Dylan defies all categories—musically and politically

The Nobel committee was right to place him in the company of wonderful writers

by Sam Tanenhaus / November 14, 2016 / Leave a comment
Published in December 2016 issue of Prospect Magazine

©Adam Beitcher/Getty Images

“It will be a good joke on us all if, in 50 years or so, Dylan is regarded as a significant figure in English poetry,” the music critic Donal Henahan wrote in 1967. “Not Mr Thomas, the late Welsh bard, but Bob, the guitar-picking American balladeer.” Well, the punchline has come and no one is laughing, except possibly Bob Dylan. After 16 days of enigmatic silence, America’s most honoured living artist at last acknowledged his latest accolade, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and even agreed to attend the award ceremony in December, “if it’s at all possible.” Possible? Why wouldn’t it be? What does he mean?

As usual with Dylan, there is no good answer, because he cares much less than we do. Even as an apprentice, yet to write his first songs, “my mind was strong like a trap and I didn’t need any guarantee of validity,” he wrote (in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One). Not “validation”—the affirming squeeze of the shoulder—but validity: official sanction, the stamped passport. Like all hero-artists, Dylan travels alone, without documents. He is “vague about his antecedents and birthplace,” the New York Times reported nine months after Dylan arrived in Manhattan, more than 50 years ago, a 19-year-old college dropout beginning his rapid conquest of the Greenwich Village folk-music hatchery. From the start the press played along. The New Yorker music writer Nat Hentoff conspired to spread the story that Dylan, in reality a coddled son of the middle class from northern Minnesota, “ran away from home seven times—at 10, at 12, at 13, at 15, at 15 and a half, at 17, and at 18. His travels included South Dakota, New Mexico, Kansas, and California.”

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Comments

Stephen Kennamer
November 17, 2016 at 01:23
My goodness, I haven't seen adulation like this since Stalin addressed the party congress in 1934. There is no accounting for taste, so my utter indifference to Dylan, whether we are separating out his high-schoolish lyrics from his humdrum harmonic schemes and his truly awful singing, must be as mysterious to Tanenhaus as his reverence for this mediocrity is to me. I will, however, just take aim at what seems over-the-top even for a worshiper. "The greatest songwriter in modern history – in all of history, some have argued." Wow. He performed the songs of other writers "better than anyone else." Goodness. The "hidden wound which he alone could salve." He alone! "Where no others could go." NO others! "Of course he knows full well he is a word-genius – 'the greatest living user of the English language,' as the literary scholar Christopher Ricks has said." Whew. Not just the greatest songwriter, or greatest poet, but greatest LIVING USER of the language. I don't know what has made Ricks's brains fall out, but it seems to be catching. Why not just say the greatest of all time? Move over, Shakespeare. As for poor old Peter, Paul and Mary, whose version of "Blowin' in the Wind" is what made Dylan – progressive-summer camp warblers. Dylan's opinion of himself seems to be about on a par with Tanenhaus's: "For sure my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before." Never struck before! Not by Keats, Emily Dickinson, or Dylan Thomas. But perhaps what irritates me most is that Tanenhaus can be duped by a pose. Regarding Dylan's coyness with the Nobel committee, we get this: "As usual with Dylan, there is no good answer, because he cares much less than we do." Oh, really? He's now a legend in his own mind, so he has to live up to it. But in playing the role to the hilt, Dylan has turned out to be simply rude.
Reply
1. Andrew
  November 17, 2016 at 08:49
  OK Stephen, who's your top postwar songwriter then?
  Reply
  1. Stephen Kennamer
    November 18, 2016 at 02:19
    All commentary on art is subjective and I would not claim to have better taste than someone who likes Dylan, only different taste. I come at Dylan as a musician and I consider song lyrics to be a special type of text, intended to serve a musical conception. (This too is an opinion, and I do not offer it as any sort of aesthetic truth or rule, although what I say is perhaps a truism among composers.) In this respect, lyrics resemble opera librettos and screenplays -- there may be a good deal of literary quality to individual examples of all these genres, but their success tends to be judged by how well the song, opera, or movie comes off as an integrated, multimedia art form. Dylan's lyrics are revered enough to have been published complete as an expensive book, so his fans find great independent value in them. I do not, and I think many people have liked them in part because he stood for the same ideas that they do. I myself respond to the idea of "Blowin' in the Wind," and its status as an anthem of the Civil Rights movement is deserved; but I don't find poetic genius in it. Because I find the musical value of Dylan's songs to be extremely attenuated, and his style of singing not only marred by a poor voice but also an affected presentation ("Mah friend"), I find him uninteresting as a singer of songs. However, I recognize that the Nobel Prize is awarded for the literary quality alone. If I were to put forward an alternate choice for a better songwriter, it would have to be someone whose musical value comes first. Paul Simon would be one obvious choice, because in my aesthetics, the musical excellence is the primary factor. I was moved to comment not because I want to be offensive to Dylan's fans, but because I feel that Tanenhaus's praise soars over the moon.
    Reply
hans altena
November 17, 2016 at 08:26
Well Stephen, he sure struck your nerve too apparantly. Anyway, Dylan himself is not about idolatry, and somehow this article sheds light on that. And when Dylan said he struck nerves touched never before, he did not deny that for instance Keats in his time did just the same. It is the mark of the true artist to stand in tradition and broaden its borders, no more or less has been Dylan's way: the song and dance man who climbed the highest mountain in literature. A great poet, who just died, said something akin to it.
Reply
1. Stephen Kennamer
  November 18, 2016 at 02:29
  As I have written above, I don't wish to insult Dylan's fans or give the impression that my opinion has any more validity than theirs. I would say that if Dylan seriously meant what he said, that his "lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before," then that means that he thinks neither Keats nor anybody else had ever struck those particular nerves, but only different nerves. It's a large claim. Now fans of Dylan like to say that he puts people on, and I have no idea whether he was serious when he said that, but TANENHAUS is serious. And if Tanenhaus can be so certain that Dylan is more psychologically complex and authentic than, say, Bruce Springsteen, I can offer my own reading that Dylan's coyness about the Nobel Prize strikes me as pretty much just an act. Maybe he doesn't like being idolized, but maybe he does.
  Reply
Al de Baran
November 19, 2016 at 01:34
Unlike Stephen, I really couldn't care less how Dylan idolators take my observation that Dylan is grossly overrated as a musician, a songwriter, and a lyricist. If Dylan is truly the greatest poet of today, then that says only how low our standards for poetry have sunk--which in itself is hardly front-page news (forgive the antiquated metaphor). I think that the Nobel Committee should have singled out <i.Tarantula for a mention, myself, as an exemplar of Dylan's "genius". Do even the hardest core Dylan fans plow through that steaming pile of sub-Joycean feces, I wonder?
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