"But of the sixty-six selections, thirty were released between 1947, when Dylan was six years old, and 1962, when his first album appeared, shortly before his twenty-first birthday. This strange body of music includes Italian restaurant staples like Sinatra’s 'Strangers in the Night,' gunslinger melodramas like 'El Paso' by Marty Robbins, Vegas gruel by Dean Martin, and the Yale 'Whiffenpoof Song' as sung by Bing Crosby, Fred Waring, and the Glee Club. There’s a way to see this canon as the genome that shaped Dylan’s gift, the
mundus that greeted the bonneted
infans at his planetary awakening. In another light they are the musical reef that he dynamited, utterly obliterated, using only his voice, his attitude, and his harmonica. There’s a name for the place that both nurtures and imprisons us, the place we simultaneously pine for and detest: home...."
Writes Dan Chiasson in "Road Maps for the Soul/The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another" (NYRB).
Nice pen-and-ink drawing of Dylan — by Yann Kebbi — at the link.
I've blogged plenty about TPOMS, but I couldn't help blogging one more, stunned as I was by the phrase "the mundus that greeted the bonneted infans at his planetary awakening."
Sometimes when you like something you read, it's because you're thinking, yeah, that's the way I write. Other times you like it precisely because it's so crushingly obvious that you'd never even dream of writing anything like that.
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15 comments:
"There’s a name for the place that both nurtures and imprisons us, the place we simultaneously pine for and detest: home"
Us? We?
Italian restaurant staples like Sinatra’s 'Strangers in the Night,'
What an odd, and insulting way to refer to the song.
And "Las Vegas Gruel"? When did they ever serve "Gruel" in Las Vegas. And how is a song "Gruel"?
Its seems like the author is your typical boring urban fuck who doesn't like country music, Dean Martin, or pop music from the 50s and 60s. Was there a slam at Elvis? Usually there is.
“ Sometimes when you like something you read, it's because you're thinking, yeah, that's the way I write. Other times you like it precisely because it's so crushingly obvious that you'd never even dream of writing anything like that.”
Yes! Wonderfully phrased. A kind of universal experience for any reader who also writes; or imagines doing do. An eternal internal measuring and testing, trying to emulate exemplars and dismiss competitors in the course of reading a text against one’s own expectations, sensibility, skill, ambition.
"At times The Philosophy of Modern Song feels like a sci-fi project set in a parallel universe where Bob Dylan stayed home in Hibbing and inherited his father’s electrical supply store."
It's another effort to figure out why did Dylan pick these songs.
Strangers in the Night doesn't even belong in that "strange body of music," being that it was recorded in 1966.
There’s a way to see this canon as the genome that shaped Dylan’s gift, the mundus that greeted the bonneted infans at his planetary awakening.
If we were on Zoom, you could hear my singsong voice now saying "Ooooh, somebody took Latin in school!"
Didn't much of the folk revival involved rediscovering and revaluing funky old things that sophisticates had dismissed? Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music was a big deal. Many US, and especially British, folk fans were narrow ideologues in both music and politics who only appreciated what "authentically" came from the Folk. Dylan apparently cast a wider net.
Growing up, I tended to see music also in narrowly sectarian terms. If you liked rock, you were supposed to hate country, disco, Sinatra, and bouncy pop. Rock critics encouraged such dismissal. But for the musicians it wasn't quite that way, and it was surprising to find out how much admiration there was across genre divides that I'd assumed were unbridgeable. Maybe musicians reserved their contempt for those who were actual competitors, rather than artists working in a different genre.
When I was child in the DR, I remember a word that sounded like Italian, to mean "everybody" i.e., titirimundi. There was also titirimundati, which sounded like the vulgar version of titirimundi. And then if you were in a hurry, you would just say titiri, instead of titirimundi.
Musica Mundana meant music that was not Christian. It was disapproved to listen to in a Christian house. Maybe it's related to the English word "mundane". The word has evolved, it's no longer solely tied to religion.
When Jesus said "I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world. The Spanish translation has it: yo soy de allá arriba. Ustedes son de este mundo; yo no soy de este mundo.
Mundo, as I came to understand it, has a lowly, dirty connotation, the opposite of heaven.
"Strangers in the Night doesn't even belong in that "strange body of music," being that it was recorded in 1966."
I know, and he so easily could have put "Volare" there.
"It's another effort to figure out why did Dylan pick these songs."
The simple answer could be Dylan is hearing these old songs in all the subsequent songs he hears. That happens to me sometimes.
Its weird the way these dumbo MSM Book reviewers, instead saying something intelligent about Dylan's analysis, piss and moan about what he chose to write about.
"Why didn't he write about the songs I like. Why didn't he choose the songwriters I want to read about?" Wah Wah.
BORING!
A genius for certain and a man I have admired since his beginning; but I can never quite shake the feeling that we're in on the long con.
I agree with Dylan. "Streets of Laredo" is a great song.
Never Mind. Laredo is not El Paso. Both out there in West Texas. Both have streets.
"Gruel," ya say?
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