Bob Dylan's militant nostalgia: "People confuse tradition with dandruff"

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"Art is discrepancy, money is pact", writes

in one of the first pages of

(Anagram).

"This is why there can be no national art form. If we try to achieve one, we will see the rough edges being smoothed out, the effort to incorporate all opinions, the desire not to offend. Very quickly, everything becomes propaganda or outright commercialism ".

The book unfolds simply as a selection of 66 exemplary songs of what a song should be.

Each one is commented with short poetic essays (Dylan playing music critic), encyclopedic information (Dylan playing Wikipedia contributor) and bare-knuckle musings (Dylan playing Dylan).

Because every biography is an autobiography, it is in the latter where the greatest interest of the book resides, since it

.

His philosophy.

We are talking about a man who has protected his privacy with an armor of silence and who chose to speak only through his songs and that the listener would draw his own conclusions, probably wrong.

Speaking of ellipses and silences: "One of the ways creativity works is that the brain tries to fill in the gaps and gaps," he writes elsewhere.

"We fill in missing pieces of images, fragments of dialogue, we finish rhymes and invent stories to explain things we don't know. When you don't know who Juanito Pírate or the Goddess of Arrabal are, and you have no idea about Coca-Cola douches, your imagination it fires".

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In his selection there are

.

Almost half of the chosen ones were recorded in the 50s, especially in 1956, when rock & roll was just invented and the old curmudgeon was 15 years old under the toupee: there he locates the eye of the modern song hurricane.

This has upset some readers: what the hell are you calling modern song?

"People confuse tradition with dandruff"

, he affirms with his phrases like slaps.

"We listen to old records and imagine them sealed in amber, a scrap of nostalgia that exists for our own needs, with no thought to the sweat and toil, rage and blood that went into making it or what might have been."

What Dylan writes about in this book and what he gives himself more as a devotee than as a fan is to the

in the United States and which has been the canon of piece of music that has survived until today.

That is to say, the same thing that he talked about before starting to write this book on his radio show,

, and that has permeated his own music for several decades.

Country-folk, rhythm & blues and rock & roll.

"Every generation seems imbued with the arrogance of ignorance and chooses to get rid of what came before, instead of building on the past," he says to vindicate that yesterday that was the pinnacle of modernity.

A conclusion that we already knew: unlike many other musicians, he is a music fanatic;

he listens to it non-stop, analyzes it and enjoys it as a listener.

Another conclusion: the Nobel Prize for Literature and inveterate troubadour lives in discrepancy, which is why it is important that he identify art with the determination not to iron out rough edges or make an effort to incorporate the opinions of others.

Art, he tells us, dies when he fears to offend.

That Dylan is not afraid of offending is shown better than anything else by the fact that

in his selection of favorites , an unexpected and, above all, ridiculous percentage.

The publisher, Simon & Schuster, who is probably afraid of offending, has put an unknown female singer, Alis Lesley, in the center of the book cover, who is not even included in the selection.

What will Jorge Herralde, founder of his Spanish publishing house, Anagrama, think, who presumes not to publish right-wing authors?

There's a particularly awkward chapter on divorce settlements, in which the 81-year-old artist concludes that it's "cheaper to keep her."

"Crusades for women's rights and promoters of

until they find themselves lost dodging the pieces of the glass ceiling", he affirms to vindicate polygamy with sarcasm. "What downtrodden woman, without a future, beaten by the whims of a cruel society, would not be better off as one of the wives of a rich man?", he continues. And roundly, a reflection on marriage lawyers: "They don't care about family ties;

they are, by definition, in the knockdown sector.

They tear down families.

How many of them are responsible, at least in part, for teen suicides and serial killers?"

More things we can learn or understand about Dylan in this book?

Let's see.

Bob Dylan hates current music: "Now everything is too crowded;

. The songs are only about one specific thing, there are no nuances, shadows, mystery. Perhaps that is why music is no longer an area in which people project their dreams; dreams suffocate in such rarefied surroundings."

Bob Dylan, in fact, hates the world today: "And it's not just about the songs: the movies, the TV shows, even the clothes or the food, everything is destined for a certain consumer niche and is pushed around excessively. There isn't a dish on the menu that doesn't carry half a dozen epithets, all selected to appeal to your sociopolitical-humanitarian-snobbish-foodie eater instinct.Enjoy their cayenne-dusted, cumin-infused organic farmhouse reduction

, let's get it over with."

Bob Dylan doesn't like

: "Rock and roll went from being a brick against a window to

: from the slicks in leather jackets making rockabilly records to the Kiss-monogram belt buckles that sold in malls. Music is relegated to the background as bureaucrats constantly reassess the risk-reward ratio of popular taste."

Bob Dylan does not like respectable people: "A normal criminal can be of various kinds.

or even have a seat in Congress. They can be millionaires, financial sharks or stock analysts. Even doctors ".

Bob Dylan was an arrogant young man and still feels guilty: "Each generation ends up picking and choosing what it wants from previous generations with the same arrogance and egotistical conceit that previous generations displayed in appropriating the choicest of those who came before." .

Bob Dylan likes touring: "On the road you lead the life you like. Making music with your friends and earning your bread."

He really enjoys being on tour: "The good thing about being on the road is that you don't get overwhelmed by things, even bad news. You dedicate yourself to bringing joy to others and you keep your sorrows to yourself."

Bob Dylan points a stiff finger at the contradictions in society:

. "

Bob Dylan, friends and friends, returning to the music of his youth in the autumn of his days, returning home in a new exaltation of popular culture, bohemian literature and cheap philosophy.

With an old idea of ​​modernity and wrapped in nostalgia, this diversion between the book on the coffee table and the one you have next to the toilet.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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