Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Everybody must get Bobbed.
The Santa Claus of Popular Music.
The All Wheel Drive Vehicle of American Culture.
Inside the never-created Bob Dylan the Video Game, one dons specific personae, in heroic and epic battles with demons, enemies, politicians. There are religious quests and bonus rounds.
The Santa Claus of Popular Music.
The All Wheel Drive Vehicle of American Culture.
Inside the never-created Bob Dylan the Video Game, one dons specific personae, in heroic and epic battles with demons, enemies, politicians. There are religious quests and bonus rounds.
None of these rediculous characterizations suffice, to understand the importance and impact of Bob Dylan. Many have tried, recently; one writer even claimed Bob had usurped Walt Whitman, as the poet of the common people, without explaining the comparison past the article's first line. No one that I've seen has put Dylan's poetical works (if that is what are we to call them, in sum) aside the prolific works of his self-delivered namesake-- perhaps because such a comparison, between Dylan the Traveler and Dylan the Welshman, could require many thousands of words. It is important to recognize Dylan as the person he has chosen to represent himself as-- not just through his lyrics, but through the name he took for himself.
Bob has refused to speak about his award; it's been weeks, and he only keeps on chooglin', as the song says. He is throwing no Million Dollar Bash for either candidate-- in fact, his last few albums may be not his worst, but surely his least relevant to the society into which they enter. Johnny may still be in the basement, mixing up the medicine, but Bob hasn't spent much time "standing on the pavement/thinking about the government" during this century. What's keeping Bob from accepting another fifteen minutes of fame from the mainstream media?
These days, one either dies a cultural hero, or lives long enough to see themselves eulogized before their passing. I haven't gleaned the Internet for the latest speculation, but it's my understanding he hasn't been heard from since he was awarded the prestigious prize. A sentence appeared on his website acknowledging the award, inside a plug for his latest published work, an autobiography. Then, the sentence was removed less than a day later. Bob may very well be "working for a while on a fishing boat/right outside of Delacroix," or may simply be occupying the same space he always has: a private person, emerging as of late through autobiography and continued creative output. He was and continues to be on tour--the one that he's been on since 1988, except that three month break when he fell ill-- though now when the Bob Dylan Show comes to town, so does his legendary in-venue cell phone use police. According to reviews of recent Bob concerts on Ticketmaster.com, Bob fans found these police overzealous, ever fearful that Bob's mystic presence may leak onto the web-- and maybe the gig would be up. People either loved or hated their not-cheap Bob experience, and some complaints were common to most bad reviews: the sound was terrible; the songs weren't recognizable; Bob didn't acknowledge his audience.
Why? Because they were worth hearing. Bob Dylan's lyricism is worth everyone's hearing, in my view. His tender folkism of the early 1960s-- his absurdist and basement-dwelling tendencies later in the decade, as the psychedelia whirled around him-- his white-faced ringleader role to a mega-band in the 1970s-- his turns toward spirituality in the 1980s-- none of these public personas of Dylan matter. Just as his self-assigned namesake's legacy is his collected poems, Dylan's cultural silliness will be forgiven, and forgotten. The words and melodies he leaves behind will be remembered, studied, as a way to understand the twentieth century. Because understanding the society in which Dylan functioned (as a poet and separately as a musician) is made easier through his lyrics.
That is, on recordings. I have seen Bob in concert, at a gymnasium at Harvard University, almost ten years ago (or more?), and my impression was similar to those documented by audience members more recently on Ticketmaster's site. The acoustics of the venue were terrible, and Bob's voice was drowned out by the full band, doing their thing, as Bob did his. This included playing acoustic and electric guitar, a bizarre little stand-up keyboard, harmonica, and more mumbling than anyone in the audience paid for. My friend and I truly couldn't distinguish one song from another. Had this been intentional? Was Bob himself, in the words of another classic rocker, an "eminence front... a put-on?" Were we not supposed to care which song was which, but simply to marvel that we were in the presence of Bob?
