Ask anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the Nobel prizes for literature — no one thought Bob Dylan would get the award before Haruki Murakami. Yet again, all those who have kept ready their paeans to Murakami’s surreal and insightful prose returned that document to the folder titled “Definitely, Maybe” even as they perhaps heaved a sigh of relief. In contrast to all those occasions when the winner’s name has journalists turning to Google for some clue about what the Nobel awardee has written and where they’re from, this year’s prize winner is someone whom everyone knows. While some, like authors Irvine Welsh and Hari Kunzru have minor conniptions that Dylan has won the Nobel, the man who has been the voice of every generation since the 1960s has joined an elite list. From being a scrawny fringe element to a bard, then an icon, Bob Dylan is now a bona fide poet courtesy the Nobel.
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, Dylan has been one of the most influential musical figures of our times. Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius said Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize for literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. Danius also compared Dylan to Homer and Sappho. Dylan is the first American since Toni Morrison to win the Nobel prize for literature. He joins George Bernard Shaw as a Nobel laureate who is also an Oscar winner. Dylan is the second songwriter to win the Nobel for literature (Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore was also a songwriter, as the 1600-odd Rabindra Sangeet attest).
In his eccentric and charming memoir Chronicles, Dylan wrote, “I really was never any more than what I was – a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze.” Those songs have been touchstones for at least three generations of folk and alternative music fans. While announcing the award, Danius quoted one of Dylan’s best-known phrases: “The times they are a-changin'”. It was a disappointingly predictable pick from a treasury of lyrics and quotable quotes that have expressed disenchantment and protest with unusual poignancy.
Dylan’s songs have often been full of sound and fury, like “Hurricane”.
“How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed
To live in a land
Where justice is a game…”.
Then there are others that seem incoherent when you consider them closely. After all, what exactly does he mean when he sings,
Now your dancing child with his Chinese suit
He spoke to me, I took his flute
No, I wasn’t very cute to him, was I?
But I did it, because he lied and
Because he took you for a ride
And because time was on his side and
Because I want you.
In one interview, Dylan said his lyrics made no sense, which is evidently one link to which the Nobel Twitter feed will not linking. He also said he had no interest in being a bard of his times. “All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities,” he wrote in Chronicles. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of.”
And yet, for all these admissions and denials, there are the songs that Dylan has sung that still resonate with such anger, cynicism and despair that they continue to feel relevant in the present. Listen, and you can feel the melancholy and exhaustion of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”; the desperation in “All Along the Watchtower”; that spark of hope in “Shelter From the Storm”. He’s created anthems in songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Mr Tambourine Man”, “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35”. Across the world, Dylan’s songs have been the soundtrack to growing up and realising just how skewed the world is, and how little sense it makes. In the way he shape-shifted and defied conventions of how a singer should look and sound, Dylan inspired people. That, along with his curious wordplay, made him a legend long before the Swedish Academy’s acknowledgement of his genius.
Whether Dylan deserves the Nobel or not is a debate that will continue to rage on the internet and in drawing rooms in the coming days. His nomination stokes back to life the age-old question of what distinguishes “high art” from “popular culture”, and the function of awards. Is the Nobel supposed to shine a light on a voice that hasn’t been heard enough, make us familiar with a name that looks strange and a culture that isn’t omnipresent? If it picks a name that’s popular, is that an instance of the Nobel being versatile? Should the Swedish Academy be concerned about whether it has been able to ‘trend’ on social media?
Whatever the expectations of the Nobel and the Swedish Academy, it’s a good time to listen to Blonde on Blonde or Hard Rain while reading Chronicles. Better yet, watch Todd Haynes’s brilliant film, I’m Not There, which was based on Dylan’s many avatars and has one of Cate Blanchett’s most spectacular performances. And imagine the Swedish Academy’s jury listening to the complete works of Bob Dylan. If there was any doubt that the 21st century is the age of the hipster, let it rest today with this win for the Granddaddy of Hipsterdom.
