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The Philosophy of Modern Song
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About This Book
The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan's first book of new writing since 2004's Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan's unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work's transcendence. In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.
Reviews
"Characteristically Dylan, in fact ..."
"Part humor, part history and part hogwash – a little like love letters to analog life and rebukes on the world gone wrong with a twist ..."
"It rip-snorts along, charging from song to song, idea to idea."
"For all its eccentricities, The Philosophy of Modern Song hits upon some welcome grace notes."
"The Hall of Famer riffing in prose is often as appealing — and enigmatic — as his riffing in music ..."
"There are history lessons, too!"
"This would all seem like flat one-upmanship if Dylan weren't such an engaging and lively host, prone to grumble occasionally, but more likely to make you laugh out loud."
"Where needed, he tosses in some prodigious music history and biography, and some appreciations read like short stories ..."
"In a lot of the cases, you could switch Dylan's commentaries around, apply them to different songs and not know the difference."
"Though Dylan knows that 'people ask songwriters what a song means, not realizing if they had more words to explain it they would've used them in the song,' here he is quite happy to use more words, to sometimes comic effect ..."
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