PanThe Times (UK)... it seems to have been drawn like teeth from the head of its author, its title does not lack ambition. Philosophy is a big word; maybe one of the biggest. Heigh-ho, alas and also lackaday: Dylan turns out to be to philosophy what Kant was to the blues harmonica. Still, a collection of essays on individual songs from the finest songwriter of the postwar era is surely something to get excited about ... Typically, Dylan will treat the song lyric as a dramatic monologue into which he will project little backstories and character sketches. Some of these are clever and insightful. Some are mere bloated paraphrase ... The effect is like letting Brief Encounter run to three hours so we can see what Trevor Howard ended up having for his dinner. Others seem gratuitously lurid ... The best entries give their song a terrific little cultural and social history with Dylan most himself — funny, geeky, informative and the right side of ADHD ... The lyrics are, sensibly, Dylan’s primary focus. He is also casually brilliant on music history, the lives of other musicians, the origin stories of the songs and the nuances of the songs’ performance. Elsewhere, the book is bulked out with listicles, rants and tenuously related \'musings\'. Interesting things Dylan knows about shoes. A cheerfully incomplete list of pop songs based on classical melodies. A reflection on the cinematic misrepresentation of lemmings. Some pieces seem the product of careful revision; others suggest the recent discovery of the speech-to-text button on Dylan’s iPhone ... It’s all so confusing ... the ultra-fans will have to mix a lot more denial into their confirmation bias ... Among several other things Dylan needed to hear but did not is that the way he talks about women here is not and never was acceptable ... The book is also full of auto-memes, where choice bits of Dylan’s deathless are slapped over full-page images, but their attempts to reflect the whimsical nature of his philosophical method can lead to a terrifying loss of perspective ... Personally, I am done with crediting narrowly if uniquely talented men with Leonardo-esque versatility. This nonsense is killing us all. Dylan’s googling chops and Discovery Channel subscription do not make him a polymath; his serviceable but rudimentary piano skills need not be described in the kind of critical language we reserve for Keith Jarrett; and Chronicles being far better than expected does not oblige us to cry Proust every time he finds a pencil ... Take any random page by Cavanagh (who died in 2018, broke, and by his own hand) and you’ll find more care, style, grace, research and insight than you will in 60 per cent of this lazy, half-written dog’s dinner ... despite the tone of this review, I’m one of them. For true believers, maybe.
