When a nervous Steve Jobs pondered the “most important moment of my life” – the launch of the very first Apple Mac – he leaned on his hero, opening his presentation by reading the second verse of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changing.” Jobs worshipped the music of his creative muse and had 21 of Dylan’s albums on his iPod – including six bootlegged live performances. Were he alive today, Jobs will be among millions of fans applauding perhaps the greatest recognition yet for modern music’s most disruptive force. By winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan is again breaking the mould. On a practical level, the award is sure to push the singer/poet’s popularity to another new high, introducing a whole new generation to this gifted outlier. They’re in for a treat. – Alec Hogg
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(Bloomberg View) —Â Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom.
âHe not busy being born is busy dying,â Dylan sang, in âItâs All Right, Ma (Iâm Only Bleeding).â Reinventer of folk music, voice of the 1960s, blues singer, rock star, born-again Christian, champion of gospel, country singer, old-style crooner, and now winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has found a million different ways to say the same thing. (He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, and he sang, âYou may call me Zimmy.â)
I have been to just one Bob Dylan concert, about a decade ago. He concluded with his 1965 masterpiece, âLike A Rolling Stone,â whose brutal lyrics seem to exult in the suffering of someone brought low. The song starts with a sneer: âOnce upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime/didnât you?â The first stanza ends: âNow you donât talk so loud/Now you donât seem so proud/About having to be scrounging for your next meal.â
Dylan said in an interview that the song originated in a âlong piece of vomit,â beginning with âsteady hatred directed at some place that was honestâ and ending with a kind of revenge, captured in the famous chorus: âHow does it feel/To be on your own/With no direction home/Like a complete unknown/Like a rolling stone?â
In concert, however, the song was turned upside down. As people sang the chorus along with Dylan, they were exhilarated, jubilant, exultant. Far from laid low, they were unchained. As Dylan sang it, âLike A Rolling Stoneâ had become a declaration of independence.
But of course, that declaration was there all along. Even in 1965, the chorus was a cry of defiance. âWhen you ainât got nothing, you got nothing to loseâ — and thatâs not all bad.
The Nobel confirms what has long been sensed: that Bob Dylan is among the most authentic voices U.S. has produced https://t.co/S0p9o5VfWY?
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 14, 2016
If âLike A Rolling Stoneâ is Dylanâs âHamlet,â âDesolation Rowâ is his âKing Lear.â Itâs a fever dream, or a love letter, about an unruly procession of humanity — Cinderella, Ophelia, Einstein, the good Samaritan, the tightrope walker, a jealous monk, the blind commissioner, insurance men, Dr. Filth and his nurse (who âkeeps the cards that read âHave Mercy on His Soulââ).
But in the last stanza, thereâs a radical change; the dream is over. Dylan shifts from the procession to the mundane: âYes, I received your letter yesterday/About the time the door knob broke/When you asked me how I was doing/Or was that some kind of joke?â He seems to be describing a note from a family member, perhaps his mother — mundane, chatty. He concludes:
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, theyâre quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I canât read too good
Donât send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.
Thatâs not exactly nice. But it captures what Dylan cherishes in Jack Kerouac, who understood freedom in much the same way, and who wrote, âThe only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.â
It's great that Bob Dylan won the Nobel. I don't listen to his music but appreciate seeing songwriting recognized as an amazing art form.
— roxane gay (@rgay) October 14, 2016
Though sometimes cruel, Dylan is also capable of great tenderness. âLay Lady Lay,â his most celebrated romantic song, is uncharacteristically mawkish. Much better and more real, and in its own way a celebration of freedom, is âBuckets of Rainâ: âI like your smile/And your fingertips/I like the way that you move your hips/I like the cool way you look at me/Everything about you is bringing me/Misery.â
Or consider the surpassing sweetness of âForever Young,â written for his son: âMay your hands always be busy/May your feet always be swift/May you have a strong foundation/When the winds of changes shift/May your heart always be joyful/And may your song always be sung/May you stay forever young.â
Dylan is often categorized as a folk singer, but he doesnât like that: âFolk music is a bunch of fat people,â he said in an interview in 1966. He hates being described as the âvoice of his generation.â Asked by an interviewer in 1965 how he thinks of himself, he said âas a song and dance man.â Booed in the 1960s for turning away from protest songs, he said, with sarcasm and contempt (and a kind of truth too), âAll my songs are protest songs. Thatâs all I do is protest.â
In his sort-of autobiography, âChronicles: Volume 1,â Dylan wrote that âsongs, to me, were more important than just light entertainmentâ; they were a âdifferent republic, some liberated republic.â He didnât plan to stir things up, but âthought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.â
Americaâs poet of rootlessness lit a flame, and it burns right through that frost.