In FOLK MUSIC:
A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (Yale University, 273 pp., $27.50; illustrated by Max Clarke),
"Marcus, who has spent decades analyzing Dylan’s music, zooms in on songs dating from 1962 to 2020. He reminds the reader early on that Joni Mitchell once accused Dylan of being a “plagiarist.” “Everything about Bob is a deception,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2010. Marcus doesn’t refute the idea so much as he argues that Dylan’s music has always been a vessel through which to channel the lives, stories and sounds of others, and that this creative process is, after all, at the heart of the American folk tradition.
Though the book is described as a biography, its chapters swing from modern events such as the death of George Floyd and the riot at the Capitol to Dylan’s embarrassing stint as a fundamentalist preacher. It is not chronological and the reader can sometimes feel suspended in the air, weightless and waiting for Marcus to reveal what a painting done by the Black artist Henry Taylor in 2017 has to do with a song written by Dylan in 1964. He uses the 1965 song “Desolation Row” to recall three Black circus workers who were lynched in Duluth, Minn., Dylan’s hometown, in 1920. Was Dylan’s Ukrainian grandfather in the crowd, like so many white Americans who once cheered as they watched Black men killed at the hands of a bloodthirsty mob? Marcus does not know. Still, the song and that grisly moment may yet be connected in that Dylan could have imagined his grandfather being there in the audience that day, “which is to say, in an artist’s sense, that he was,” Marcus suggests.
Marcus, who famously derided some of Dylan’s music with words that are unprintable here, calls Dylan’s 1980s albums “a true parade of sludge” and writes of “the deepest trough of the nadir of his career.” But the book is kind in its defense of Dylan as a student who, through his songs, has tried to explore nearly every corner of the American experience, using his music and lyrics as signposts on a map. “It would be a mistake to assume there’s any road on that map that Bob Dylan, as a historian, as a listener and a scholar, a folk man, doesn’t know,” Marcus writes. To that end, Dylan’s new book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” is a collection of essays centered on why certain songs just keep getting better with time."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/books/review/new-music-books.html |
