Nobel prize in literature won by Bob Dylan – as it happened

I’m going to wrap up this blog now. Thanks very much for everyone who’s read it and commented. It’s hard to know which Dylan song to finish on, so I’m going to choose the coruscating Idiot Wind from Blood on the Tracks, eight minutes of some of the most breathtaking musical vitriol ever recorded.

The New Yorker has just published a great piece in which its writers discuss their favourite Dylan lyrics. Rebecca Mead picks this song. She writes:

I’m glad to say that it’s been a while since I felt a personal identification with Idiot Wind, but the furious castigation and the reeling pain conveyed by that song have spoken for me more times than I care to recall. Critics will argue about Dylan’s place in the canon, or about the rightness of bestowing a prize upon a writer whose celebration doesn’t particularly help the publishing industry. But, for my money, anyone who can summon, as a bitter valediction to a lover, the line “I can’t even touch the books you’ve read,” knows—and captures, and incarnates—the power of literature.

The legendary music journalist Everett True emails to say he has written some thoughts on Dylan’s award. They include:

Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature says everything about the establishment’s understanding of the appeal of popular music – ie it has none.

Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature heightens the gender and race divide between ‘serious’ rock music and ‘disposable’ pop music. (Think Beck winning at the Grammys.)

Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize for Literature pays lip service to populism, the same way the establishment’s championing of Bob Dylan from the 1960s onwards has always paid lip service to populism while simultaneously serving to put the rest of us Great Unwashed firmly in our place, a slap across the face.

Read Everett’s piece in its entirety here.

And here’s a great and somewhat poignant fact from my colleague Bryan Graham.

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Another interesting piece on why Dylan deserves the Nobel from Rob Salkowitz in Forbes magazine, who makes the argument that over six decades Dylan has channelled the voices of the marginalised. He writes:

One of the primary grievances of the out-groups, whether they are Brexiters, members of the European right, or Trumpians in the US, 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.

Bob Dylan’s art, at its finest, dignifies those voices. He is not of those communities by origin, but he has embraced them so deeply and consistently through his six-decade career that he speaks on their behalf with clarity, conviction and authenticity. At the same time, he is an advocate for social justice at the most basic, human level, and in his mature work refuses to reduce either side of a discussion to caricature.

Indeed:

Tonight, Dylan plays in Vegas. His peer and fellow Desert Trip/Oldchella performer Paul McCartney is also playing a concert – at Pappy & Harriet’s, a 300-capacity bar in Pioneertown near the Joshua Tree. The box office opens at 6.30pm. Tickets are $50 which seems pretty good value to get up close and personal with a Beatle.

Our correspondent there says it’s “the biggest thing to happen in Pioneertown since Roy Rogers threw the first bowl at the bowling alley.”

Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stones bassist) has written a fine paean of praise to Dylan’s Nobel prize for Vulture, zeroing in on Chimes of Freedom, which he calls “among the greatest pieces of lyric poetry of our time”. He writes:

Poring over the song, the members of the [Nobel] academy would have found the words “for those compelled to drift, or else be kept from drifting.” It might have occurred to them that that Dylan had precisely limned two of the great tragedies of the 20th century — ethnic cleansing and forced exile, on the one hand, and the gulag on the other — in a single prosaic line.

Or how about this: “For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale”; they might have seen at least a hint of recognition of the fights to come in the realm of interracial marriage and, of course, gay rights.

The news wire service AFP have been taking the temperature of the literary world’s response to Dylan’s Nobel win, and it’s rather chilly.

“Dylan’s name has often been mentioned over the past few years but we always thought it was a joke,” said the French novelist Pierre Assouline, who could not hide his fury at the Nobel committee.

“Their decision is contemptuous of writers,” he told AFP. “I like Dylan but where is the (literary) work? I think the Swedish Academy have made themselves look ridiculous.”

However, Marianne Faithfull weighed in in defence of her old pal.

“I think he’s one of the greatest artists in the world and he’s changed our whole lives with his writing and his poetry.”

And she was scornful of the writers criticising the choice. “I think they’re ridiculous,” she said.

