Not everyone shares my opinion. Irvine Welsh, author of the novel Trainspotting, is critical of Bob Dylan winning the Nobel because Dylan is a musician, not an writer. If he wins the Nobel, Irvine reasons, then Don DeLillo should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If DeLillo had rapped his novel Mao II maybe he would be. But song lyrics are poetry put to music, and Dylan's contribution was to lyrics, not the accompaniment. He used standard folk and blues forms, often utilizing traditional arrangements that had been around for decades, if not centuries, with words that spun a unique and mesmerizing blend of surrealism, spirituality and beatnik cool. He changed pop music, injecting its words with a poetic sensibility before unknown. Again, the revolution wasn't in the melody, but in the words, which, at their best, stand with some of the best contemporary poetry.
I think there is also a block because Dylan is a popular artist. We have a strict separation today between what we consider high and popular art. But a hundred years ago, when the award was in it's infancy, the separation between broadly appealing, commercial entertainment and high brow music and plays was much narrower. Rudyard Kipling, winner in 1907 was the author of popular adventure stories enjoyed by generations of youth. Ernest Hemingway (1954) wrote popular novels, which made them fodder for Hollywood movies. The same can be said of William Faulkner (1949) and Saul Bellow (1976). These weren't obscure writers writing to a rarefied audience, but authors who regularly appeared on the best seller list. If we go back further, many of Charles Dickens' novels were first serialized in magazines read by the masses, and Shakespeare's plays would have been seen by a wide swath of London society, from royalty to the lower middle class. We think of these writers' work as being high art today, but their contemporaries didn't necessarily see it that way.
The reason why we hold these and other authors of the past up so high is because their work has lasted. Their books are still being read, their plays are still being staged and seen, and, in the case of Dylan, his songs are still being listened to, and quoted, and covered by other artists who's rhetorical skills just don't live up to the master's.
The breath of is work is staggering. His lyrics addressed politics, human rights, romantic struggles and faith, not to mention man and God and law. He was a prophet in the sense that he looked at society and spoke back exactly what he saw, unvarnished. He never looked to make people comfortable with things as they are, whether it was the state of race relations, or even the music scene he born out of. Some in the folk scene took offense, for instance, with his best known hit Like a Rolling Stone, because it seemed to present a negative image of the underground culture of the mid-1960's. He exposed hypocrisy whether it was in the White House or on 4th Street on the Lower East Side. He changed styles, going electric when such a move was considered an act of heresy against the folk tradition he was supposed to represent. His playing the prophet was no accident, since his work is drenched in Biblical imagery (pointed out by Bishop Barron here and here) painted with the brush strokes of Eliot (1948) or W.B. Yeats (1923). If someone wants to argue the he doesn't deserve this honor because he's not a poet of the same caliber as them, Ok. I'd have to listen, then. But to suggest that he's not a poet, not a writer, that his music wasn't simply an avenue by which to deliver his words is to miss the point.
Needless to say, I'm pleased. And may Bob Dylan's words continue to be listened to and cherished.
Jerry Garcia's version of Positively 4th Street
It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
Like a Rolling Stone - The Rolling Stones (I just had to)
Maggie's Farm. Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and getting booed off the stage for it.
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