Respect to
100 SONGS BY BOB DYLAN (Simon & Schuster paperback, £14.99)
NOT everybody welcomed Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature last year. Scottish ray of sunshine Irvine Welsh claims he’s a fan but still tweeted that it was “an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies”. Nice! A bit of a writer too, you see.
Dylan himself began his Nobel Lecture by wondering how his songs related to literature and ended it — after paying tribute to the Odyssey, Moby Dick and All Quiet on the Western Front in terms that had him accused of plagiarising readers’ notes for students — by stating quite firmly that songs are unlike literature. “Lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page”.
He’s been saying much the same for a long time. In 1968, he told Newsweek: “I only look at them as things to sing. It’s the music that the words are sung to that’s important. I write the songs because I need something to sing. It’s the difference between the words on paper and the song. The song disappears into the air, the paper stays.”
A lot of paper stays in the case of Bob Dylan. There is a vast and majestic edition of Dylan’s Lyrics, 1961-2012, including revisions and variants from subsequent performances, initially published as
‘It’s the music the words are sung to that’s important. I write the songs because I need something to sing’
a costly collector’s piece but now available as a Simon & Schuster paperback discounted to £25, which every convinced Dylan fan will find essential. But for those not yet persuaded, here’s a carefully chosen selection of his lyrics, spanning 50 years, from Song to Woody (1962) to Early Roman Kings (2012), printed without any introduction, notes or even dating, so that they can speak for themselves. Sing, even.
For it’s a peculiarity of reading Dylan’s words that, if you have ever heard the songs, they do not stay on the page, when encountered there. They irresistibly recall and evoke their performance. They sound themselves out. They’re heard, not seen, after the first few words.
So asking whether or not they work simply as words on the page is not just a mistaken question but one that is almost impossible for anybody with any knowledge of Dylan’s music to answer sensibly.
If somehow you have never heard them and can thus contrive to receive them as silent print, then perhaps they do seem loosely structured, casual in their diction? But song proceeds differently from any written literature, even lyric poetry, despite being similarly abetted by rhythm, rhyme and