, or country music encourage active and thoughtful engagement rather than mindless consumption. The many songs Dylan includes about love and his interspersed commentary on it suggest that love, not love as a legal agreement or social contract, but passionate love, love as connection and not conquest, is a salve. Dylan also gives us songs like “On the Road Again,” “Truckin’” “Keys to the Highway,” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Images of keeping things new, of movement, of becoming, of being delivered provide an escape route to avoid the stagnancy and stasis of conformity. Being “On the Road Again,” keeps us from being “bogged down by anything,” even the monotony of daily chores like taking out the garbage (The Philosophy of Modern Song 92). Dylan’s analyses repeatedly suggest individual agency and meaningful participation in one’s life as pushback against consumer culture’s artifice.

Perhaps this is the philosophy of modern song – the place where the personal – the problems of modern life as they affect individual men and women – becomes the political – identifying and commenting on the issues of society that contribute to or cause the problems of individual people through art. To be sure, Dylan would argue that he’s apolitical. That’s fair. But you can’t ignore his critiques of conformity and of power structures that exploit and control social and cultural institutions. Though mainstream culture is generally a tool of the power elite, passively consumed by the masses without consideration of its effects or consequences, thoughtful analyses, deconstructions, and examinations of it as Dylan has provided in The Philosophy of Modern Song reveal substance that challenges its typical reception. That may be the signal point. Art, even art conceived, produced, and consumed in mainstream popular culture, serves as intellectual and artistic resistance needed to survive the artifice of contemporary society.

Works Cited

Butler, Smedley D. “War Is a Racket.” Heritage History. https://www.heritage-

history.com/site/hclass/secret_societies/ebooks/pdf/butler_racket.pdf)

Dylan, Bob. Chronicles. Simon & Schuster, 2004.

—. The Philosophy of Modern Song. Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Herren, Graley. “Come You Whiffenpoofs of War.” Dylantantes, Substack, 22 November 2022.

https://thedylantantes.substack.com/p/come-you-whiffenpoofs-of-war)

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956. With a New Afterword by

Alan Wolfe, 2000.

—. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press, 1959. With a New Afterword by

Todd Gitlin, 2000.

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Directed by Martin Scorsese. American Masters. PBS, 2005.

August 26, 2023/by Nicole Font

Dylan Review Vol. 5.1, Spring/Summer 2023, World of Bob Dylan 2023

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Come Writers and Critics”

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“Come Writers and Critics.” World of Bob Dylan 2023, June 2023, Tulsa, OK.

BY Rebecca Slaman

Every Dylan fan has, at some point, had to defend Bob to friends, strangers, and enemies. As the community of fans has intimately connected in the digital age, it can be baffling for us to be reminded of what other people think of our favorite artist. Of course, it’s been well-documented that Bob Dylan has critics. Even before his first musical controversy, certain groups did not embrace Dylan’s voice nor his politics. So what did fans have to say when those politics changed? What made people stay when his voice did, too? With a career as varied as his, there are myriad reasons for people not to like him. But criticism, while sometimes unpleasant, can reveal a lot about the critic and the culture they live in. Likewise, a fandom’s defense mechanisms reveal what they truly value about the artist. I believe the marriage of fandom and criticism is the key to Dylan’s legacy continuing and prospering.

The academic discipline of Fan Studies has some terms that describe the relationship and social dynamics of fandom. Bob Dylan is a producer, and fans engage in two ways: affirmationally and transformationally. In his article “Towards a Theory of ‘Appropriate Fandom,’” Mark Stewart, describes these two: “Affirmational fan practice is seen as ‘restating’ the object of fandom, reifying the canon, and by extension, engaging in ways which privilege depth of knowledge and economic engagement. Transformational fan practice, conversely, is more commonly positioned within a productive space; a space of fan fiction, vidding, shipping, and slash; a space where the textual meaning sits in the hands of the fans, rather than the industrial producer.” Affirmational is more often a male fan practice, accepting the canon, more economically productive and therefore encouraged by producers through Fanagement. Transformational is often female-coded, and inherently questioning of the canon. This transformational space can be fraught, controversial. It is the more rebellious engagement.

