The Nobel Prize in literature has gone completely to the dogs. The committee felt it was time to give the prize to an American and since there are no actual American writers writing anything worth a damn, they chose a soppy songwriter. This is pathetic. And it’s especially sad that this year’s prize cheapens the achievement of Svetlana Alexievich who was awarded the Nobel last year. This will allow Putinoids to say, “See? The Prize goes to people who are not even real writers. It’s all political.”
Well, at least I know this fellow’s name. I was getting tired of the Nobel being awarded to people I’d never even heard about.
Clarissa's Blog 
Dylan’s poetry and songs are amazing. I have loved them since the 1960’s. The political ones are the best of his works, of course. I am thrilled that he won this.
I am hoping that Nnedi Okorafor wins it sometime; she is the best living fiction writer I know.
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Pop singers have their own award. What is it called, Emmy, Grammy? Why do they have to squeeze out high culture if it’s already so marginalized? Should absolutely every cultural space be colonized by soap operas and the like? What’s next, giving the Tchaikovsky Competition award to Dr. Phil? I mean, I love Dr. Phil but he has his own place and that is not in playing classical music.
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The same argument could be made against philosopher, mathematician and political activist Bertrand Russell who won the 1950 Nobel. I admire Russell overwhelmingly, but giving him the prize is more of a stretch than giving it to a poet.
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I find a comparison between Russell and some dime-a-dozen pop singer very strange. Russell’s writing was beautiful and his ideas were profound. While these Dylans are a dime a dozen. Hey, I dig Eminem but I’m not expecting that he should get a Nobel.
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Song writing lyrics requires music and a singer to bring them alive. Without that, they are nothing and they do not stand on their own.
Rationalize that the ancient Greek epic poets were bards singing epic poems all you like, but to me singer songwriters are a distinct category all on their own from poetry, fiction or creative non fiction.
I’m very deeply into another artist right now and his lyrics on the page are not great, but his delivery is a completely different creature.
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“Song writing lyrics requires music and a singer to bring them alive. Without that, they are nothing and they do not stand on their own.”
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“lyrics requires music and a singer to bring them alive”
The line between pure poetry and song lyrics is fairly blurry.
There is poetry that can’t be set to music (to any possible advantage) and lyrics that cannot stand on their own at all.
Somewhere in between you get poetry that works when set to music (like Lieder) or some lyrics that can stand on their own without music.
If I didn’t know the song and just saw the words on the page I would think the following was originally written as poetry:
So why does it come as such a shock
To know you really have no one,
Only a river of changing faces
Looking for an ocean.
They trickle through your leaky plans,
Another dream over the dam.
And you’re lying in some room
Feeling like your right to be human
Is going over too.
Well some are going to knock you
And some’ll try to clock you.
You know it’s really hard
To talk sense to you,
Trouble child,
Breaking like the waves at Malibu.
(Trouble child, Joni Mitchell)
But I do think Dylan award was a gimmick to create buzz and assure ongoing coverage of the prize.
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Dylan is also very dated. I know he means a lot to people who are 20+ years older than me but the younger generations have no idea who he is and would find him very antiquated. I don’t get his music at all, for instance. And his lyrics sound primitive to me.
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“Dylan is also very dated”
Like I said before, it’s a prize to make middle aged male Euopean music critics feel good about themselves…. I came home today to watch just such a Polish critics expound upon why it was such a good choice…. blech.
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“Like I said before, it’s a prize to make middle aged male Euopean music critics feel good about themselves”
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In his heyday, Dylan was an excellent songwriter (and a horrible singer). This verse from “The Times They Are A-changing” totally summed up the attitude of the children’s crusader hippie revolutionaries of the late 1960’s:
“Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land.
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly aging.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand,
For the times, they are a’changing.”
Someday, your teenager daughter will say something very equivalent to you. 🙂
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Aging / changing? Some poetry, man.
Jeez. I wrote “poetry” of this kind when I was 9. Roses / noses was my favorite rhyme. Also, love / dove / above.
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No, you didn’t write universal truths about adolescent attitudes at age 9, girl. You weren’t old enough to experience them.
As to Dylan’s simple rhyme scheme– it isn’t the mechanics that made those verses ring true. It’s the content.
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That content is as banal and trite as the form, I’m afraid. 😅😅😅
For a more current version of the same thing, I recommend Eminem’s “White America.” Of course, I’m all outdated with my Eminem for 15-year-olds. 😅
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“White America” isn’t about the same thing at all. Eminem’s song is a put-down of people whom the rap singer considers inferior white trash. Dylan’s verse is about the universal adolescent rebellion against parental authority that every generation experiences.
There, explained it for you. 🙂 🙂
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Inferior parental trash, inferior white trash, same diff. 😉
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Ah, this debate isn’t leading anywhere, we’re just running laps. 🙂
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The Dylan songs are poems. He sings them, but.
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Whatever you think of Dylan’getting the Nobel Prize in literature, that prize has a better track record over the years than the Nobel Peace Prize, which has been given to Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, Yassir Arafat, Al Gore, and Barrack Obama!
The Peace Prize selection is always good for a laugh — if nothing else!
