Given their ubiquity in human cultures, and songs have attracted surprisingly little philosophical attention. In contrast to this paucity of attention, the philosophy of music generally is a well-established sub-field, at least in the Anglo-American academic world, with major orienting contributions from several philosophers of art including Jerrold Levinson. Much of this attends first of all to the question ‘What is Music?’, then to the question of what is musical expression. But is song an art form?
On one view, there is nothing distinctive about song per se. Song is a kind of music, distinctive in that it uses words, but the use of words does not thereby place a piece into a different art form. Susanne Langer offered a forthright version of this view in claiming that there are “several great genera of art—plastic, musical, balletic, poetic,” and that each genus “creates a different kind of experience altogether; each may be said to make its own peculiar primary creation”, with music’s distinctive creation being “a purely audible time”. (Langer pp. 78-9) She grants that there are ‘complex’ kinds of art including song, but that even in cases where the poetry of Shakespeare or Goethe is set to music, the words “all become musical material” and “have been musically exploited”, with the result that “the poem as a poem has disappeared in the song.” (p. 84) Accordingly, though there may be certain kinds of internal complexity to art works, “there can be no hybrid works, belonging as much to one art as to another.” (p. 82)
In his influential essay ‘Hybrid Art Forms’, Levinson denies the claim that there are no hybrid art forms, though not the claim that songs are fundamentally a kind of music with a distinctive internal complexity. He posits that we categorize art forms as either pure or hybrid. Paradigms of hybrid art forms are inter alia kinetic sculpture, concrete poetry, and opera. What makes them hybrid is not as it were their ontological diversity, because any art form can be seen as hybrid under a certain analytic scrutiny; one might absurdly consider oil painting as a hybrid art of shaping canvas and depositing pigment. Hybrid status, Levinson suggests, “is primarily a historical thing”; the relevant kind of complexity that is constitutive of hybrid status is that at least two of the materials used in a hybrid art are independently identifiable as emerging “out of a field of previously existing artistic activities” (Levinson, p. 27). On this account song is not a hybrid art because there is not an independent art of lyrics. In its central examples and in a vast range of cases trans-culturally and trans-historically the lyrics of songs are not an independent, non-musical art. Unfortunately, Levinson does not give sustained attention to oral poetry, and one might dispute, or at least severely qualify his by noting that a great deal of what is usually thought of as oral poetry is sung; as Albert Lord influentially put it, the improvising oral poet is the singer of tales. Levinson treats songs only in passing, where he says that “song has two dimensions, music and words” and that ‘traditional song’ is a ‘complex but nonhybrid’ art. He adds that “this does not prevent us from ahistorically viewing traditional song as a combination of poetry and music, a perspective that fits nineteenth-century lieder, however, better than Appalachian ballads or Balinese chant.” (p. 29 and n. 4) But since he has already argued that any art form can be as hybrid if viewed ahistorically, this qualification offers no insight into song. So one might follow Levinson in replacing the common sense characterization of song as a hybrid art form with the conception of it as a sui generis and complex art. But what if anything is the distinctive character of song? Perhaps Bob Dylan might help here.
In his book The Philosophy of Modern Song Dylan offers short accounts of sixty-six songs in a particular performance. All but one song, Stephen Foster’s ‘Nelly was a Lady’ (as performed by Alvin Youngblood Hart) are from the twentieth-century, all but two are in English, with the large majority from performances recorded in the 1950s and 1960s. No one familiar with Dylan’s sensibility would be surprised to see that many of the choices are surprising; who could have guessed that Dylan would choose to discuss The Fugs’s ‘CIA Man’ or Vic Damone singing ‘On the Street Where You Live’? Some less surprising choices from the mainstreams of popular music include Marty Robbins’s ‘El Paso’, The Who’s ‘My Generation’, and The Clash’s ‘London Calling’. And given Dylan’s recent excruciating exploration of the American Songbook, there is an inevitability to the choice of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Strangers in the Night’. The discussions are brief, and mostly in two parts. A first part of a page or two addresses the reader as ‘you’ and rehearses the narrative of the song with existential elaborations. For example, the account of Bobby Darin’s ‘Beyond the Sea’ begins “IN THIS SONG YOUR HAPPINESS LIES beyond the wide sea, and to get there you have to cross the great unknown. You’re going out of bounds and you’re into the briny deep” and ends “No more cruising off into supernatural darkness. Never again you’ll go sailing, you lay it all down and pull the shade. You quit while you’re ahead.” (Dylan (2022), pp. 85-6) A second part of perhaps at most a few short pages shifts to the third person address and offers anything and everything Dylan thinks relevant: mostly facts about the song or the singer mostly and reflections on their importance, but also social commentary and homespun advice, including some thoughts on the superiority of polygamy to monogamy. In a minority of instances the first part addressing the reader is omitted, and in one case the text is only of the first kind. The longest entries total eight pages, with the shortest being a few sentences on Little Richard. There are also a great many photos throughout the book, with varying degrees of appropriateness to the neighboring text.
