Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song is by turns brilliant, nonsensical, and misogynistic.

He might be the single most written-about musician in the history of popular music, but Bob Dylan has long had a sideline as a sort of music critic himself. His songs themselves are often glosses on the warehouse of music in his head, as on his nearly 17-minute 2020 single “Murder Most Foul”—improbably the sole Dylan song ever to top a Billboard chart—which begins as an invocation of Jack Kennedy’s assassination and metamorphosizes into a metaphysical DJ set that name-checks some 74 songs and artists. … They neither move nor speak, yet they vibrate with life, and contain the infinite power of the sun.” In the more prosaic sidebar, Dylan observes that suede shoes were the kind of luxury a poor person could afford: “Has any article of clothing ever said more plainly that it wasn’t meant for the farm, that it wasn’t made to step in pig shit?” However, he notes, Perkins was too much of a bumpkin to make the impact on rock ’n’ roll that the more urban “feral whiff” of Elvis Presley did: “Carl wrote this song, but if Elvis was alive today, he’d be the one to have a deal with Nike.” In the case of Presley’s own “Money Honey,” on the other hand, skip past the riff to the sidebar, which opens with the sharp proposition “Art is a disagreement. He never mentions when a song is one he’s performed himself in the past, such as “Jesse James” or Tommy Edwards’ “It’s All in the Game.” It’s amusing when Dylan trashes the Who’s “My Generation” for its youthful arrogance, knowing that he’s the one who wrote the generational call to arms “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” And in the chapter on Judy Garland’s version of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Come Rain or Come Shine,” he writes, “During the sixties, it was popular for self-important scene-makers to belittle so-called Tin Pan Alley hacks. In the past decade, he’s recorded three full albums of Tin Pan Alley standards, but in 1963, on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he drawled: “Unlike most of the songs nowadays that have been written up in Tin Pan Alley … this was written somewhere down in the United States.” Even in 1984, he proclaimed: “Tin Pan Alley is gone.