PositiveNew Yorker... a nimble, Surrealist compendium .. . Dylan has always had a vaguely tense relationship with the writers and journalists who frantically parse his songs for meaning, and, while reading The Philosophy of Modern Song, there were moments when I grew slightly red-faced, worried that the book might be an elaborate gag, poking fun at all the drooling critics who have gone berserk trying to illustrate the heft and beauty of his work. (Who among us has not mixed a metaphor once or twice?) ... Dylan’s descriptions are tone poems, intricate evocations of a certain mood or sensation. He is extremely interested in the devastations that connect us ... Dylan’s book is deeply personal, despite its sweeping title. To be fair, taste should be idiosyncratic and kind of awkward ... It’s obvious that Dylan did not tweak his preferences to suit a cultural narrative...Yet that the book contains only four songs performed by women—let that sink in!—is both grim and astounding. This might lead readers to question Dylan’s character and, more worrying, to wonder about the limits of his musical knowledge.
Joe Hagan
PositiveThe New Yorker\"Hagan’s portrait of Wenner is crisp and cutting: using Wenner’s own archive, and more than two hundred and forty interviews, he narrates the story of an indulgent and widely disliked man who is obsessed with celebrity and consumed by ambition ... For Hagan, the two institutions—Wenner and his magazine—are inseparable. He approaches his topic with an essayist’s instinct: dismantle, question, question again, and surmise. Though Sticky Fingers is, at five hundred and forty-two pages, a formidable read, it’s also terrifically smart and full of anecdotes that anyone remotely interested in rock and roll, publishing, or the legacy of the nineteen-sixties will find engrossing.\
