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Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize

“Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Gotten a Nobel”

by Anna North

Bob Dylan does not deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He does deserve the many Grammys he has received, including a lifetime achievement award, which he

won in 1991. He unquestionably belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, into which he was inducted in

1988 along with the Supremes, the Beatles and the Beach Boys. He is a wonderful musician, a world-

class songwriter and an enormously influential figure in American culture.

But by awarding the prize to him, the Nobel committee is choosing not to award it to a writer, and that is a

disappointing choice.

Yes, Mr. Dylan is a brilliant lyricist. Yes, he has written a book of prose poetry and an autobiography. Yes,

it is possible to analyze his lyrics as poetry. But Mr. Dylan’s writing is inseparable from his music. He is

great because he is a great musician, and when the Nobel committee gives the literature prize to a

musician, it misses the opportunity to honor a writer.

As reading declines around the world, literary prizes are more important than ever. A big prize means a

jump in sales and readership even for a well-known writer. But more than that, awarding the Nobel to a

novelist or a poet is a way of affirming that fiction and poetry still matter, that they are crucial human

endeavors worthy of international recognition.

Popular music is such an endeavor too, but, for the most part, it already receives the recognition it

deserves. And apart from a few spoken-word awards, no one would expect the highest honors in music to

go to a writer—we won’t be seeing Zadie Smith or Mary Gaitskill in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The committee probably did not mean to slight fiction or poetry with its choice. By honoring a musical

icon, the committee members may have wanted to bring new cultural currency to the prize and make it

feel relevant to a younger generation.

But there are many ways they could have accomplished this while still honoring a writer. They could have

chosen a writer who has made significant innovations in the form, like Jennifer Egan, Teju Cole or Anne

Carson. They could have selected a writer from the developing world, which remains woefully

underrepresented among Nobel laureates. They could have picked a writer who has built an audience

primarily online, like Warsan Shire, who became the first Young Poet Laureate of London in 2014.

Instead, the committee gave the prize to a man who is internationally famous in another field, one with

plenty of honors of its own. Bob Dylan does not need a Nobel Prize in Literature, but literature needs a

Nobel Prize. This year, it won’t get one.

From The New York Times, October 13, 2016 ©2016 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by

permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,

redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

“Dylan's Nobel Prize Settles Debate: Rock Lyrics Are Poetry”

by Dan DeLuca

Bob Dylan is the songwriter who opened up the doors of possibility to all who followed. He was the

mysterious bard with a guitar who sent out a clarion call—first as the acoustic Voice of His Generation,

then as the plugged-in rocker who remained a master of the unexpected for five decades—that the words

pop singers sang were worthy of being taken seriously.

“Dylan was a revolutionary,” Bruce Springsteen said in his 1988 speech inducting Dylan into the Rock

and Roll Hall of Fame. “The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind.” Early masterpieces

such as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Visions of Johanna” and “Like a Rolling Stone” fueled a

debate: Are rock lyrics poetry?

The answer must be yes, because on Thursday, Dylan was awarded the highest honor for a writer: the

Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, in making him the first American winner since novelist

Toni Morrison in 1993, cited him for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American

song tradition.”

The Swedish Academy's decision to honor Dylan set off an online debate, with Scottish Trainspotting

novelist Irvine Welsh calling it "an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of

senile, gibbering hippies." Salman Rushdie, a Nobel candidate himself, called Dylan "the brilliant inheritor

of the bardic tradition. Great choice." President Obama settled the argument by tweeting:

"Congratulations to one of my favorite poets, Bob Dylan, on a well-deserved Nobel."

Dylan’s name has been whispered as a possible winner for many years, but he was a surprise choice.

Ladbroke’s, the English betting house, had the favorite as Haruki Murakami, the Japanese author of The

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, at 4–1. American gray eminence Philip Roth, the author of Portnoy’s Complaint

and American Pastoral, was 7–1. Dylan came in at 60–1, with a slightly better chance than Princeton-

based Irish poet Paul Muldoon (66–1) and slightly worse than Czech novelist Milan Kundera (50–1).

Many of Dylan’s most fervently loved songs—some of which actually are love songs—date from the

1960s, and his being honored at age 75 can be seen as an ultimate affirmation for the baby boomer

generation. There was a movie about the Beatles in theaters this fall, and now Dylan has won the Nobel

Prize. They have lasted.

