Bob Dylan and The Nobel Prize

Trust old Bob to throw a spanner in the works. Don’t get me wrong: the announcement that a certain Mr. Robert Zimmerman was to be the recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature was bound to cause controversy without any help from the man himself. And it did.

Newspapers and radio programmes immediately set about finding people who would have a good whinge, in print or on air, about the accolade being given to a lowly song and dance man. And there were loads of willing mouthpieces.

One line peddled by the “How Could They?” faction was that songwriting just isn’t literature, in pretty much the same way that it just isn’t cricket – and that to suggest that it is amounts to an insult to all of the great writers out there, and not so out there too, who work away assiduously at their craft, often for little or no return – and without the crucial help of a backing band that makes Bob’s art the equivalent of humming along while you take a walk in the park.

This argument was generally twinned with the accusation that the decision was obviously a populist one on the part of the Nobel committee, who were basically courting publicity, the philistines. In the context, the word populist was generally used as a synonym for cheap and nasty. It was as if Donald Trump himself had been honoured.

The next, rather more familiar, line of attack was that the award should instead have gone to Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Philip Roth or, in an Irish context, someone like William Trevor. And actually, when you think about it, you could go on and on in that vein, pretty much forever: at any given moment, there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of writers for whom a case might be made. Why not Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul – except, of course, that the latter did indeed win the award, back in 2001. A few of the names mentioned in conversation had actually won the Nobel prize – Alice Munro springs to mind – indicating that people who whinge are not always very good at doing their homework.

A third argument can be summarised as follows: I have no problem with the idea of a songwriter getting the prize but there’s loads of others who deserve it more than, uhhh, Bob fucking Dylan. Like, what about Paul Simon? He’s Jewish as well and far nicer. Or Joni Mitchell: would they not have been much better to give it to a woman?

I don’t really know where people find either the time or the energy to be outraged about shit like this. If Ian McEwan had been chosen, I’d have thought: well, there’s a nice endorsement for a really fine, intelligent writer, with a luminous prose style, whose view of the world seems admirable, in so many ways. Good on him. If they had opted for Anne Tyler, it might have occurred to me that she’s not quite up there with Samuel Beckett, but what the hell? She’s a great storyteller and I’ve enjoyed everything that I’ve read by her, so why not?

If they really wanted to be populist, they’d have picked someone like J. K. Rowling. And if they had, I’d have thought: you know, she really is a very likeable, decent, warm and generous individual. And while I have no great interest in the Harry Potter books, there is indeed an argument that she deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature because she has single-handedly done so much for the world of books and literature, by turning-on an entire generation, all over the world more or less, to the idea of reading. Books have weathered the threat of the internet better than most forms of art. Sales are on the rise. Authors can aspire to making a living. J. K. Rowling isn’t responsible for this phenomenon on her own, but she played a pivotal role at a time when the future looked less than sparkling. Giving her the Nobel Prize for Literature wouldn’t be the worst idea ever.

When I heard that Dylan was the intended recipient, I felt something entirely different: that he really is up there with William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett. In fact there are times when he might seem like a brilliantly unholy amalgam of the poetic geniuses of the two.

Let’s deal with the argument that there are other songwriters who are equally deserving for a start, because it’s easy. There aren’t. There are other towering figures in contemporary music. Of those who are still alive, The Beatles (well, Paul McCartney), Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits and Madonna spring to mind. And you’d have to add the likes of Beyoncé, Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar to any roll-call of the truly exceptional contemporary talents.

I doubt that there is even one of these who would seriously dispute Bob’s pre-eminence. Except Kanye. In fact Bruce Springsteen – one of the few songwriters who has created a vast body of powerful work on a scale that might compare with Dylan’s – paid timely tribute to Bob in his recently published autobiography, Born To Run, hailing him as “the father of my country.” It is a phrase that is worth rolling around in your mouth.

Bruce describes listening to albums like Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, both released in the marvellously prolific year of 1965, as “the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived.” And he added that Dylan’s music “supported him” through his years as a young American. It is a powerful and persuasive endorsement.

“Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become,” Bruce writes, in what is a wonderfully eloquent testimonial. “He planted a flag, wrote the songs, sang the words that were essential to the times, to the emotional and spiritual survival of so many young Americans at that moment.”