It didn't matter: "The Bootleg Series" has quenched my thirst for juicy slabs of vintage Bob. It is difficult to imagine the world without the to-the-brink-of-disaster-absurdity of Bob Dylan: "notifiy my next of kin/this wheel shall explode" ("This Wheel's On Fire"). Drawing on Bob's earlier, folkier songs, Forbes magazine contextualized Bob's Nobel as a political statement, an artistic champion of the little guy in the face of all that is against him:
One of the primary grievances of the out-groups, whether they are Brexiters, members of the European right, or Trumpians in the U.S., is that their voices are not heard and respected among the elite. Their concerns about diminished social and economic status, the failure of their communities and families and the general sense of abandonment are treated as collateral damage by elites, who condescend to them without actually understanding the cause of their pain (Salkowitz).
It is to these listeners, says Forbes, that Dylan speaks, as a poet of "disruption and revolution." While I concur with the author's political contextualization of Dylan's catalog, the songs he has written contain an element even more grand than the ability to write songs that not only comment on the society into which they enter, but often match the meaning of the words to an easy and pleasant melody. This is by no means why he earned the Nobel Prize in Literature, and perhaps the only award given for this unique skill is that his songs, I firmly believe, will still be sung one hundred years from now.
I'm not sure the now-Nobel-Prize-winning-Bob was very comfortable in his American societal skin anyway. Besides making conscious and historical choices about releasing his previously-unavailable live and studio recordings, he has continued to write books (I owned a first edition copy of Tarantula when I was in college), produced new recordings (however bizarre and Sinatra-inflected though they may be), and, for better or worse, he will simply not stop touring. He is well deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Salkowitz, R. (13 Oct. 2016). "Bob Dylan's Nobel Sends a Strong Message." Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2016/10/13/in-todays-political-world-bob-dylans-nobel-prize-sends-a-strong-message/2/#641170d4ccb8
Bob has refused to speak about his award; it's been weeks, and he only keeps on chooglin', as the song says. He is throwing no Million Dollar Bash for either candidate-- in fact, his last few albums may be not his worst, but surely his least relevant to the society into which they enter. Johnny may still be in the basement, mixing up the medicine, but Bob hasn't spent much time "standing on the pavement/thinking about the government" during this century. What's keeping Bob from accepting another fifteen minutes of fame from the mainstream media?
These days, one either dies a cultural hero, or lives long enough to see themselves eulogized before their passing. I haven't gleaned the Internet for the latest speculation, but it's my understanding he hasn't been heard from since he was awarded the prestigious prize. A sentence appeared on his website acknowledging the award, inside a plug for his latest published work, an autobiography. Then, the sentence was removed less than a day later. Bob may very well be "working for a while on a fishing boat/right outside of Delacroix," or may simply be occupying the same space he always has: a private person, emerging as of late through autobiography and continued creative output. He was and continues to be on tour--the one that he's been on since 1988, except that three month break when he fell ill-- though now when the Bob Dylan Show comes to town, so does his legendary in-venue cell phone use police. According to reviews of recent Bob concerts on Ticketmaster.com, Bob fans found these police overzealous, ever fearful that Bob's mystic presence may leak onto the web-- and maybe the gig would be up. People either loved or hated their not-cheap Bob experience, and some complaints were common to most bad reviews: the sound was terrible; the songs weren't recognizable; Bob didn't acknowledge his audience.
