1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About, and: Song of the North Country: A Midwest Framework to the Songs of Bob Dylan (review)

1989 belongs to a genre entirely new to me: "lyrical theory." This theory singles out 1989 as a watershed year (an "annus mutationis") (6) and groups this French Revolution bicentennial year with developments that preceded it—the Tiananmen Square uprising and 1988's ecstasy-driven "second summer of love" (88)—and with its immediate aftermath: the collapse of the Soviet empire , "the death of vinyl" (95), the war against hip-hop, "the High Grunge era" (83)—all told a "belle époque" (20, 92, 97, 106, 118, 119, 133) in Joshua Clover's view. What makes his theory "lyrical" is his soundtrack for the transformations—and impasses—1989 charts. It encompasses an eclectic mix of performers—household names, niche acts, one-hit wonders, pop-cult movements—whose songs all "bear . . . traces of possibility" (6). Clover bookends this soundtrack with Jesus Jones's proclamation, in "Right Here. Right Now," that "Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about . . . how good it feels to be alive." A cultural "taxonomy written on water" (54), Clover's soundtrack also includes Madonna, Scorpions, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, N.W.A, and Roxette. The lynchpin of Clover's "lyrical theory," this taxonomy undergirds his overarching point that "pop music" had, since its midcentury inception, been "biding its time until 1989" (9). Citing Raymond William's parsing of cultural change into residual, dominant, and emergent phases, Clover characterizes the unresolved aftermath of what emerged in 1989 as the realization of "pop's capacity for grasping . . . world-historical events" (21) and "the spectacularization of coherence" (13).

Clover's argument is informative, often illuminating. He explains how gansta rap appeals to mainstream fantasies of ghetto violence, simultaneously encouraging and lampooning the image of young Black men as "America's nightmare" (38) but defuses its own rhetorical excess. Clover provocatively reopens the late-century conversations spurred by Fredric Jameson and Francis Fukuyama. What Clover doesn't do is demonstrate why his argument needs to made "right here, right now." Taking theory discourse for granted—as an end in itself—may account for distracting lapses into opaque academese: the claim, for example, that Public Enemy's "significance lies in their realization of an explicitly social-political, confrontational problematic in relation to an aesthetic form that expressed the same problematic otherwise: a total work that solicits engagement and generates affects in multiple ways" (32). Luckily, between such obstructions Clover probes incisively the relationship between marketplace imperatives and genre change. 1989 also contains some vividly compressed flashes of insight. Isaiah's shopworn call to turn swords into ploughshares, for instance, becomes a synoptic trope for tracing the Youngbloods' flower-power summons to "smile on your brother" and "love one another" to Joe Strummer's punk exaltation of fury and anger to Nirvana's grungy "tuneless shriek" (88). Another trope highlights Bob Dylan's "rhetorical machine" (30) as the gold standard for all subsequent rock innovation. Dylan also shadows 1989 with the truism that Glover renews: "pop singers must pretend to be the common man" (118).

Peripheral to 1989, Dylan's demotic persona and rhetorical machine are central to David Pichaske's Song of the North Country. Pichaske begins by revisiting the case for treating Dylan as a traditionalist poet. Homing in on one legacy from among the many Dylan has claimed, Pichaske exhaustively annotates an identity disingenuously claimed on Dylan's third album, The Times They Are A-Changin'. There Dylan sings that "the country I come from they call the Midwest." Those Dylan aficionados who love him as a trickster, as perhaps America's slipperiest living ironist, may balk at the assumption reflected in Pichaske's earnest subtitle, "a Midwest Framework" because in this song, "With God on Our Side," Dylan dissonantly implies that "the Midwest" is someone else's...