How does this apply to Bob Dylan? To describe our engagement with him personally, it’s like throwing our thinkpieces into a bottomless pit. If you asked Bob, the critics or fans don’t and can’t matter, though we know criticism can sometimes spark creative magic, even with Dylan: Judas comes to mind. I’ll give you some examples of these practices using iconic Dylan-goes-electric moments. The cry of Judas fueled the legendary performance of “Like a Rolling Stone”; we can easily see the cause and effect of critic on artist. To cite this moment is affirmational of the canon of Bob Dylan. The live Newport version of “Maggie’s Farm” is rip roaring and rock ‘n’ roll. We see it as rebellious. But also you can see in the footage of his acoustic set after the infamous reaction tears rolling down his face. This isn’t a widely discussed idea, it doesn’t fit into the canon narrative of Dylan’s attitude, so this is my transformational theory on Bob’s dealings with criticism. These are two different takes: He doesn’t care and it fuels him to be an adversary versus he cares deeply and this trauma forced him to put on that persona. We can’t know why Bob retreated from the spotlight in the late 60s, but threats and boos probably played a role. Beyond that point, he saw that criticism is creative poison, hypocritical.

But criticism plays a different role to an artist than to their fans/everyone else. Though Bob isn’t personally managing his image here, there is a (niche) industrial complex. Affirmational practice is kind of what we’re doing here: legitimizing him in the canon and affirming that he deserves a place in history. As we move forward with scholarship, however, it’s going to become more transformational, and in some ways, critical. The world has changed so much since Bob became famous; we can keep studying history within its own context and look at Dylan and his work with fresh perspectives. Since Bob’s not answering or doing any “fanagement” anyway, fans have to make their own answers and meaning, in alignment with the culturally accepted version, or against it. We should ask ourselves, when handling criticism, are we aligning with the more economically productive answers? Are we “selling out?”

Fans have also been critics themselves; criticism is necessary for someone with as much power as Dylan. With social media, more diverse fans of music are driving discussions about the reconciliation of someone’s art with their personal beliefs and actions. With Dylan, these conversations include misogyny in The Philosophy of Modern Song, possible theft of Black artists, and relevancy due to Dylan’s age. This certainly aligns with the larger cultural discourse of today.

In the early days, his whiteness was not as much in question, but rather his Judaism. You can bet his Jewish identity was held against him in addition to his sympathies with the civil rights movement: he was protested by TACT (“Truth About Civil Turmoil”) and “American Patriots for Freedom.” This group wrote in the New York Times, “It isn’t surprising that John Hammond would be interested in Bob Dylan’s brand of culture for Mr. Hammond, according to official US Government records, has made himself a party to at least seven communist fronts.” Though this is all obviously silly, this critique of Dylan being too political manifested when he was barred from performing “Talkin John Birch Blues” in 1963 on the Ed Sullivan show. Someone else’s fear of critics directly affected Dylan’s ability to convey his music to an audience, and that had to affect him.

It’s interesting how this cultural pushback goes from “young commie Jew” to “old irrelevant white man.” Don’t scoff too much at the latter one though, because many people who’d criticize today’s young artists might have had the same idea back in 1965 towards Bob. The criticism of “young people’s music” is equally as farcical as more biased reasons; it has nothing to do with the artist himself. On December 26, 1965, there was a letters to the editor section entirely around the debate on whether Dylan was a poet. It was in response to an article by Thomas Meehan about a young/old divide on the subject. College students called Dylan (24 at the time) their favorite contemporary American writer. As one English professor from the University of Vermont responded, “Anyone who calls Dylan the ‘greatest poet in the United States today’ has rocks in his head. That is such an irresponsible statement as to deserve no attention. Since his appeal (apparently) is to irresponsible teen-agers, I can’t take him seriously. Dylan is for the birds, and the bird-brained.”

It’s funny that this same discourse popped up around the Nobel Prize In 2016, interestingly on the other side of the young/old divide… or rather, old and slightly less old. I think the only young people who cared were students roped in by English teachers. Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh said “I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.” Brutal!