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Not only is he the songwriter who redefined the pop song and became the voice of a generation, it appears he also made a sculpture which resides in the Clintons’ back garden.

Bruce Springsteen (or the people who run his website anyway) has offered his congratulations to Dylan with an excerpt from the Boss’s recently-released autobiography, Born to Run.

Part of it reads:

He inspired me and gave me hope. He asked the questions everyone else was too frightened to ask, especially to a fifteen-year-old: “How does it feel... to be on your own?” A seismic gap had opened up between generations and you suddenly felt orphaned, abandoned amid the flow of history, your compass spinning, internally homeless. Bob pointed true north and served as a beacon to assist you in making your way through the new wilderness America had become. 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.

Al Gore has weighed in with his thoughts. It’s safe to say he approves.

Inspired by Will Self’s comments to the Guardian about whether or not Dylan should accept the Nobel, children’s author Michael Rosen has been moved to pen a verse.

Self said earlier today:

It cheapens Dylan to be associated at all with a prize founded on an explosives and armaments fortune, and more often awarded to a Buggins whose turn it is than a world-class creative artist. Really, it’s a bit like when Sartre was awarded the Nobel – he was primarily a philosopher, and had the nous to refuse it. Hopefully Bob will follow his lead.

The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch is seeking to settle the argument via Twitter poll:

I really enjoyed this piece by Alfred Soto on MTV’s website on why Dylan deserves the Nobel. The whole thing’s great, but here’s a sample paragraph:

There’s no getting around the fact that, say, Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s Field Work works differently than Blonde on Blonde. An ear for assonance and meter as fine as the one that belonged to the 1995 Nobel winner serves a linguistic pleasure that requires the spatial limits of a blank, white, demanding page. So much of the pleasure I get from Dylan, on the other hand, derives from the voice singing those lyrics. He was never more moving than the decade when his larynx turned into a rusted carburetor; he sang like a carping vulture, and I loved it.

There are plenty of music writers on Facebook debating Dylan’s win. One of them is our Chicago-based country music writer Mark Guarino, who has given me permission to quote from his post in defence of Dylan’s win, which is being shared a lot. He writes:

1. Lyrics are not meant to outlast the music. Dylan’s do. His work fundamentally changed the art form. Today the marketing people would call him a “disrupter” and a “change agent.” His use of language is profound, playful and instinctual. Somehow he developed pop music that works well in the back of a bar, but at the same time you can disappear inside the songs and let them work their magic. As great poetry does.
2. He has a body of work that stretches more than 50 years, which is much longer than most contemporary novelists, poets, painters. Even his so-called “bad” period in the 80s contained some of his most evocative writing (Oh Mercy). Joni Mitchell, Smokey Robinson and many others created great work but within very specific time periods. Dylan never stopped. Some of his late career work stands firmly up against Blonde on Blonde. More incredibly, despite great fame he was able to sit down again and again and write with a true eye, which isn’t easy to do. Ask any number of your classic rockers who stopped decades ago.
3. Dylan’s songs live as both highbrow and lowbrow. His fans span truck drivers to Ivy League academics. His songs have meaning to people who heard them in the Woodstock era and to those who heard them during the first Iraq war. There are people who attend his concerts to pump their fists in the air and there are others who quietly count the syllables. For a body of work to be so pliable is the very definition of great literature.
4. Shakespeare wrote plays that have been turned into music, movies, and are performed in garages to great halls. Are not songs simply internal monologues that are sung? Are some novels poetry and some chapbooks novels? Literature is ultimately about the language, not the genre.
5. This prize is affirmation that pop culture can aspire to, and achieve, high art. People thought pop music was for children before Dylan and the Beatles showed up. He fused the folk revival with pop to steer things in a new direction. Now songwriters can aspire to greatness far outside the commercial realm. Indeed into one where so-called “serious” literature exists. “Hits” have little to do with what he left behind.
6. Dylan is a humanist. Like Tennessee Williams, he sees our folly. Dylan’s lyrics reflect both deep nihilism about the human state of affairs and sometimes idealism about human encounters, one-on-one. Ever since the advent of the nuclear bomb, he has summed us up pretty well. He isn’t just a writer — he has a perspective.

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