Bob Dylan is the songwriter who opened up the doors of possibility to all who followed. He was the mysterious bard with a guitar who sent out a clarion call first as the acoustic Voice of His Generation, then as the plugged-in rocker who remained a master of the unexpected for five decades that the words pop singers sang were worthy of being taken seriously.
Dylan was a revolutionary,” Bruce Springsteen said in his 1988 speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Early masterpieces such as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Visions Of Johanna” and “Like A Rolling Stone” fueled a debate: Are rock lyrics poetry?
The answer must be yes, because on Thursday, Dylan was awarded the highest honor for a writer: the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, in making him the first American winner since novelist Toni Morrison in 1993, cited him for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
The Swedish Academy’s decision to honor Dylan set off an online debate, with Scottish “Trainspotting” novelist Irvine Welsh calling it “an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.” Salman Rushdie, a Nobel candidate himself, called Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice.” President Barack Obama settled the argument by tweeting: “Congratulations to one of my favorite poets, Bob Dylan, on a well deserved Nobel.”
Explanation:
Dylan’s name has been whispered as a possible winner for many years, but he was a surprise choice. Ladbroke’s, the English betting house, had the favorite as Haruki Murakami, the Japanese author of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” at 4-1. American gray eminence Philip Roth, the author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “American Pastoral,” was 7-1. Dylan came in at 60-1, with a slightly better chance than Princeton-based Irish poet Paul Muldoon (66-1) and slightly worse than Czech novelist Milan Kundera (50-1).
Many of Dylan’s most fervently loved songs — some of which actually are love songs — date from the 1960s, and his being honored at age 75 can be seen as an ultimate affirmation for the baby boomer generation. There was a movie about the Beatles in theaters this fall, and now Dylan has won the Nobel Prize. They have lasted.
On one end of Dylan’s songwriting spectrum is the vengeful, resolute, and timeless “Masters Of War,” which he sang last weekend in his slot opening for the Rolling Stones at the Desert Trip festival-otherwise known as “Oldchella” in Indio, Calif. It’s high dudgeon at its finest: “Let me ask you one question: Is your money that good? / Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could? / I think you will find when your death takes its toll / All the money you made will never buy back your soul.”
On the other end are Dylan’s love songs, some of them also vengeful, such as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (from 1963’s “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”) or “Idiot Wind” (from 1975’s brilliant “Blood On The Tracks”), or morose, like “Love Sick,” from the 1997’s late career tour de force “Time Out Of Mind.”
A personal favorite is the uncharacteristically tender and humble “To Ramona,” from 1964’s “Another Side Of Bob Dylan.” “Ramona come closer, shut softly your watery eyes / The pangs of your sadness will pass as your sense will rise / The flowers of the city, though breathlike, get deathlike at times / Though there’s no use in trying to deal with the dying / Though I cannot explain that in lines.”
Dylan is of course enormously influential. Springsteen, who referred to him as “The Father Of My Country” in his new “Born To Run” memoir, is one of many who were once known as “New Dylans.” Every singer-songwriter with a personal story to tell owes him a debt, and hearing the above lines read or sung aloud, with their knack for internal rhyme, call up inevitable parallels to the dense playful language of rap.