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There are many singers who are also poets, Dylan (aka Robert Zimmermann) is one of the best known. I’ve loved some of his songs for decades. He started out very political in the early 1960’s so, yes he may be outmoded by now. So are many of us! I’m not claiming that everything he’s written is sublime, but there’s a considerable distance between his best work and the average pop music pap. Why should imaginative words, written with skill and passion, be considered less than ‘literature’ if they are sung?
Leonard Cohen, Canadian is another great singer songwriter, he started out as a poet and novelist. His songs are better than his novels!
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“Why should imaginative words, written with skill and passion, be considered less than ‘literature’ if they are sung?”
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I get that, of course. I’m never impressed by any awards / ceremonials, they all have their own infighting and bias so the winner is usually a compromise candidate anyhow!
Its the narrow acceptance of creative writing forms that I get tired of. If a writer won’t fit in, they don’t get published, or sung, or performed or whatever. Why can’t songwriting merge into poetry, poetry into play-script, into short story and via prose poem into something else entirely? Writing’s meant to be creative, so why are the forms so hide-bound?
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“The Times They Are A-changing” totally summed up the attitude of the children’s crusader hippie revolutionaries of the late 1960’s:
“Come, mothers and fathers throughout the land.
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Your old road is rapidly aging.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand,
For the times, they are a’changing.”
What makes that work (and I agree it works almost brilliantly) is how it forecasts revolution within an ultra-traditionalist setting.
That verse recalls both the populist song “This land is your land” and the pro-Union anthem “Which side are you on?”
“Come all of you good workers, good news to you I’ll tell”
It recasts the common people vs the elite sentiments of those songs
“They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair ”
in generational terms.
I disagree about how universal this is. It cannily captures the spirit of American youth rebellion but generational conflicts tend to play out according to cultural scripts that are not identical across the world.
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Another thought or two on the Nobel.
I was expecting something meant to create buzz as soon as I saw that the literature prize was scheduled last. IINM the peace prize is usually announced last and this year it was lost in the shuffle.
I think Dylan has been a nominee for a long time now I recall some American (dumb) writers calling for him to win around 10 years ago or so. Might have meant more to them then though….
I think they gave it to him because John Lennon is dead and they would have like to have given it to him for the worst-political-song ever, the dreadful Imagine which elites in the western world seem to be trying to operationalize.
I don’t think this is the absolute worst choice they’ve ever made, whatever you think of their writing and ideas, it’s hard to classify Winston Churchill or Bertrand Russell as producing “literature”.
And about 20 years ago they honored the Italian Dario Fo who wrote and performed in plays (that were as much improvized as put on the page and much of the text was in dialect impenetrable for much of the country) that was probably the worst literature award that I can remember (an Italian I knew at the time was as puzzled as everyone else, she had kind of heard of him, but didn’t realize anyone took him seriously).
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I love the Beatles but today nobody younger than me even knows who they are. Pop culture gets dated very very fast.
I have no idea who this Fo is but he sounds terrible.
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“I have no idea who this Fo is but he sounds terrible.”
There’s a British TV production of one of his plays from 1983 or so on youtube. I note it says “adaptation” rather than just “translation” so I don’t know how close it is to the original….
I couldn’t get through more than about two minutes of it….
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I’m wondering if the committee was aware of this performance of the Confederate anthem “Dixie”. I’m sure it’s considered very problematic by some….
Dylan first emerged as part of a larger roots revival that began in the 1950s (that codified some types of Apalachian music as American Folk music and he has always remained an admirer of musical Americana.
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Dylan singing a controversial song? Not exactly unusual, he did write a few of them. I know he’s usually regarded as being from the opposite end of the political spectrum to ‘Dixie’, he’s probably singing it either because of his lifelong interest in old folk music sources or he was trying to get a rise out of someone..! I don’t believe he was unaware of its provenance.
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Dylan revisited… As early as 1967 the idea of Dylan-as-poet was around and this is an interesting experiment, dramatic declamation of his verse to pseudo-chamber music background.
God help me, this is my favorite version of this particular song and easily in my top 5 Dyland covers ever…. what is wrong with me?
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Final Dylan comment of the day (I promise nothing, there may be more).
One of his best songs is Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues, the lyrics of which come as close to poetry as anything he wrote.
The song itself was inspired by a trip to Juarez mexico where he had digestive problems and probably suffered from sensory overload (Mexico tends to do that to first time visiting Gringos). Like much of his best work it’s full of callbacks and references to other songs and writings.
His version was kind tongue in cheek and it ends up being about a middle-class Anglo who goes slumming and gets more than he’d bargained for.
I previously thought the best version was by Judy Collins whose meticulous reading turns it into a dream-like, distanced study of madness.
In the wake of the award I went looking on youtube and found Nina Simone’s version. She turns the song into a desperate portrait of decline, alienation and loss that is now my favorite. Her adlibbed “Well that’s it folks…. that’s it” is devastating in its understatement.
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As for Lennon’s “Imagine”, I love this song. It brings tears to my eyes. But the lyrics are not even part of it. I love his voice, the music , the delivery. Plus, he was super cute before the beard. The words themselves are trivial in the extreme.
This is the problem with songs: it’s impossible to separate words from everything else. Just like movie scripts don’t count as literature because they are nothing on their own.
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