Dylan doesn’t need validating

The following is an excerpt from a commentary in the Guardian by Alexis Petridis:

There’s a sense in which Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in literature isn’t surprising at all.

If any rock star was going to win it, it was pretty obviously going to be him.

In 2008, he won a special citation at the Pulitzer Prize.

His lyrics have been the subject of academic study for decades.

Even before that, he was being feted by poets and authors as their equal or more, as he is to this day.

There’s a wider point here. At the risk of sounding like the kind of English teacher who insists on first-name terms and keeps saying Great Expectations was the East-Enders of its day, why shouldn’t lyrics — or rather the best lyrics — be treated as literature?

Pretty much everyone who really loves rock and pop music can quote at least a handful of lyrics that genuinely bear com- parison to poetry, in their incisiveness, or power, or the richness of their imagery.

Occasionally they lose something by being written down rather than sung — “the music does what the words alone cannot do,” as Germaine Greer put it when complaining about this kind of thing — but equally there are others that, to repurpose another of Greer’s phrases, carry their music with them.

When, at the end of his celebrated 1979 essay on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, the critic Lester Bangs quotes the title track’s opening lines next to lines from Lorca’s Ballad of the Small Plaza, it doesn’t look like affectation.

The notion that not a single word that’s been set to pop music over the last 60 years is worthy of mention in the same breath as literature is clearly nuts.

Indeed, a more compelling counter-argument might be that pop music, lyrics and all, is an art form in itself and doesn’t need validating with a pat on the head from the literary establishment.