Dietrich / TheBlueHourInBobDylan

The Blue Hour in Bob Dylan

(10.9.2023) In his Philosophy of Modern Song – a beautiful book that also would pass as a collection of illustrated blogs –, and in his discussion of Pump It Up by Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan says something essential as to what a song is about: a song is about making you feel something about your own life. And the method Dylan is using to make a chosen modern songbook more transparent to his readers, is to evoke the situation a song is evoking: you are this, your are that. You do this, you do that. If you are the subject of that song, respectively the singer (or the person listening – and, perhaps partly, perhaps completely, identifying with that position). By identifying with a certain position – a playful choice, or a choice by necessity – a listener does allow a song to function. Making him feeling something about his own life.

One) I had not been following the career of Bob Dylan in the late 1990s, after I had been, in the early Nineties, been fascinated by his version of Blackjack Davy. Had it been the style of guitar playing, or the monotonous, and mercyless, unfolding of a social drama (a rich lady, or girl, is running away with a gipsy), maliciously – I guess – performed (and unfolded) by the singer. I don’t know exactly. It always had seemed to me that there was something in the way of my really appreciating Bob Dylan. And I believe it was the constant presence of cultural codes on the one hand, American cultural codes that I was not that familiar with, and the presence of irony on the other hand, which seemed to make an understanding of Bob Dylan rather difficult for me. So I did miss, in 1997, his beautiful song Not Dark Yet, which must figure in a cultural history of twilight, and in a history of the blue hour.

Two) Cultural codes seem also to be present in that song. Certain details seem to make it appear to be a Civil War ballad. But the essence is probably an all-human essence. It is about evaluating one’s life, and about overseeing the time that seems to be left. Not Dark Yet, no, complete darkness has not yet come, but is is getting there. It is about to come, expected to come, which is a situation that has one, the subject of the song, evaluate the past, which is now the life one has led. And if the position is that of a soldier having fought in a war, then the song raises the question if we, I, can identify with that position, or perhaps with the all-human situation of having some time left, but much behind me.

Three) Important is also the monotonous background, the riffs played by the instruments, since this is time passing, and there is beauty, still beauty left, still some light shining. But this is exactly the point. The song will fade, time is running out, and what once had been beauty, or a good life, will come to an end. Such things, made plain here, are said only indirectly in art. Since making it plain does not do justice to these things. But saying these things indirectly does do justice to such things.

Four) Question: Have you ever tried your hand at any of the other arts?
Bob Dylan: Yeah, painting.
(from the Essential Interviews)

Five) The academic or connoisseurially-oriented Dylan industry does not seem to be certain how serious to take Dylan’s other career (exept that of being a poet, singer, writer), his career as a visual artist, a painter. But Bob Dylan did provide us with a painting of twilight. It is reminding cultural codes, perhaps the style of Hopper. And perhaps it does primarily remind us of the parallels between painting and song. Perhaps a painting is just as well about making you feel something about your own life. And a song can mix elements of the past, the presence and the future, as well as a painting can be a composite, and for example can be the result of evaluating one’s one life.

Six) Twilight seems to be about the basic situation which is also the basic situation of the novel: it is either about homecoming or about departing, and in that it is about being underway. About a journey. This seems to be rendered – a bit conventionally, perhaps – in Twilight. And one may go back to Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song to understand him better, since in this book he is speaking about such situations, in making choices from the modern songbook.

Seven) If his own song Not Dark Yet perhaps is in need of a counterpart, a song that highllights the new dawn instead of contemplating the final dusk, one does find such song in Dylan’s Philosophy book: it is My Prayer by the The Platters, which has an intro about twilight (which also Dylan does mention). But what Dylan does not mention is that this is a song about daydreaming and evoking the situation of a blue hour: a rapture in blue, the dream of finding love and rapture in the hours of dusk.

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Titian, Leonardo and the Blue Hour

The Blue Hour Continued (into the 19th century)

The Blue Hour at Istanbul (Transcription of Cecom by Baba Zula)

The Blue Hour in Werner Herzog (Today Painting V)

The Blue Hour in Louis Malle

Kafka in the Blue Hour

Blue Matisse

Blue Hours of Hamburg and LA

The Blue Hour in Chinese Painting

Dusk and Dawn at La Californie

The Blue Hour in Goethe and Stendhal

The Blue Hour in Raphael

Who Did Invent the Blue Hour?

The Blue Hour in Paul Klee

The Blue Hour in Guillaume Apollinaire

The Blue Hour in Charles Baudelaire

The Blue Hour in Marcel Proust

The Contemporary Blue Hour

The Blue Hour in 1492

The Blue Hour in Hopper and Rothko

The Blue Hour in Ecotopia

Historians of Light

The Hour Blue in Joan Mitchell

Explaining the Twilight

The Twilight of Thaw

The Blue Hour in Pierre Bonnard

Explaining the Twilight 2

The Blue Hour in Leonardo da Vinci and Poussin

The Blue Hour in Rimbaud

Faking the Dawn

Historians of Picasso Blue

The Blue Hour in Caravaggio

Watching Traffic

The Blue Hour in Camus

The Blue Hour in Symbolism and Surrealism

Caspar David Friedrich in His Element

Exhibiting the Northern Light

Caspar David Friedrich in His Element 2

Robert Schumann and the History of the Nocturne

The Blue Hour in Robert Schumann

The Twilight of Thaw 2

Multicultural Twilight

The Blue Hour in Anton Chekhov

The Blue Hour in Medieval Art

Twilight Photography

MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM A History of the Blue Hour Painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi

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ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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