This is the kind of criticism that clearly doesn’t hold over large periods of time, no matter who it’s addressed to. If you say something is only for young people, those people grow up, and even the radio Disney anthems of my youth are now played at parties to much acclaim. The fact that I’m writing this today [as a young Dylan scholar] shows that artists can transcend their own initial time and audience.

Interestingly, both of these examples are aimed at people who are fans of Dylan. They can be boiled down to one incredibly frustrating word: Overrated. It means that something, to someone, is saturated in the culture past the point of its merit.

And whatever merit Bob Dylan had when he was at his first peak, people have acted like it has been taken away at each consequential era. Bob Dylan has been praised for his “authenticity,” though most of us know that doesn’t mean he’s always telling the truth. The emotional and musical truth is what gives him that merit in the first place, and to most of us, that doesn’t go away no matter what genre he’s adopting. But even our beloved scholars have criticized him in this way:

Greil Marcus: “For me – and Dylan says this himself, too, somewhere I’m not locating at the moment – the marking point is John Wesley Harding, and every album after that…up until the kinship albums Good As I Been to You, World Gone Wrong, and Time Out of Mind, is some kind of mistake, put-up job, a disguise you could see right through, a lie.”

(And this guy’s a keynote speaker!) As I cannot find a source of that “Bob” sentiment, I’m classifying this claim by Mr. Marcus as transformational fan practice.

Just as Dylan once blindly called the shot of his Nobel Prize in Hearts of Fire, one critic did this amazing callout in 1988. “The words have become less clear,” says Jerome Rodnitzky. “Finally, Dylan, like Walt Whitman, might turn on his critics and declare: do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Pretty incredible stuff we can find in criticism, even when we disagree. Maybe Bob Has listened, who knows?

Criticism is constantly transforming its image of Bob. It has to, as time and people change. The issues people have with Bob’s music share consistencies across the eras, though those people become louder depending on the cultural attitudes in general. His voice, for one, was probably more palatable at the initial burst of rock ‘n’ roll when culture was radically new, and artists with unconventional voices had a place. Introducing to young people a smart cutie with a rebel streak made his vocals matter less. Also, people read more back then. But as more and more people discover him and time goes on, culture prefers more polished sounding music, and the criticism grows. It must have reached Bob, for he said “Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. Why don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I getspecial treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free?

Because Bob, everybody hates the popular girl.

In my research, I expected his initial shift to “singing” to elicit more distaste, or at least, some McCartney-esque conspiracy theories. He gets in a motorcycle accident and emerges three years later with a new voice, face, and style? I would say, that’s not the same guy. It turns out, change was still largely welcome. If people called out his “phony, swallowed style of vocal production,” Nashville Skyline was extremely commercially successful. The Beatles got mustaches, Bob got a new voice, everyone grew up. If anything, this transformation helped him escape the label of has-been. On Jan 25, 1976, John Rockwell wrote of Desire: “But can Dylan ever really come back from the position he occupied ten years ago? Is there a place in the grey, workaday 70s for a legendary hero from the mythological 60s?”

The answer is yes. At least in the mainstream, Dylan was canonized. This is where affirmational fan practice begins, building up a positive image. Coverage of his musical exploits remained important as reward for being part of a great musical time. He’d earned his place, though of course that leads to backlash. Some felt he was done after a certain point. A scathing profile in Spy Magazine in August 1991 by Joe Queenan called him a pathetic kook, basically hoping he’d die so he’d cement his legacy: “Only now, any hope for the return of Dylan’s sustained wit, intelligence, and passion, may finally, finally have died.” Queenan clarified that does not take away from the great music he made, if anything he thinks it supersedes anything he would do from that point on.

