The Bob Dylan Nobel controversy is ridiculously reminiscent of the ’60s

It had to happen. Someone in the Swedish Academy just had to pull Bob Dylan up on his manners.

It has taken the whole ridiculous thing even further back into the 1960s. Yes, of course that was the Decade of Youthful Rebellion, but then there had to be something to rebel against. Parental morals for a start. So a huge debt of gratitude is to due to Per Wastberg, the academy member who has come out as a radical throwback by calling the singer impolite and arrogant if he goes on snubbing Stockholm.

It’s already been a week, which may be a long time in politics, but which is an unmeasurably small microsecond in the time it takes boys from that generation to say, let alone, write: “Dear Mr and Mrs Nobel, Thank you so much for the kind invitation to your party. I should be delighted to attend and look forward to it greatly. With best wishes to you and the family, Robert.”

What would his father Abe Zimmerman, a former manager at Standard Oil in Duluth, and his wife Beatty had said if they thought he was leaving socially important invites like this one on the mat? And what might he have replied as he picked up his guitar case and headed for New York? “It’s all right, Ma”?

It has already been a richly entertaining week, full of timeless prejudice and stereotyping. You can warm your face from the angry heat coming off the coverage that has Nobel Eggheads Fuming as Pop Icon Walks off with Book Prize. Which of course is exactly what he hasn’t done; and he is almost the antithesis of a pop icon.

And yet, if he doesn’t turn up in December to receive the prize, he wouldn’t be the first absentee laureate. For a variety of reasons, including health, ideology and political sensitivity, several former winners have stayed away, including Harold Pinter, Doris Lessing and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. It is not necessarily the snub it is being portrayed as. Besides, the committee accepts it is an award; the winner doesn’t get stripped of it if he or she doesn’t show.

Dylan is only a pop singer if you insist on defining him by his early chart hits of half a century ago. But even then there was something odd about them, and gloriously so. As he himself has said many times and in many ways, he is not mainstream. Although he was always ambitious, and almost as inspired by Elvis Presley as by Woody Guthrie, he has remained peculiarly unassimilated, shifting from style to style, voice to voice, while somehow remaining transparently true to himself.

Film directors have picked up on this perpetual sense of otherness and absence; Sam Peckinpah who cast him as the unknowable Alias in Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid in 1973; director Todd Haines’s 2007 movie I’m Not There, in which Dylan was played by six very different actors.

The more important question has to be whether he is worth the honour. The simplest answer is probably that by being judged worthy of the award by the Swedish Academy, he therefore is. Unless of course you take the view that the Academy is somehow trying to flaunt its broad-mindedness and cultural liberalism. That doesn’t quite work.

If anyone has been breaking the rules, it is Dylan him- self, and he has been at it for the past fifty years and more. Having won over the fans of an ailing Woody Guthrie and become a standard bearer for that troubadour of the common man, he then trashes the image by going electric at the famous Newport Folk Festival of 1964.

If, for whatever reason, you can’t remember that affair, it is hard to overstate the perceived treachery of such an action. Vandalism is probably a better word, trampling on so much that the oral tradition held dear and, to his great credit, showing that the American Left could be quite as reactionary as the Right when it chose.

The great thing about Dylan was – still is, clearly – that he really didn’t seem to care too much for repute. Before that dramatic decade was out, he had released, in Blonde on Blonde, an utterly extraordinary double album in which a set of basically rock songs, with pop and country also present, was being asked to bear a weight of literary lyrics such as these genres had never shouldered. Some of them, like I Want You and Just Like A Woman had their moments of edgy directness, but others seemed to be soaring off in search of sublime imagery and knowingly poetic diction.

A few of the visons, of Johanna or otherwise, sounded heroically stoned, and others were just rather beautifully strung, or strung-out words. It didn’t matter exactly what he was trying to say with “the ghosts of electricity howl in the bones of her face.”

You knew, to borrow a slightly later term, where he was coming from.

As for “In the museum infinity goes up on trial,” well, yes, it does, doesn’t it, when you think about it. You’d just never heard such propositions from The Beach Boys, or Buddy Holly, or the Everly Brothers, for all their glories. The thing was, he was saying this stuff, or singing it, and you got the picture. He was going for it, risking at a height, and if he fell out of the sky, so what, you were still interested. THE INDEPENDENT