But these 'performative sins' may be forgivable, if only because of Bob's staying power: he has existed in our culture for a long time, and will persist for a long time to come. Bob Dylan and Bernie Sanders should have an arm wrestling match to see who should win Person Of The Year. Though Sanders would be a favorite, as a former runner and woodchopper from the hills, I'd put my money on Bob-- those arms once carried the weight of the entire Rolling Thunder Revue, a high water mark for the post-psychedelic era. As a kid growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs-- bedrock America, if you ask some candidates-- I discovered Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II on vinyl while in high school. By senior year, my makeshift rock band was playing our own arrangement of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," with horns, in after school in the cafeteria. Through college, I amassed a decent collection of Dylan albums (though someone lifted my compact disc of the oddball 1989 live release Dylan & The Dead). As of late, I became terrifically fascinated with Bob's 'from-the-vault' series of releases, including original and uncut sessions. These recordings ("The Bootleg Series") represent not only Dylan during what many will regard as the most inspired and poetic period of his career, but also an important milestone in the history of commercially-available recorded music. The "Basement Tapes," along with the studio sessions from the mid and late 1960s, were some of the first recordings-- perhaps some of the first media, ever-- to be 'leaked' to the general public, in the form of someone walking out of the recording studio with an illicit copy of the magnetic tape master, featuring Bob and The Band goofing around. These recordings were pressed onto the cheap but durable format of LP records, becoming what many regard as the world's first "bootlegs."
Why? Because they were worth hearing. Bob Dylan's lyricism is worth everyone's hearing, in my view. His tender folkism of the early 1960s-- his absurdist and basement-dwelling tendencies later in the decade, as the psychedelia whirled around him-- his white-faced ringleader role to a mega-band in the 1970s-- his turns toward spirituality in the 1980s-- none of these public personas of Dylan matter. Just as his self-assigned namesake's legacy is his collected poems, Dylan's cultural silliness will be forgiven, and forgotten. The words and melodies he leaves behind will be remembered, studied, as a way to understand the twentieth century. Because understanding the society in which Dylan functioned (as a poet and separately as a musician) is made easier through his lyrics.
That is, on recordings. I have seen Bob in concert, at a gymnasium at Harvard University, almost ten years ago (or more?), and my impression was similar to those documented by audience members more recently on Ticketmaster's site. The acoustics of the venue were terrible, and Bob's voice was drowned out by the full band, doing their thing, as Bob did his. This included playing acoustic and electric guitar, a bizarre little stand-up keyboard, harmonica, and more mumbling than anyone in the audience paid for. My friend and I truly couldn't distinguish one song from another. Had this been intentional? Was Bob himself, in the words of another classic rocker, an "eminence front... a put-on?" Were we not supposed to care which song was which, but simply to marvel that we were in the presence of Bob?
It didn't matter: "The Bootleg Series" has quenched my thirst for juicy slabs of vintage Bob. It is difficult to imagine the world without the to-the-brink-of-disaster-absurdity of Bob Dylan: "notifiy my next of kin/this wheel shall explode" ("This Wheel's On Fire"). Drawing on Bob's earlier, folkier songs, Forbes magazine contextualized Bob's Nobel as a political statement, an artistic champion of the little guy in the face of all that is against him:
One of the primary grievances of the out-groups, whether they are Brexiters, members of the European right, or Trumpians in the U.S., is that their voices are not heard and respected among the elite. Their concerns about diminished social and economic status, the failure of their communities and families and the general sense of abandonment are treated as collateral damage by elites, who condescend to them without actually understanding the cause of their pain (Salkowitz).
It is to these listeners, says Forbes, that Dylan speaks, as a poet of "disruption and revolution." While I concur with the author's political contextualization of Dylan's catalog, the songs he has written contain an element even more grand than the ability to write songs that not only comment on the society into which they enter, but often match the meaning of the words to an easy and pleasant melody. This is by no means why he earned the Nobel Prize in Literature, and perhaps the only award given for this unique skill is that his songs, I firmly believe, will still be sung one hundred years from now.
I'm not sure the now-Nobel-Prize-winning-Bob was very comfortable in his American societal skin anyway. Besides making conscious and historical choices about releasing his previously-unavailable live and studio recordings, he has continued to write books (I owned a first edition copy of Tarantula when I was in college), produced new recordings (however bizarre and Sinatra-inflected though they may be), and, for better or worse, he will simply not stop touring. He is well deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Salkowitz, R. (13 Oct. 2016). "Bob Dylan's Nobel Sends a Strong Message." Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2016/10/13/in-todays-political-world-bob-dylans-nobel-prize-sends-a-strong-message/2/#641170d4ccb8
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