Good one :D.
Yeah, I’ll stop pissing on this parade, my opinion is clear but it’s not important.
Good for him and his millions of sincere fans.
I think it’s deserved, as a poet he’s definitely one of the greats of the 20th century.
I find this interesting, having just attended PEN/New England’s third awarding of a prize specifically for lyrics as literature/poetry. I don’t follow the high roads of Lit, but there seems to be a rising interest in our better lyricists as formal successors to epic poets and balladeers, much of whose work is highly regarded in Lit studies.
Dylan is pretty much the number one pick in this category, and I think I know why he hasn’t received the PEN award among the first six awardees: the recipient has to show up in person to receive it. He’s not that easy. Gotta be a King making that call.
At least, so I hear if I lean out far enough from Desolation Row.
ETA: The interesting question is this: When will a Nobel Lit be awarded to an artist working a medium that did not exist when the prize was established?
I utterly loathe Bob Dylan - and yes, I know I’m in a tiny minority. The man is pretentious and inauthentic, and always has been. You want to hear REAL folk music? Listen to Woody or Arlo Guthrie.
If we’re just looking for poets, I can think of two off the top of my head that won it in my lifetime: Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska. And Pablo Neruda a few years before I was born. (All three are among my favorite poets). It’s the songwriter part that’s unique.
I never did/could get into Dylan. Maybe I’ll give it another shot.
Dylan genuflects at the Guthrie altar and always has. Yes, he has been a pretentious ass at times in his career. But he’s the more than worthy successor to Woody and the other American originals of that era.
According to one website, the poets who won the Nobel Prize are the following:
Rabindranath Tagore
W.B. Yeats
Gabriela Mistral
T.S. Eliot
Pablo Neruda
Czeslaw Milosz
Octavia Paz
Seamus Heaney
Wislawa Szymborska
Rudyard Kipling
Romain Rolland
Correct me if any of this is wrong.
“Cinderella, she seems so easy, “It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning. “You Belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend, you’d better leave”
And the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row”
I’m thrilled by this choice.
Don’t be silly - New Republic says Dylan couldn’t possibly win.
(“Did I say that?” - written six days later)
If you want to get technical, T.S. Eliot wrote the lyrics to most of the songs in Cats. Does that count?
And just to set everyone’s head spinning a little - IMHO the current crop of poet/lyricists working today are all in the Rap/Hip Hop world. Today it’s a “folk singer” winning, in 30 years it could be a “rapper”.
Dylan also gets credit for picking talented band members.
On the heels of this, what one album would be a good place to start?
The guilty undertaker sighs…
Not an album suggestion, but here’s a few songs:
Lyrical mastery, It’s Alright Ma
Clever lyrics, nothing necessarily brilliant, but the song rocks, Cold Irons Bound
Highway 61 Revisited
Yeats and Kipling, at least, have also had their poetry posthumously set to music. Doesn’t make them songwriters.
Yeah, that one. Or Bringing it all Back Home.
Blood on the Tracks came out when I was 14 years old, and I remember thinking “Bob Dylan is really a big deal. I should not only get the new album but listen to all his older stuff, too.”
Luckily, BOTT turns out to ALSO be an excellent album with which to start.
Yes, in my opinion Bob well deserves a Nobel.
“Blood on the Tracks” is probably the most consistent and melodic – and has several (IMO) masterpieces. It’s a favorite of my 22 yo daughter as well.
When I saw this on my Google News page I honestly thought it was from a satire site. Not because Dylan isn’t worthy; because the Nobel Prize committee doesn’t work that way.
I wonder who the new members are.
Dylan is getting the award for the five albums from 1964-1966: The Times They Are a-Changin, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. And you can make a good case for the transitional The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan from 1963. The transition was from folk singer to angry bard. We’ve had great folk singers before, some of them as angry as Woody Guthrie. Dylan was our first true modern bard. He didn’t keep up the anger for the next 50 years, probably why he’s still alive and making music today, but he’s still mythic in ways that not even the Beatles are. That 50 extra years of music is a gift with nuggets of pure gold.
If you lived through the 60s, when rock music was the devil’s enema aftermath, you will be lightheaded with vindication. And just as lightheaded with astonishment.
I’m still betting it’s satire.
Life is satire, Xap. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.