Now, on Twitter, I see defenses for the albums he’s referencing and more, based on criticism I didn’t even know existed. I don’t see much new criticism for his art. The only people paying attention really, are us. People barely see him part of the present moment. We, of course, know about Rough and Rowdy Ways and Shadow Kingdom and the tour, but most think of Dylan as a historical figure. Remember when “Murder Most Foul” went #1 like a month into the pandemic? Most people don’t. In fact, it wasn’t two years before people claimed Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s version),” at 10 minutes, to be the longest #1 ever on the Billboard charts. Regardless, the publication of the Philosophy of Modern Song caused a bit of a resurgence in criticism. John Carvill wrote a now infamous screed in Popmatters against the book that I would call, brave. Commenting on this criticism feels more dangerous having personally witnessed the discourse that followed it. Nonetheless, his is one of the few published, well thought out, criticisms of Dylan’s deification. While Dylan’s defenders engage in affirmational practice of nearly all of Dylan’s work, Carvill went against the mold and offered a transformed image of Dylan as an artist. This image includes the artist’s work he admires, but also a plagiarist, ghostwritten, misogynist, hack. Many disputed the writer’s projection that Dylan was an old ranting grandpa, but that projection is not any less valid than anyone else’s. We have to have a bit of transformation to hold or deify Dylan in our heads.

Fans that don’t match Dylan’s demographic do this especially well. If you’ve been on Dylan twitter, you might have seen me and my friends calling him gay, calling him a baby, saying objectively ridiculous things about him. We aren’t being insane, we’re engaging in transformational practice. Our canonizing of him may be playing with the truth in a very Dylan- esque way, but it’s fun, and takes it all less seriously. If we were to engage with Dylan, or any of our artists, critically all the time, it would be a bummer, like we don’t need to do Allen Ginsberg discourse 24/7. It makes sense if you consider the hurdles we already have to cross in terms of access. In some ways, it’s an asset: those who have to transform art to see themselves in it may unlock new, unexpected meanings. But critical conversations are being had online, where spatiality and temporality don’t dictate who can take part. In terms of criticism, I would be remiss to bring up the whole women’s perspective of it all.

Misogyny was difficult to research for obvious reasons: very few female Dylan academics have been published, and the male ones are often more sexist than Dylan himself. Though Albert Goldman said of his first published book of lyrics in 1973 that “Dylan’s anger and peculiar vindictiveness toward women are diminished in print,” Laurie Stone printed just this year that “Bob Dylan has never imagined the effect of his lyrics on a woman, or else, you know, the words would not be so sneering, and he would give us a picture of the woman and not just her effect on him. Bob doesn’t address women. He writes to men about women.” I would argue Bob has given us pictures of women, otherwise how would we know their jelly- faces all sneeze? Both of these responses go back to Dylan’s attitude being a huge part of the accepted narrative. They include extra projections about what a “man with attitude” could mean: a brutish misogynist. This is a way the affirmational canon elicits more criticism because who has been allowed to shape it. The inherent biases of the loudest Dylan fans can turn someone off from the joy of an art that doesn’t even reflect those ideas. A different perspective on women’s response to Bob Dylan comes from Mark Beaumont: In his negative article about Dylan’s legacy: he mentions that all his past girlfriends have tried to convert him to fan!

This is at the heart of most modern Dylan criticism: it’s us. It comes down to us. Our fandom is loud and ubiquitous. We “overrate” him, pushing people away from the demand of liking him. We are annoying.

The upcoming film A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet is garnering anticipatory criticism, and a fair bit of apprehension. Regardless of its quality as a film, it will undoubtedly draw young people’s gaze toward Dylan. This will create a new transformational fandom if I know anything about Timothée Chalamet and his fans. There are already Bob fan edits and headcanons out there, some created by yours truly, but it is mostly limited to my friends in Bob Nation. A certain following is expected at least for the movie, and I anticipate a new set of critical criteria. When this happens, I ask you to engage with this criticism with an open mind about what fandom can be. Being a fan is supposed to be fun, and criticism can also be fun. Affirmational fandom has been the norm for a long time, but if Dylan’s legacy is going to continue, our engagement will have to transform.

August 26, 2023/by Nicole Font

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Mr. Tambo & Mr. Bones, Play a Song for Me: Foster & Poe in Dylan’s ‘Nelly Was a Lady’ Chapter.”

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘The future for me is already a thing of the past’”: The Philosopher’s Nostalgic Dilemma in The Philosophy of Modern Song”

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘The Laws of Time Didn’t Apply to You’: Bob Dylan and the Zeitgeist of the Discontent”

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “‘Lame as Hell and a Big Trick’: Dylan’s Comment on Popular Art as Resistance in The Philosophy of Modern Song.”

WORLD OF BOB DYLAN: “Come Writers and Critics”

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