On one end of Dylan's songwriting spectrum is the vengeful, resolute, and timeless “Masters of War,”

which he sang last weekend in his slot opening for the Rolling Stones at the Desert Trip festival—

otherwise known as “Oldchella”—in Indio, Calif. It’s high dudgeon at its finest: “Let me ask you one

question: Is your money that good? / Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could? / I think you

will find when your death takes its toll / All the money you made will never buy back your soul.”

On the other end are Dylan’s love songs, some of them also vengeful, such as "Don’t Think Twice, It’s

Alright” (from 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan) or “Idiot Wind” (from 1975’s brilliant Blood on the

Tracks), or morose, like “Love Sick,” from the 1997’s late career tour de force Time out of Mind.

A personal favorite is the uncharacteristically tender and humble “To Ramona,” from 1964’s Another Side

of Bob Dylan. “Ramona come closer, shut softly your watery eyes / The pangs of your sadness will pass

as your sense will rise / The flowers of the city, though breathlike, get deathlike at times / Though there’s

no use in trying to deal with the dying / Though I cannot explain that in lines.”

Dylan is of course enormously influential. Springsteen, who referred to him as “The Father of My Country”

in his new Born to Run memoir, is one of many who were once known as “New Dylans.” Every singer-

songwriter with a personal story to tell owes him a debt, and hearing the above lines read or sung aloud,

with their knack for internal rhyme, call up inevitable parallels to the dense playful language of rap.

The Nobel is given for a body of work, and comes with a prize of 8 million Swedish kronor, which

translates into approximately $900,000. (A drop in the bucket for Dylan, who’s reportedly earning $7

million a piece for his gigs at Desert Trip, which happen again this weekend.)

His big win comes with slightly ironic timing, because with the recent shows on his Never Ending Tour—

which played the Mann Center in Philadelphia this summer—he has been concentrating not on songs that

he’s written himself, but those associated with Frank Sinatra found on his two most recent albums,

Shadows in the Night (2015) and this year’s Fallen Angels.

Dylan clearly won the Nobel for his songs, but he has published non-musical writing, including a book of

poetry, Tarantula, in 1971, and Chronicles: Volume One, a memoir that came out in 2004. “Dylan has the

status of an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady

stream of secondary literature,” the Nobel committee wrote.

They added: “Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics like the social

conditions of man, religion, politics, and love. The lyrics have continuously been published in new

editions, under the title Lyrics." (At which point the snarky comment to make is: And it’s a good thing they

have been published, because if you’ve gone to see the famously sneering and syllable-garbling Dylan

play live in recent years, you probably couldn’t understand a word he was singing.)

Used with permission of Philadelphia Inquirer Copyright© 2017. All rights reserved.

“Bob Dylan, Titan of American Music, Wins 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature”

by Colin Dwyer

Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. The prolific musician is the first Nobel winner to

have forged a career primarily as a singer-songwriter. What's more, he's also the first American to have

won the prize in more than two decades. Not since novelist Toni Morrison won in 1993 has an American

claimed the prize.

Dylan earned the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song

tradition," according to the citation by the Swedish Academy, the committee that annually decides the

recipient of the Nobel Prize. The academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius, announced the news

Thursday.

The win comes as something of a shock. As usual, the Swedish Academy did not announce a shortlist of

nominees, leaving the betting markets to their best guesses. And while Dylan has enjoyed perennial favor

as an outside shot for the award, the prospect that the musician would be the one to break the Americans'

long dry spell was regarded as far-fetched—not least because he made his career foremost on the stage,

not the printed page.

Yet few would argue Dylan has been anything but influential, both in the U.S. and beyond its borders. The

prolific singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has produced dozens of albums, including The

Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks. His track "Like a Rolling Stone"

has taken on mythic standing in the decades since its release; many, including Dylan himself, have

pointed to it as emblematic of a sea change in American music.

"Tin Pan Alley is gone," Dylan proclaimed in 1985, referring the dominant conventions established by

music publishers of the early 20th century. "I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now."

Dylan, who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, "has the status of an icon," the Swedish Academy

wrote in a biographical note. "His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a

steady stream of secondary literature."

In an interview following the announcement, Danius elaborated on the Swedish Academy's decision: "He

is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition, and he is a wonderful sampler—a very original sampler,"

Danius explained. "For 54 years now he has been at it and reinventing himself, constantly creating a new

identity."

And for his work, he has been amply recognized by critical community. Dylan has won Grammys, an

Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S. Now, to

that trove of honors Dylan has added a Nobel.

