Life was Dylan-flavored in the mid-’60s, at least in the Bay Area where I lived at the time. Everywhere you went, it seemed, there was “Bringing It All Back Home” and then “Highway 66” on the turntable, or their songs on the radio, refusing to conform to the usual 2-3 minute-per-song format of the time. Dylan’s songs, his voice singing his songs—his politics, his ideas—were part and parcel of the way the times they were a-changing for so many of us.
But I’m bothered by giving him the Nobel for literature. Trying to cram him into that category bruises both ways, both his work and the category. Singer/songwriters shouldn’t be set up to compete with non-musical writers. Not only does it take away chances from the likes of Philip Roth (everyone’s favorite American perennial most deserving non-winner), but it’s apples and oranges. I was teaching freshman English in Dylan’s early heyday and students would write papers on the poetry of Dylan. It was, I felt, my painful duty to let them know that, extracted from the music, the great lyrics of some of the world’s greatest songs (beloved of teacher and students both) didn’t make it as poetry.
Songs are not just poems which just happen to be set to music. They are conceived as songs and should always be considered as such.
The Nobel committee is being praised for this courageous, revolutionary deviation from the traditional and expected. The really revolutionary thing would have been to declare a Nobel Prize for singer-song-writing. And then sure, give the first one to Dylan.
It would be a way of saying that probably the most influential, culture-shaping artform of our time shouldn’t be a second-class citizen, to be lumped in (once in a hundred years) with legit artforms.
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