Editor's note: "The Philosophy of Modern Song" is a written work published by Bob Dylan in November, and surging news reporters learned that the Chinese edition of the book is being translated and will be published by CITIC Press. This article was originally published in the Atlantic.
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From songs, poems, novels, memoirs, radio reviews, to the occasional film script or Nobel Prize speech, Bob Dylan's work has been seen in a variety of different forms over the years, and he has devoted himself to the study of authorship itself. From his earliest days as a folk singer in Greenwich Village, New York, he was known for freely and often "brazenly" borrowing from the work of his predecessors (and sometimes his contemporaries) to create his own work in a unique way. In his 2004 impressionist memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan appears to dig through old Time magazine issues and various other sources to create a series of collages to express his own memories and ideas. Even though many of his "paintings" seem to be based on still images from films and published photographs, Dylan would accuse appropriation. His entire work is primarily concerned with "Who really created this?" "This question.
Cover of the new book "The Philosophy of Modern Song".
The answer to that question might be "Who cares?" "But actually, Bob Dylan cares. For him, the nature, mechanism and meaning of creativity, especially in relation to music, are very important. As articulated in his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. Packed with short essays, lyrical riffs, plenty of facts and unpredictable digressions, and a desk-friendly historical photograph, the book shows Dylan's thoughts on 66 songs recorded over the past 100 years or so. The book is about authorship—how singers recreate songs through their performances, how listeners recreate songs in their minds to meet their own needs, and how Dylan writes his own genres of songs through his unique way of thinking and creating. Obviously, this is a work about authorship, and at the same time it is a criticism and banter of the concept of authorship.
Dylan's philosophy about the workings of popular music is largely centered on recording and focuses on performance, not composition. "Perry Como lives every moment of every song he sings." Dylan says in a chapter about "Without a Song," a Valentine's Day song recorded by Frank Sinatra in the 1940s with Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra, and a pop hit produced by Sinatra's assistant Cuomo in the early 1950s. Dylan explained that Cuomo "didn't have to write songs to do it... When he sang while standing, he owned and shared the song to make us believe in every word he sang. ”
Here, Dylan shows how a mature singer like Cuomo can be as creative as a songwriter through sensitive interpretation. This may seem anachronistic when it comes from a talented songwriter, but it suits a singer-songwriter well. He produced five recordings in his later years, the songs of which were originally recorded by singers such as Sinatra and Como.
Dylan focuses each chapter on a specific song recording and usually focuses on the performer or performer, but there are many exceptions. Dylan begins chapters with a looping, free-form narrative that tells an imaginative story that is somehow connected to the idea or theme of the song. For Ray Charles' recording of I Got a Woman, for example, we hear a powerful little noir story about a tired man driving through town only to be somewhat disappointed, "his sweaty shirt glued to his car seat" and "tapped rhythmically on the wheel to David Newman's tenor saxophone".
These are undoubtedly the most visible literary parts of The Philosophy of Modern Song, and the literature they evoke is the vulgar literature on the shelves of American bus stations in the middle of the last century, such as James B. Novels by authors like James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. Their work preached the indulgence of taboo and was seen as a cultural symbol of "coolness" in the early 1960s. Revel in a world of "gypsies, trampsies and thieves" and feel bold in a quaint, almost cliché way, but he also sometimes seems strangely craving a shock. For example, in the chapter "There Stands the Glass" about Webb Pierce's cover, Dylan himself covered it, making up a strange fictional story about a combat veterinarian haunted by images of atrocities he committed in the name of duty: "He saw a two-year-old boy who murdered him, he saw his companions cut a little girl with a knife, took off her clothes and assaulted her, and then shot her. "This unique and bizarre story has nothing to do with the song, but it's as shocking as a trash man fantasy novel.
In many chapters, Dylan presents the songwriters as poster boys in fan magazines, offering rich anecdotes, such as Ricky Nelson, whose Locabier song "Poor Little Fool" topped the Billboard charts in 1958. Not only did he excel in tennis and aerial acrobatics, he was also a junior player on the high school football team — like his father, Ozzie Nelson, he was the starting quarterback of the Rutgers football team. Sometimes, Dylan also excludes the author's biographical part for the sake of the work itself. He wrote in a chapter of Elvis Costello's Pump It Up: "Knowing a singer's life doesn't particularly help you understand a song, what matters is how a song makes you feel about your life." "Dylan reminds us that pop music is a collaborative art in which not only creators, performers, musicians and record producers are involved, but every listener also contributes to the music. In a sense, Dylan seems to be suggesting that a song's listener is also its author.
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At the same time, for Dylan, emphasizing the irrelevance of biography is a reminder of the role of his own biography in his work. His resistance to personal scrutiny, obfuscation and self-creation techniques did not distract people from his life experiences, which were the story of his life. His Chronicles: Volume I vividly and accurately describes the thoughts of an outstanding allegorist who is a master of interweaving fact and fiction. If Dylan never found time to write a second volume, he offered a sequel similar to Chronicle through The Philosophy of Modern Song. While the book is ostensibly about songs by other artists, it contains the outline of another book, a "shadow book" about Dylan.
In the book The Philosophy of Modern Song, we can clearly see something. From the choice of songs and singers, we can conclude that Dylan has little interest in female artists. Only four of the dozens of artists featured in the book are women—five if you count The Platters, which includes a female singer; And women who collaborate with men in songwriting (or in some cases independently) are mostly ignored or obscured. When he did discuss women, Dylan often portrayed them as evil witches or witches who lured men to their doom. Of course, he realistically reflects the way women are portrayed in the songs, but he is also the one who chooses these songs. Of course, the 66 songs that anyone chooses will inevitably be missed, but Dylan does to some extent refuse to acknowledge women's contributions to American music.
We can also see that Dylan rarely mentions hip-hop — or, more likely, he doesn't think about it at all. We see him have some disturbing thoughts about marriage, including the belief that polygamy can solve many marital problems. "How many wives a man has, it has nothing to do with anyone." He said. However, this should be just a joke.
In addition, in this book, we can find some interesting surprises - Dylan knows more obscure subjects than people think. For example, the puzzling authorship of Sinatra's Strangers in the Night; the history of the production of the Disney documentary White Wilderness; and the complex process of translating the works of Albert Camus from French. Without endnotes, the reader has no way of knowing the source of these materials. So we can only enjoy it to the fullest, marveling at Dylan's constant examination of the meaning of authorship and his ability to make someone else's work his own.