
The Philosophy of Modern Song
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By:
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Bob Dylan
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. The audio is narrated by an all-star lineup including Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright, and Renée Zellweger!
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 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.
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And a great cast of characters.
I listened to each song before the chapter started and it really brought it to life.
Loved!
Zimmerman Riffs on Song
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Bob fans will like this
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I lived all of this, just keeps getting better.
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It’s about everything else around the music and in the music and with music. I loved it.
Story of Song I Loved It
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Fun and Instructive
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Bob Dylan’s Narration is Very cool
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Are we fortunate and we are.
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For example:
“By theTime I get to Phoenix”, Jimmy Webb, 1996.
A proofreader would have been an excellent idea.
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Easily the type of audio book you can listen to many times.
Superlative in its poetry, music history, and read
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He analyzes and comments on a selection of modern songs and, as he does so, it’s as if he composes it doesn’t songs on top of inside and around each one of the songs that he’s communicating about. He operates, according to a different kind of logic. A logic of truth, but not correspondence. A logic, where the meaning of something is conveyed, even if it takes a roundabout, scenic journey, and incorporate all kinds of wildly crazy associations, that upon reflection aren’t crazy at all. They are exactly what this song is about. He is able to demonstrate how seemingly juvenile utterly simplistic songs are actually deceptively complex and nuanced. Then he can show you how a song that is attempting to be highbrow is actually bawdy and perverse. He helps you hear a classic love song, as if it was written by a serial killer, because there are some forms of love that are so consuming that they actually do make men and women to the tax people with murder the object of their love if they could.
He writes about poetry poetically. He has never not singing. This book is a treasure of the human spirit. A lot to be required reading for anyone who desires to learn more about the folk cultures of the world and about how the human consciousness emerge from the soil grew up in the sky scrapers then shot itself on the moon.
A Masterclass by the Preeminent American Poet
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