The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded since 1901 to writers who have produced "the most

outstanding work in an ideal direction." In that time, 109 prizes have been distributed to 113 writers. This

year, the prize carries with it a purse of approximately $900,000 and, as usual, inclusion on literature's

most illustrious list—the pantheon of Nobel winners.

The 75-year-old artist will receive his award in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

©2016 National Public Radio, Inc. NPR news report titled “Bob Dylan, Titan Of American Music, Wins

2016 Nobel Prize In Literature” by Colin Dwyer as originally published on npr.org on October 13, 2016,

and is used with the permission of NPR. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

“Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize, Redefining Boundaries of Literature”

by Ben Sisario, Alexandra Alter, and Sewell Chan

Half a century ago, Bob Dylan shocked the music world by plugging in an electric guitar and alienating

folk purists. For decades he continued to confound expectations, selling millions of records with dense,

enigmatic songwriting.

Now, Mr. Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era, has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature,

an honor that elevates him into the company of T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and

Samuel Beckett.

Mr. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection on Thursday is perhaps the most

radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901. In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s

highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of

literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.

Some prominent writers celebrated Mr. Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce

Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr. Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,”

adding, “Great choice.”

But others called the academy’s decision misguided and questioned whether songwriting, however

brilliant, rises to the level of literature.

“Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs. Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars,” the novelist

Rabih Alameddine wrote on Twitter. “This is almost as silly as Winston Churchill.”

Jodi Picoult, a best-selling novelist, snarkily asked, “I’m happy for Bob Dylan,

#ButDoesThisMeanICanWinAGrammy?”

Many musicians praised the choice with a kind of awe. On Twitter, Rosanne Cash, the songwriter and

daughter of Johnny Cash, wrote simply: “Holy mother of god. Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize.”

But some commentators bristled. Two youth-oriented websites, Pitchfork and Vice, both ran columns

questioning whether Mr. Dylan was an appropriate choice for the Nobel.

As the writer of classic folk and protest songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-

Changin’,” as well as Top 10 hits including “Like a Rolling Stone,” Mr. Dylan is an unusual Nobel winner.

The first American to win the prize since Ms. Morrison in 1993, he is studied by Oxford dons and beloved

by presidents.

Yet instead of appearing at the standard staid news conference arranged by a publisher, Mr. Dylan was in

Las Vegas on Thursday for a performance at a theater there. By late afternoon, Mr. Dylan had not

commented on the honor.

Mr. Dylan has often sprinkled literary allusions into his music and cited the influence of poetry on his

lyrics, and has referenced Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Ezra Pound. He has also published poetry

and prose, including his 1971 collection, Tarantula, and Chronicles: Volume One, a memoir published in

2004. His collected lyrics from 1961–2012 are due out on Nov. 1 from Simon & Schuster.

Literary scholars have long debated whether Mr. Dylan’s lyrics can stand on their own as poetry, and an

astonishing volume of academic work has been devoted to parsing his music. The Oxford Book of

American Poetry included his song “Desolation Row” in its 2006 edition, and Cambridge University Press

released The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan in 2009, further cementing his reputation as a brilliant

literary stylist.

Billy Collins, the former United States poet laureate, argued that Mr. Dylan deserved to be recognized not

merely as a songwriter, but as a poet.

“Most song lyrics don’t really hold up without the music, and they aren’t supposed to,” Mr. Collins said in

an interview. “Bob Dylan is in the 2 percent club of songwriters whose lyrics are interesting on the page

even without the harmonica and the guitar and his very distinctive voice. I think he does qualify as

poetry.”

In giving the literature prize to Mr. Dylan, the academy may also be recognizing that the gap has closed

between high art and more commercial creative forms.

“It’s literature, but it’s music, it’s performance, it’s art, it’s also highly commercial,” said David Hajdu, a

music critic for The Nation who has written extensively about Mr. Dylan and his contemporaries. “The old

categories of high and low art, they’ve been collapsing for a long time, but this is it being made official.”

In previous years, writers and publishers have grumbled that the prize often goes to obscure writers with

clear political messages over more popular figures. But in choosing someone so well known, and so far

outside of established literary traditions, the academy seems to have swung far into the other direction,

bestowing prestige on a popular artist who already had plenty of it.

