English 208: Philosophy of Modern Song Radio Show

May 8, 2025

Quantá Holden | Duke English Communications Strategist

This Spring, Professor Taylor Black taught English 208: Philosophy of Modern Song Radio Show, a course, he noted in its description, “for people who listen to music seriously and are interested in expanding their powers of critical reception.” To conclude the class, students submitted their final portfolio, which consisted of writing pieces that had been workshopped during the semester, reflecting on how they related to critical texts the class had surveyed.

Below are links to the group projects completed by Professor Black’s students presented in a radio program format.

This “Radio Show” project was intended to deepen a semester-long exploration into thoughtful listening and the history ofAmerican popular music. Drawing on course readings, outside sources, and insights from class discussions, we worked in groups to develop podcast-like radio shows inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” episodes. Each groupcarefully selected a theme, songs, and an organizing principle which we developed in steps over the course of the semester.

Our segment specifically focuses on New York City, investigating what New York means to people and how that is portrayed through song, especially the ways in which the city both fulfills and falls short of people’s hopes andexpectations. We included songs explicitly about the New York experience as well as selections that connect to New Yorkin less obvious ways. Songs were also chosen from eras of music discussed in class – the earlier sounds of Frank Sinatra and the New York City punk scene with Talking Heads – and from our own research. We hope you enjoy!

Group members: Maddie Blanco, Megan O’Sullivan, William Herff, and Clay Thornton

In our class, Philosophy of Modern Song, we spoke about how to listen to music: how to attune ourselves to its subtlest resonances and to lean into what Susan Sontag called the "erotics of art" rather than merely dissecting pure sound and word-for-word lyrics.

In creating our radio show, "Dreams: A Journey Through American Music", my group mirrored this broader philosophy of the class. As we decided on a theme and began to compile content, we had to learn how to follow a single thread that had woven itself, like a dream bleeding into waking reality, through decades of sounds and stories. This project encouraged us to make connections and pay attention—to learn how to listen, feel, record, and convey the feeling music imparts, working across the whole spectrum of experience— while having fun and integrating both personal taste and class readings into our final product.

We quote Bob Dylan in our radio show’s opening: “A song is like a dream, and you have to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter.” As Dylan himself suggested, we entered these "strange countries" of song not as tourists but as travelers, allowing ourselves to be transformed by the landscapes we encountered.

Group members: Rebecca Arian, Ali Levy, and Marin Yearly

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan’s collection of very strange essays about popular songs of the 20th century, deals with the opaque yet illuminating, essential yet undefinable, and fictive yet revelatory nature of popular music as it pertains to our culture and humanity. His essays, which each explore a single song, most often come in two parts. The first is stranger and more experimental, addressing the reader in second person using unconventionally constructed, almost prose-poetic language. The second part is more typical—but still strange in its Dylan-ness—nonfiction, often wandering into backstories and histories that seem only tangentially related to the song but are, as Dylan presents them, clues into the music’s essence. Our radio show plays with both of these styles, telling stories both true and imagined, evoking mood, character and scene rather than merely communicating information, and—we hope—revealing truths about the music. We take inspiration from Dylan’s Philosophy and his Theme Time Radio Hour, which presents songs in all their dimensions in a lyrical yet narrative manner similar to the Philosophy, following a particular theme each episode.

Our theme, flight, can symbolize freedom, escape, migration, longing, or transformation. It can be physical— via trains, planes, cars, avian animals, or a spaceship; it can be emotional—dreamers dreaming, relationships breaking, and souls rising or falling. This episode will guide listeners through these interpretations by using music and spoken interludes to explore how flight has shaped American music and storytelling.