I cannot imagine a reader whose prior familiarity with the songs and personal reflections upon them would make reading the book pointless. For this reviewer the great revelation was Dylan’s account of The Osborne Brothers’ ‘Ruby, Are You Mad?, along with a viewing of their performance of it at Newport in 1966. But aside from a seemingly unordered series of Dylan’s interests and reflections, surely worth the time and effort of anyone interested in Dylan or post-World War II American song, what does the book offer? And in particular, does Dylan present anything on the philosophy of modern song, or of song generally, that would motivate and justify the title?
The book has neither an introduction nor a free-standing conclusion. But the book does end with what must be taken as his explicit philosophical statement of the nature and importance of song. The last song discussed is Dion’s ‘Where or When’, which Dylan identifies as ‘a song of reincarnation’, (p. 326) and he concludes with a credo: “it [music] is of a time but also timeless; a thing with which to make memories and the memory itself. Though we seldom consider it, music is built in time as surely as a sculptor or welder works in physical space. Music transcends time by living within it, just as reincarnation allows us to transcend life by living it again and again.” (p. 334) Dylan’s topics, then, are those of the great stream of thought that subtends philosophy and religion: time and timelessness; memory; construction; mortality and immortality. Forty pages earlier he gives what seems the only other explicitly philosophical remark, a rejection of the idea that the intended and appropriate reception of a song involves the hearer’s understanding of it: “Like any other piece of art, songs are not seeking to be understood. Art can be appreciated or interpreted but there is seldom anything to understand.” (pp. 298-99) How might we take these brief statements of perennial themes in relation to the great bulk of the book, with its fierce addresses to ‘you’ and small clouds of facts and reflections surrounding particular performances of particular songs?
Now the idea that philosophical reflection can consist in examination of particulars is familiar from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who suggested that philosophy need not consist in advancing and arguing for theses, but rather could range across particular examples, whether real or imagined, with the aim of giving a perspicuous representation of some problematic area of human interest. The inaugurating question of philosophical inquiry would be ‘I don’t know my way around’; and the aim of the consequent inquiry is not to provide some piece of information that would guide one towards some goal (‘turn left at the light, go straight for a mile, and you’ll see the philosophy department’s building on your right), but rather to provide something of a sense of how the landmarks and paths in the relevant area are related. Success consists not in solving but in dissolving the problem. Schematically, the philosophical inquiry consists in (a) recognition of the problematic character of phenomenon, (b) investigation of particulars and mapping of their relations to the point where (c) the phenomenon is perspicuously represented and clarified. If one were to apply this schema to Dylan’s book, one could (a’) follow the title identify ‘modern song’ as the phenomenon, but what is the problem? And how (b’) what sort counts as illumination of particulars and their interrelations?
