Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan Book

Too many genuflectors at the alter of academia result in too many words with too little said about what really matters: the intersection of music, poetry, and performance that is popular music. Dylan's music shines above and brighter (by far) than any chronological contemporary (his career spans nearly the entire history of "pop" music) because his music, in ever-shifting ways, times, and places excels in each and all of these facets of why we listen to music whether with eyes closed and imagination engaged, hands clapping and soul engaged, or hips swaying and body engaged (I'll leave it to you, dear listener, to parse out music, lyrics, and performance amongst those sensory effects).

From this privileged place, then, arrives the Cambridge companion to Dylan, a thinner echo of the fat college textbooks we all had for some early morning graveyard shift in ENG101 taught by an earnest grad student or a disinterested assistant professor. And it feels just the same way: snapshots and snippets long enough to engage the head, but too short and decontextualized to capture the heart.

The first half of the Dylan companion consists of thematic essays on Dylan's impacts on gender politics, religion, culture, touring, collaboration, and of course, academia (couldn't do this without at least some level of navel-gazing, could we?). The second half fares better as it focuses on the music, (finally!), with short essays on eight of Dylan's 40-plus albums identified as "landmark" albums. They are mostly the right choices and good essays, although the omissions serve to highlight the tremendous breadth of Dylan's high-quality output over nearly half a century.

As you might expect by the tenor of my review, the thematic essays wade too deeply in obfuscating claptrap to engage anyone but the most sincere and sincerely-misguided freshman, while the album reviews may at least help un-misguide the floundering student and point him or her on the path of understanding the visceral and deep impact of Dylan on everything that matters.

So, from an overall rating of three stars, I would rate the thematic first half two stars (skip it) and the album review second half four stars, short enough to read in a good lazy afternoon at your neighborhood Borders. For a literary criticism of Dylan worth buying, reading straight through, and re-referencing while listening, take home Christopher Ricks's Dylan's Visions of Sin.