Bob Dylan: winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature reveals in a book the songs that marked him forever

Guitar, harmonica, messy hair. The American troubadour, the popular rhapsody who won the Nobel Prize and who was hated by half the literary guild for that, publishes a new book. “Filosofía de la Canción Moderna” (Anagrama) is a set of 66 short essays dedicated to 66 songs that, in some way, marked his memory with fire. It is the first literary creation of Dylan since “Chronicles I”, published in 2004, and since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.

Born as Robert Allen Zimmerman and universally known as Bob Dylan, at the age of 82, the idol is still active with an overwhelming maturity. He does not want to live on his income or take pleasure in looking at himself in the mirror of a slow decline. Perhaps there is no other musician with greater moral authority than Dylan to undertake this project. He grew up a child who was an Elvis fan, but his brief stint at university turned him into a lover of folk and protest songs, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. That’s where “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or Blowin’ in the Wind come from, songs that made him a spokesman for the anti-war movement and the fight for civil rights in a very short time.

But Dylan is much more than that, or at least he offers us many more masks: he is the young man who left Dulluth, escaping from a small Jewish community of Russian and Lithuanian émigrés, he is the counterculture leader twinned with the poets of the Beat generation; Judas of folklore after adding electric guitar to his poetry and singing “Like a Rolling Stone”; converted Christian after, as he said, Jesus appeared to him to lay hands on him, a miracle that produced wonderful gospel records that disgusted many. It’s stupid to be a Dylan fan and not assume that contradiction and evolution is part of his essence.

And along the way, his collaborations with George Harrison, with Tom Petty, with Johnny Cash, with Roy Orbison, with Patti Smith are recorded there.

A genius who listens to genius

In the “New York Times” book review, critic Dwight Garner recently warned that Dylan’s published essays in “Philosophy of Modern Song” are very reminiscent of his own song lyrics. And he chooses as an example, half at random, his essay on “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy”, by Mose Allison. Dylan writes: “This song is about hypocrisy. Hit and run, cull and kill, grab the grand prize and finish in the lead. And then be generous, bury the hatchet, apologize, kiss and make up”.

Indeed, in each entry of his essays, the author sounds that enlightened. Dylan puts the lyrics of the song under the magnifying glass and checks between his lines. He digs into the stories and makes them reveal much more than they hint at. And if Garner compares his literary style with his way of singing, we could also link it to another of Dylan’s facets: that of a radio announcer, a facet he performed on “Theme Time Radio Hour”, a satellite program broadcast between 2006 and 2009. Each episode, which can still be heard on the Internet, eclectically mixed blues, folk, rockabilly, R&B, soul to country and rock and roll, centering around a monographic theme such as time, money or flowers.

Something similar to those programs Dylan does in this book, reeling off musical oddities with his wonderful narrative style.

His sentences, scattered in each paragraph, often border on satire. “The best things in life are free, but you prefer the worst. Maybe that’s your problem ”or“ No matter how many chairs you have, you only have one ass ”, she writes about“ Money Honey performed by Elvis Presley. And with regard to “My Generation”, the classic by The Who, one must fear a quarrelsome spirit to insinuate that the song “is sung from the perspective of an 80-year-old man who lives in a residence” or that Ricky Nelson and not Elvis He was the true ambassador of rock and roll.

Dylan’s highly personal essays are accompanied by remarkable photographic research, with images from old movies, magazine covers, vintage advertisements and newspaper clippings, things that we might find on the walls of a vintage-style coffee shop or in the back of a wardrobe. a New Olero grandfather. Garner affirms that in “Philosophy of modern song”, there is not so much philosophy but rather a great display of knowledge. It would be necessary to define what we understand by the term. Indeed, there are no intentions to rationalize music or share doctrine or poetry. However, we could opt for other meanings of the word philosophy: the serenity of mind to withstand the vicissitudes of life, or the personal way of thinking or seeing things.

From this perspective, the genius bard from Duluth enthusiastically acknowledges genius in other people’s songs (and sometimes his other colleagues). In his scale of values, simplicity prevails: “The work of songwriting, like other types of writing, is largely based on editing: reducing thoughts to their essence.”, he writes when analyzing “Pancho and Lefty”, by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Dylan also points out against artificiality: “There is nothing prefabricated or contrived about it. Nothing cosmetic or plastic. It is first class material, and it does not appear on the mapshe says of Jimmy Wages’ Take me from this garden of evil. Reading his book with Spotify next to it can be an epiphany.