Times they are a-changin’ ...
Bob Dylan becomes first musician to win Nobel Prize in literature
Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley, With his pointed shoes and his bells, Speaking to some French girl, Who says she knows me well.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in literature has served as the pinnacle of literary achievement. Awarded for a lifetime body of work, it has gone to novelists, poets and playwrights such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The last American to receive the prize was Toni Morrison, in 1993.
And now Bob Dylan has entered that pantheon, the first musician to be awarded the prize.
Dylan, the brilliant, iconoclastic musician whose career surfed the cultural riptides of the 1960s, was awarded the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
For fans, the announcement Thursday morning simply affirmed what they had been saying for years — Bob Dylan has long been considered by many to be a, if not the, pre-eminent modern American poet. His
songs are taught as poetry on college campuses around the country.
Still, it was a bold, surprising, and for some questionable, choice; when his name was announced at the Swedish Academy, a murmur of surprise went around the room, loud enough to be picked up by the cameras streaming the announcement on the web.
Dylan has been part of the Nobel conversation for years — in 2011 he first appeared on the betting site Ladbrokes, and was, in fact, in eighth place on the site this year. (The Swedish Academy does not release any official lists of finalists.)
But literary watchers have never considered him a serious contender. In fact, the first English-language question Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, was asked ended bluntly with: “Does he really deserve the prize?”
“Of course he does, he just got it. He is a great poet,” Danius replied. She linked Dylan’s work to the ancient oral tradition. “It’s an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming and his pictorial thinking,” Danius said. “If you look back, far back, you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to. They were meant to be performed. It’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho. He can be read and should be read. He is a great poet in the grand English tradition. I know the music, and I’ve started to appreciate him much more now. Today, I’m a lover of Bob Dylan.”
Danius suggested that people unfamiliar with his work start with “Blonde on Blonde,” his album from 1966.
“Bob Dylan writes poetry for the ear,” she said. “But it’s perfectly fine to read his works as poetry.”
Still, it’s a shock that a musician cited for both his lyrics and music has won the world’s most important literature prize. The Nobel has previously been confined to writers working in text alone — poetry, prose and plays.
Some lamented a lost moment for books.
“An ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies,” wrote “Trainspotting” novelist Irvine Welsh. “I totally get the Nobel com- mittee,” tweeted author Gary Shteyngart. “Reading books is hard.” The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said it was too bad that a “real” writer didn’t get the award.
But several leading authors praised the news.
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison said in a statement that she was pleased and that Dylan was “an impressive choice.” Salman Rushdie, who has written songs with U2’s Bono, tweeted that Dylan is “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice.” Perennial Nobel candidate Joyce Carol Oates tweeted that “his haunting music & lyrics have always seemed, in the deepest sense, literary.”
But the prize also usually goes to a writer well into a long career whose work often reflects a social con- science. In that, Dylan fits. “He made you think,” said Robert Hilburn by phone Thursday. Hilburn, who has attended many Dylan performances, also had multiple sit-down interviews with the musician during his career as a music critic at the Los Angeles Times. “He was talking about life, politics, civil rights — he made music the equivalent of books.
“Look at all the great writers,” Hilburn said. “When you talk about words having an effect on people around the world for generations — his words make us dream, they inspire us, they comfort us, they exhilarate us. ... You could have given him this prize 20 years ago for the cultural revolution he created with just words.”
Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota in 1941. His story— by now well-known — includes traveling to New York, giving himself a new name, and embarking on a career in folk music.
Dylan steadfastlyrefused to be anointed “the voice of his generation,” but his early songs, including “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” “Blowing in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” became, and remain, anthems for the 1960s counterculture. But he changed, along with the times; though originally based in folk, he reshaped the parameters of rock when he infamously went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Bolstered by a trio of era-defining albums — “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Blonde on Blonde” and “Bringing It All Back Home” — he gave rise to the singer-songwriter movement that would also produce Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and James Taylor.
Quickly embraced by other artists, he also became something of a national bard. Artists as accomplished as the Byrds, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joan Baez began covering his songs, often resulting in their first hits. In 1965, Odetta, who Dylan praised as an influence, recognized his brilliance and put out a whole album of Dylan songs.
“Like a Rolling Stone,” his takedown of a rich and pampered young woman forced to fend for herself, was pronounced the greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine. The six-minute recording from 1965 is regarded as a landmark that shattered the notion a hit song had to be three minutes.
The literature award was the last of this year’s Nobel Prizes to be announced. The six awards will be handed out Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.