Daily Mail 14.10.16
You’ve got to give it to him. Even at the age of seventy five Bob Dylan can still really get up people’s noses. Back in the Sixties it was the establishment of politicians and big business he irritated when his first hits were anti-war and anti-prejudice songs of youthful protest. Today it’s the pomp and pretension of some members of the literary establishment who will be indignant.
And why? Because, in their eyes, Dylan is famous as a writer of songs – and not, therefore, a ‘real writer’. So for him to have been given the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for poetic expressions in the great American song traditions’ yesterday, the first time in the award’s 112 years’ history that the award has gone to a songwriter, just won’t sit well with some of the furrowed brows of academe. Talk about dumbing down, they’ll be thinking.
‘I mean, how difficult can it be to write a few lines of more or less rhyming verse, give it a backbeat and put it to some repetitive twelve bars of guitar and drums led rock music,’ you can imagine some of them saying to themselves.
And, though most might not admit it, that thought will be crossing more than a few minds today as they sit under their dreaming spires, or, more likely, in lonely, dusty back bedrooms around the world. ‘Yes, the guy’s clever and all that, but, come on… he’s a lyricist! Is that really literature?’
All tangled up in jealous green they’ll be – to more or less borrow a line from the Nobel prize winner himself.
They won’t all be chewing the carpet in frustration, of course. Former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion spoke yesterday of the ‘extremely skilful rhyming aspects’ of some of Dylan’s lyrics, while Professor Christopher Ricks, former professor of poetry at Oxford University, and a Dylan fan of forty years standing, must be whooping with delight.
For years he has set Dylan firmly in an English literary tradition to the amusement of many of his peers who considered him a fan more than a critic. And now along have come the Nobel judges to agree with him. And, for what it’s worth, so do I.
Usually the Nobel literature prize goes to someone of whom most of us have never heard. A writer called Svetlana Alexievich from Belarus won it last year. I’m sure she’s very good, brilliant, probably. The year before it was Patrick Modiano from France and then there was Mo Yan from China in 2012. I’m sure they’re all fantastic, every one of them.
But, you know, I can’t say that any of these writers’ books, none of which I’ve read, obviously, has changed my life. Okay, I own up, I’m a literary philistine. Perhaps one would change my life if I happened to stumble across it. But I know I won’t.
The words of Bob Dylan, on the other hand, have given me and you and a lot of other people around the world pause for thought in that he possesses some of the great gifts of any writer.
From the beginning of his career, playing in coffee houses in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he ‘borrowed’ traditional and out of copyright melodies to put his words to, he was able to sum up, in just a few verses of often everyday phrases, a whole argument and line of thought.
Take his most famous hit from the Sixties, The Times They Are A-Changin’. ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call,’ he wrote and sang, ‘Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.’
That second line, which sounds as if it was taken from a memory of a teacher trying to maintain order, is purely functional when applied to school life. But to use it to tell politicians not to get in the way of the generational revolution which was changing America in the Sixties, was inspired. Any speechwriter would have been proud of it. It’s so succinct.
It sounds easy to write. It probably was for Bob Dylan. But he did write it, and you and I and some clever-clogs intellectual didn’t, and by doing so, he got his message through to millions of young people, not only in the US, but around the world.
Look at the rest of this song, the snipe at political pundits ‘who prophesise with your pen’, or the warning to angry parents ‘don’t criticise what you can’t understand’, and we see that by his early twenties Dylan had a gift for poetry, putting words concisely in a telling order, albeit to music – and he knew it.
Why else would Robert Allen Zimmerman from Duluth, Minnesota, up there in the North Country of the USA not far from the Canadian border, and the grandson of a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Black Sea port of Odessa, change his surname to that of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas?.One story goes that originally he called himself after Matt Dillon, the hero of the TV Western series Gunsmoke. I doubt it.
He knew what he could do with words, which was what Dylan Thomas did with words, from an early age. He had a gift for observation for imagery. The fact that he chose a guitar to play in order to recite them, together with his early fixation on folk singer Woody Guthrie, meant that his thoughts could achieve a wider audience than they ever would had he written them in a slim volume of poetry.
And, brilliantly, this strange, gypsy-like guy, with a rasping voice that sounds as if he hasn’t quite got over a bad case of bronchitis (and it’s got worse as he’s got older), has mapped out his territory as being a lyrical historian of North America.
At first it was hobos and box car rides, and accusatory anger at racial injustices as listed in Blowin’ In The Wind that caught the moment. ‘How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man,’ he sang. In those days a black man in the Deep South of the USA was referred to as ‘Boy’. Dylan summed up, and put down, the regular insult with total economy.
But he wasn’t, he would soon say, a protest singer. He didn’t want to be pigeon-holed. A big ladies man in his younger days, he could paint a picture of a girl with a dash of inspiration that few could match. ‘She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks,’ he wrote in She Belongs To Me of one woman he knew in New York. And you immediately think, oh, yes, I used to know exotic girls like that. I wish I still did.
Did the ring sparkle before she spoke? No, of course not. But putting the two images together makes the girl seem immediately tantalising.
Dylan has written hundreds of songs, and the groovier academics like Professor Rick, as well as countless fans, have spent their lives deciphering them. But it isn’t just to literature that we are all in Dylan’s debt.
When he began writing and recording in the early Sixties, moon still rhymed with June in the vast majority of popular music lyrics. Within a few years he had changed all that, John Lennon admitting that he had been embarrassed by some of his early songs when Dylan played him his new LP and said ‘listen to the lyrics, man’.
Lennon listened, as did Paul Simon and almost certainly Ray Davies of the Kinks and many more young songwriters, and the quality of lyrics in Sixties’ records soared.
Bob Dylan did that. Like a locomotive he pulled songs stuffed with allusions and illusions into rock music, when the record charts were more intelligent and thoughtful than at any time before or since.
What he did may not be literature for the earnest and the elite. But it’ll do for me, as clearly it does for the Nobel Prize committee.
