I READ OR heard a heaping armful of reviews of this when it came out last year (timed for holiday gift season, it seemed), and no one mentioned how bonkers it is--no one, that is, except Andrew Male in Mojo: "This book is weird."
"Weird" has seemed a descriptor of choice for Dylanology since Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic enshrined the young Dylan's reference to "the old, weird America" as shorthand for the cosmos invoked by his songs and their landscape of carnivals, tent revivals, whorehouses, juke joints, and bus stations, populated by street preachers, soapbox orators, bootleggers, and doe-eyed beauties with derringers in their handbags.
But Philosophy of Modern Song is also weird in the WTF sense, its ability to baffle.
For instance, half the space, maybe more, is devoted to pictures, some of which have obvious connection to the text (shots of 1950s record stores or of the artists whose songs the book honors), others of which seem slyer (an outtake from the session that produced the inner gatefold photo of the Rolling Stones' Beggars' Banquet accompanies "Take Me from This Garden of Evil," Albert Einstein playing the violin appears in the commentary on Johnny Paycheck's "Old Violin," a flying car illustrates "Volare," Jack Ruby's mug shot shows up with "Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man"). Were these chosen by Dylan himself, or by designer Coco Shinomiya? Are they integral or incidental to the presentation?
Then there are the songs selected for scrutiny. Most are reasonably well-known, but few are famous or widely beloved, and some are downright obscure. Dylan makes no argument that these are the best songs, or the most influential songs, or the most representative songs of the composers who write them or the singers who performed them or of modern popular music. They are simply, I guess, the songs Bob wanted to write about. He could have written about a different sixty-six songs and had, I suspect, essentially the same book.
The people one thinks of as Dylan's strongest song-writing contemporaries--Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richard, Ray Davies, Lou Reed--don't show up at all.
Sometimes I wasn't sure he actually liked the song in question: "This song has a lot of defects, and it knows how to conceal them all," he writes of Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up."
He has generous things to say about a lot of folks, though--e.g., the Osborne Brothers, Johnny Paycheck, the Grateful Dead--and he is never less than interesting, even when he goes off on a tangent about polygamy or Vietnam.
Is it worthwhile? Sure. It did not impress me all that much on first pass, true, but neither did Saved, and now I play it all the time.
