But is it art?

So Bob Dylan became the first musician to win the Nobel prize for literature. If any musician was going to win it, it was Dylan. And he has always thought of himself as a poet, after all the young Mr Zimmerman named himself after one.

I like a fair number of Dylan songs (I'll come to my favourite below) and readers will know I'm interested in lyrics but, notwithstanding that, I find a lot of Dylan's stuff to be hard going and sometimes lyrically opaque. I'm probably too slow witted or not tuned in to the allegories and subtleties. Some of the songs referred to in the media coverage are, to my mind, timeless classics that will be sung as folk songs for centuries, Blowin' In The Wind and The Times They Are A Changin' being the obvious examples. In contrast, amongst the other songs being mentioned, Just Like A Woman  has always struck me as a pleasant song with not much about it and, while I like Lay Lady Lay, I thought it bizarre for it to be mentioned in a discourse on literary merit, as it was on the BBC website.

My favourite Dylan song is Positively 4th Street. You can tell I'm not mainstream Dylan as, out of 8 choices offered in a vote for best Dylan song on the BBC website, my choice was coming in 8th when I voted. Like A Rolling Stone is running first and Mr Tambourine Man (nice song, decent lyric but very marginal as a poem) is 5th. Returning to Positively 4th Street, to my ear it's one of his better tunes and it has the most piercingly acerbic, indeed vituperative lyric of any song I've ever heard. The whole song is full of spleen about some poor bugger who had clearly got to him, ending:

I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is to see you

The song is so strongly expressed I don't think I've ever felt that way about any person I've ever met!

Anyway, I guess I'll just have to dig out my copy of Bob Dylan Greatest Hits and listen to Like A Rolling Stone one more time and try to figure out the nuances, as it seems to me a fairly straightforward put-down, though with some decent imagery.

Anyway, the debate over whether a musician should win the Nobel prize for Literature is now raging. I've got no problem with Dylan winning this award, though of course I prefer Roy Harper as a poet and lyricist. For me Dylan's stuff is poetic, rather than poetry. While not for a moment dismissing him as a balladeer, most of Dylan's songs are ballads  in the sense that they tell a story and have an unequivocal meaning, compared to poems, which often have shades of meaning and so are capable of different interpretations. Indeed, poems usually require interpretation, or rather explanation, for me to get the nuances. Though Dylan conjures up some superb imagery, in my biased opinion I haven't seen a Dylan lyric to compete with the subtlety of Harper's interpretation of emotions, for example in the song Commune, which includes the line "to lust for a moment in love of another". Nor have I heard much evidence that Dylan does humour or even whimsy, unless you count one of his real turkeys, Wiggle Wiggle, dedicated to his then 4 year old daughter, with lines like "wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup".

When I was much younger and "pop" music became more sophisticated (or overblown and pretentious if you must - think prog rock in its pomp), people used to ask "But is it art?" So it will be interesting to see whether any of the current David Bowie, Beatles and other exhibitions, featuring multi-media exhibits that, for me, must be counted as "art", win any of the art prizes. Then we'll know youth culture prevailed, even if those once young are now very old or dead and gone.

Which reminds me of the Dylan lyric "Ah but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" from the song My Back Pages, though it's the version by Keith Emerson's The Nice that I'm hearing in my head. