I remember saying to a friend, not so long ago, “we haven’t heard enough of Bob Dylan in our lives”. And I keep this impression that for Dylan, it’s like for a great thinker: you could listen to him for a lifetime without ever fully grasping him.
We never finished doing our homework on him. I remember being told at one time that the greatest mistake for a philosopher was not to read Heidegger enough, and that it was the task of a lifetime. Well ! I would gladly say the same thing about Dylan, from the point of view of music, but also of philosophy. The bet of his recent book, which has just been published, is to tell us that it is a bit the same thing.
You have to read this essay slowly, with an open phone not far away to listen to each of the songs covered.
By its title and its structure, modern song philosophy echoes an impression, which over time has become one of my intimate convictions: what we listen to over and over again, what we have always listened to, what marks our mind as an intimate musical experience, forges our vision of the world in the same way as this which we commonly call “philosophy”. I take that term here in its most popular sense, as when used in the mouth of a coach of the Montreal Canadiens to sum up the common vision of things within the organization. A line-up of players, a certain attitude on the ice, as well as a list of songs in a certain order, testifies to the philosophical identity of a person, of a group.
I think a great way to start, for anyone who would ever like to venture into writing an essay, but is hesitant to do so, is to make a list of songs they like, and write about each of them. they. Guiding lines will draw themselves, horizons of meaning will take shape. I spontaneously think of this lost practice of my youth, when we made compilations of songs on cassette, for ourselves or for another. These tapes told who we were, how we saw ourselves and how we saw the world. A joyful cassette, a more thoughtful one, a more amorous one: each one became like a part of our personal philosophical sum.
Dylan offers us here 66 songs by different artists (from Marty Robbins to Johnny Cash via Willie Nelson) in as many chapters, of which we quickly noticed in the American media that only four songs were performed by women. It is indeed striking, distressing, but certainly not surprising coming from the one I amused to describe while reading as an “old snoreau philosopher”. “Tanning thinker” also crossed my mind, he who likes to brush aside the Beatles more than once, for a few pages later to denigrate rap as a whole.
His songs are for the most part very traditional, rooted in the very fiber of an uncontemporary American identity.
The musical pieces he offers us would, for a good part of them, have been very well chosen for a 1990s film by the Coen brothers (I am thinking particularly of the bluegrass and country choices, which are numerous), whereas however, the ironic second degree and the smile of George Clooney must be removed to give them a place in this book. Listen Keep my Skillet Good and Greasy, by Uncle Dave Macon, to give you an idea. Other titles reminded me more of the great era of musical selections in Tarantino’s films, such as War, by Edwin Starr. The essay on the latter offers one of the good moments of the book elsewhere, by criticizing the mercantile operation vis-à-vis the anti-war sentiment in the United States. Dylan is cynical, except when it comes to a certain lost American greatness. He even refers twice to Trump’s famous slogan, without really criticizing it.
As often, Dylan here is formidable and laughable at the same time. It is deeply personal philosophy, at the same time that it is far from being philosophy in the proper and canonical sense of the term. Ordinary mortals discover lots of songs and lots of facts about these songs, but I kept the impression that we sometimes fell into wikipedism in the writing.
The essays related to each of the songs are largely split into two. We first have a kind of logorrhea from Dylan, which seems to offer itself a free association which sometimes borders on the paraphrase of the lyrics of the musical piece. It thus allows a certain immersion in the atmosphere of the music. Then comes a second part of the essay, where some anecdote is told about the composition or the life of the artist analysed. I found the mumbling Dylan I love in the first part, while I sometimes wondered if the second had been signed by a penman, a ghost writer. The tone of those second parts made me think of those thousand times, when I was hanging out with music critics, being showered with useless but fun knowledge about songs. And it is surely in this meeting of the lyrical and the historical that the weight of this essay lies.
modern song philosophy
Bob Dylan
Fayard
352 pages