The Philosophy of Modern Song
Each song is subjected to an impressionistic gloss, delivered in the second person, in which Dylan gives a precis of the lyric while addressing the paradigmatic individual — somebody like the reader, probably — who has been in this predicament themselves. Imaginative background biographies are sketched in, a detailed picture built up of the CIA man, the poor little fool, the big boss man, the midnight rider, and the stranger in the night. Some of the entries leave it at that, but others are followed by a deeper reflection on the cultural context in which the song was released. Many of these develop into senior-moment broadsides about the state of the world, the issues of the day, identity politics, food fashion, and what’s gone wrong with the movies.
Stuart Walton reviews Bob Dylan‘s The Philosophy of Modern Song.
Terry Hall
Bittersweet snapshots of provincial life shrinkwrapped in what a later U.S. President would call “the urgency of now”. But offered up in the madcap, jaunty spirit of a Bank Holiday fairground ride, the wheels coming off but everyone just about clinging on in a blur of tonic suits and Fred Perrys. Teenage pregnancies, race relations, social collapse can rarely have sounded quite so danceable! And then of course there’s the haunting melancholy of ‘Ghost Town’, which somehow captured the mood of the times as wasteland Mardi Gras: Charles and Diana getting married with all the establishment pomp and ceremony, but in that other Britain, the one most people actually lived in, the real story was one charting a grim course from industrial decline to the utter soullessness of Thatcherism.
Stephen Hayward celebrates the life and work of Terry Hall.