It seems to me that Dylan offers outstandingly interesting answers to these questions, but to see what they are one must first turn to his earlier prose, both his autobiography Chronicles and his Nobel Prize lecture. Scattered across the Chronicles is a succinct account of how Dylan developed his distinctive poetics of song writing. The motivations to write are various and arise obscurely: “Opportunities may come along for you to convert something—something that exists into something that didn’t yet. That might be the beginning of it. Sometimes you just want to do things your way, want to see for yourself what lies behind the misty curtain . . . You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular.” (Dylan (2004), p. 51) A negative model is the three-minute song, something that is ‘without memory’ and is of a piece with the mainstream of American culture’s attack on the capacity for and exercise of attention. (pp. 55-6) Woody Guthrie provides a positive model, but one that is not appropriate to contemporary circumstances. An encounter with Brecht/Weill’s ‘Pirate Jenny’ shows Dylan how to build up a kind of formal richness in song that requires the exercise of memory: “it was the form, the free verse association, the structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge. It also had the ideal chorus for the lyrics.” (pp. 275-6) The chorus is a single line at the end of each verse, a line whose meaning and resonance is inflected differently with each occurrence (‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’, ‘It’s all over now, Baby Blue’, ‘Desolation Row’ . . . ) Mike Seeger provides another powerfully attractive negative model, a trap because its adherence to a range of folk traditions: “it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns . . . that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale . . . that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself.” (p. 71) Like the young Bertolt Brecht, Dylan’s exemplar of disorientation comes from Arthur Rimbaud and in particularly his proclamation “Je est un autre.” (p. 288)
The last directive comes from listening to the blues singer Robert Johnson, whose songs “were perfected pieces—each song contained four or five verses, every couplet intertwined with the next but in no obvious way. They were so utterly fluid. At first they went by quick too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some panoramic story—fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning piece of plastic.” (p. 282) Such is the formation of what Timothy Hampton has recently called Dylan’s ‘poetics’, his working ideologies—the sense of what is to be done and how to do it; the models to emulate and the examples to avoid; and what counts as success, with its implications and limits. (This summary of Dylan’s account in Chronicles differs in parts from Hampton’s reconstruction; for example, Hampton divides Dylan’s work into phases, with Guthrie as an initial model, one that is replaced in the mid-1960s by Rimbaud). A further suggestion from Hampton helps with the term ‘modern’ in the book’s title, something that is unmentioned in the book’s text. Hampton argues that Dylan must be treated as a modern artist on the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s influential conception. Cavell argued in late 1960s that recent artists are afflicted with a distinctive problem of comprehensibility to their audiences. On the one hand, the advanced modernist artist is engaged among other things with practices marked by the ideologies of progressivism and technical experimentation; but on the other hand this leads to products that their immediate audience finds incomprehensible. Cavell calls this ‘the burden of modernism’ and suggests that under such a burden “You often do not know which is on trial, the object of the viewer”. (Cavell, pp. 187 and 190) Hence on Hampton’s account Dylan as a modernist artist, and by extension in the practices of distinctively modern song, the artist must construct their poetics, and without knowing in advance that they would find and re-find an audience, as Dylan did in the early-mid 1960s.
Dylan’s account of the formation of his poetics raises the question: what is Dylan’s aesthetics? That is, what sort of response from listeners characterizes a successful song? In Chronicles, the Nobel Lecture, and The Philosophy of Modern Song Dylan characterizes the most powerful sort of response as being struck and then transported into a different world, but one that is one’s own world illuminated and clarified. In the Lecture he describes first hearing a Leadbelly record that included ‘Cotton Fields’: “And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of a sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me.” (Dylan (2017), pp. 2-3) This sense of the listener transformed shows Rimbaud to be the governing figure of the aesthetics as well as the poetics. The phrase “like somebody laid hands on me” suggests one motivation for the second-person address in Philosophy: as a voice from elsewhere, more powerful than the listener, the successful song addresses the reader directly and existentially, and the listener identifies for a time with the world of the song and its narrator. Later in the Lecture discusses three great literary works that provided him with thematic material and resonances for songs, Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey. Dylan summarizes Moby Dick in the third person, then shifts into the second person for All Quiet on the Western Front: “This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals.” (p. 12) And then as if to prefigure the play of address in Philosophy, he begins the summary of The Odyssey in the third person, then shifts to the second (“In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman” (p. 20)), and then reverts to the third (“And that’s still not all of it. When he gets back home, things aren’t any better” (p. 21)).
Dylan’s determined insistence upon including and shifting between second- and third-person address suggests that the philosophy of song includes both the examination of the immersive appeal of particulars and reflections upon their wider contexts; and further, that neither immersion alone nor reflection with experience offers an adequate account of what matters in song. And so too with Dylan’s themes: neither the experience in time, nor timeless understanding, but rather the thought of re-incarnation provides the minimal conceptual complexity required to grasp the experience of songs.—If something like this is right, then The Philosophy of Modern Songs presents a philosophical method for the arts that is not obviously inferior to any competing academic models known to me.
References:
Stanley Cavell, ‘Music Discomposed in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969)
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004)
-----The Nobel Lecture (2017)
-----The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)
Timothy Hampton, Bob Dylan’s Poetics (2019)
Suzanne Langer, ‘Deceptive Analogies: Specious and Real Relationships Among the Arts’ in Problems of Art (1957)
Jerrold Levinson, ‘Hybrid Art Forms’ in Music, Art, & Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (1990)
Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)