It’s not the first time it has stretched the definition of literature. In 1953, Winston Churchill received the

prize, in part as recognition of the literary qualities of his soaring political speeches and “brilliant oratory in

defending exalted human values,” according to the academy. And many were surprised last year, when

the prize went to the Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, whose deeply reported narratives draw

on oral history.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy credited Mr. Dylan with “having created new poetic expressions

within the great American song tradition.”

Sara Danius, a literary scholar and the permanent secretary of the 18-member academy, which called Mr.

Dylan “a great poet in the English-speaking tradition” and compared him to Homer and Sappho, whose

work was delivered orally. Asked if the decision to award the prize to a musician signaled a broadening in

the definition of literature, Ms. Danius responded, “The times they are a-changing, perhaps.”

Mr. Dylan, whose original name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minn.

He emerged on the New York music scene in 1961 as an artist in the tradition of Woody Guthrie, singing

protest songs and strumming an acoustic guitar in clubs and cafes in Greenwich Village.

But from the start, Mr. Dylan stood out for dazzling lyrics and an oblique songwriting style that made him a

source of fascination for artists and critics. In 1963, the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary reached No. 2 on

the Billboard pop chart with a version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” whose ambiguous refrains evoked

Ecclesiastes.

Within a few years, Mr. Dylan was confounding the very notion of folk music, with ever more complex

songs and moves toward a more rock ’n’ roll sound. In 1965, he played with an electric rock band at the

Newport Folk Festival, provoking a backlash from fans who accused him of selling out.

After reports of a motorcycle accident in 1966 near his home in Woodstock, N.Y., Mr. Dylan withdrew

further from public life but remained intensely fertile as a songwriter. His voluminous archives, showing

his working process through thousands of pages of songwriting drafts, were acquired this year by

institutions in Tulsa, Okla.

His 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks” was interpreted as a supremely powerful account of the breakdown

of a relationship, but just four years later the Christian themes of “Slow Train Coming” divided critics. His

most recent two albums were chestnuts of traditional pop that had been associated with Frank Sinatra.

Since 1988, Mr. Dylan has toured almost constantly, inspiring an unofficial name for his itinerary, the

Never Ending Tour. Last weekend, he played the first of two performances at Desert Trip, a festival in

Indio, Calif., that also featured the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and other stars of the 1960s. He is

scheduled to return on Friday for the festival’s second weekend.

“As the ’60s wore on,” Giles Harvey wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2010, “Dylan grew

increasingly frustrated with what he came to regard as the pious sloganeering and doctrinaire leftist

politics of the folk milieu.” He “began writing a kind of visionary nonsense verse, in which the rough,

ribald, lawless America of the country’s traditional folk music collided with a surreal ensemble of

characters from history, literature, legend, the Bible, and many other places besides.”

Mr. Dylan’s many albums, which the Swedish Academy described as having “a tremendous impact on

popular music,” include “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965), “Blonde on

Blonde” (1966), “Blood on the Tracks” (1975), “Oh Mercy” (1989), “Time out of Mind” (1997), “‘Love and

Theft” (2001) and “Modern Times” (2006). His 38 studio albums have sold 125 million copies around the

world.

The academy added: “Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound,

and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature.”

Mr. Dylan’s many honors include Grammy, Academy and Golden Globe awards. He was inducted into the

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, won a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and was awarded the

Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

The Nobel comes with a prize of 8 million Swedish kronor, or just over $900,000. The literature prize is

given for a lifetime of writing rather than for a single work.

“Today, everybody from Bruce Springsteen to U2 owes Bob a debt of gratitude,” President Obama said at

the medal ceremony. “There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music. All these years later,

he’s still chasing that sound, still searching for a little bit of truth. And I have to say that I am a really big

fan.”

Other 2016 winners

■ Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on

Oct. 3 for his discoveries on how cells recycle their content, a process known as autophagy, a Greek term

for “self-eating.”

■ David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz shared the Nobel Prize in Physics

on Oct. 4 for their research into the bizarre properties of matter in extreme states.

■ Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

on Oct. 5 for development of molecular machines, the world’s smallest mechanical devices.

■ President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for pursuing

a deal to end 52 years of conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the

longest-running war in the Americas.

■ Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on

Monday for their work on improving the design of contracts, the deals that bind together employers and

their workers, or companies and their customers.

Correction: October 13, 2016

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the author of a 2013

Op-Ed essay arguing that Bob Dylan should receive a Nobel Prize. The author, Bill Wyman, is a

journalist, not a former Rolling Stones bassist who has the same name.

From The New York Times, October 14, 2016 ©2016 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by

permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying,

redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.