It was what a lot of people – young people especially – felt, not just in America but all over the world. I recall hearing Bob Dylan for the first time and being transfixed by the utterly unique, unlovely but magnificently compelling, extraordinary, nasal voice of his. And thinking: I have to hear more. The first records I ever bought were a Bob Dylan EP that had ‘Corina, Corina’ and ‘Girl From The North Country’ on it; a single by The Yardbirds coupling ‘Shapes of Things’ with ‘Still I’m Sad; and The Byrds’ monumental hit version of the magnificent Dylan song, ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’.

I listened to The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, on which Dylan comes of age as a songwriter, and discovered ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’. But then every album of his was studded with gems. I still sing ‘One Too Many Mornings’ from The Times They Are A Changin and ’She Belongs To Me’ from Bringing It All Back Home. The latter LP began with ’Subterranean Homesick Blues’, a talking song that was a precursor of modern rap, with its unforgettable opening salvo of “Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine/ I’m on the pavement thinking about the government.” It’s an album on which there were gems from start to finish: ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Love Minus Zero/ No Limit’, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ and the unforgettable full-length ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’.

And that was just the start, really. I still rate Blood On The Tracks, released in 1975, as the greatest album of the past 60 years. There is a powerful overall narrative thrust to the record, but the songs themselves are marvellously dense and brilliantly bold. ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ is like a novel crammed into four and a half minutes, full of extraordinary images, descriptive flourishes and moments of great tenderness and beauty. There’s ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’, ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, ‘Shelter from the Storm’ – and more that we’ll come to.

For a kid in Ireland, hearing Dylan entering stage left and listening to his songs was like opening a window into a different universe. It scrambled your tiny little mind and gave you something wonderfully different, alien almost, to grapple with and hold onto. These songs refused to accept any of the conventional limitations of either pop music or middle class propriety. They could be crystal clear, angry, opinionated, and challenging; dreamy, mystical, psychedelic and strange; or emotional, heart-broken, loving and damned. Or they could be a strange and alluring hybrid of any and all of these strands at once.

The most important thing that they delivered was what Bruce felt: that there was a lyricist out there who was articulating the notions, ideas, thoughts, feelings, intuitions and convictions of young men and women who were struggling towards – or attempting to struggle towards – a deeper, broader, braver, more inclusive, more egalitarian, and far less authoritarian, predictable, presumptuous and bullying kind of engagement with the world than what we had grown up with and were still surrounded by.

To have followed Bob Dylan’s work, as an artist and a writer, over the years, is to have understood, again and again, and for all sorts of different reasons, that there are no easy answers; that we have to constantly question everything; and that the job of an artist is to search perpetually for new ways to express the trials, the tribulations, and the tragedies – as well as occasionally the joys and satisfactions – that are forever, inescapably a part of the human condition.

But is it literature? The fusty old distinctions between classical and popular culture – between high and low art – are for snobs.

It is like the difference between performance art and painting. Who cares? Dylan works in the bardic tradition. He is an extraordinary wordsmith. He is a wonderful storyteller. He has used language as his primary medium to spin out an extraordinarily rich and diverse range of often brilliant and original ballads, fables, philosophical reflections, love letters, polemics, spirituals, appeals to the head and the heart and fierce declarations of intent. He has created wonderfully memorable characters and put inimitable words in their mouths. He has recounted their very particular tales and sometimes made them universal. He has spoken from the heart and put on masks, invented and re-invented himself – and also the very songs that we have come to know and love, by adding to them, changing the narrative voice, re-phrasing them and turning the melodies inside out.

As exemplified in the baroque sweep of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, Bob Dylan completely redefined our understanding of songs and songwriting, and indeed of popular culture – and what can be achieved within it. And as a result, he has been uniquely influential, affecting in a vital and enduring way how songwriters operating in his slipstream, approach every aspect of their craft, whether they know it or not. And he wrote ‘Idiot Wind’, also on Blood On The Tracks.

“It was gravity which pulled us down / And destiny which broke us apart / You tamed the lion in my cage / But it just wasn’t enough to change my heart / Now everything’s a little upside down / As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped / What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good / You’ll find out when you reach the top / You’re on the bottom…”

So what is Bob Dylan’s take on it all? Is he being arrogant in not responding to their calls? Or were they arrogant in assuming that he would be thrilled skinny with the accolade and jump on a plane? Is he embarrassed to have got the nod ahead of Jake Bugg? Or will he finally accept the Nobel Prize for Literature and travel to Sweden to make a speech?

Maybe they should have checked in with him first.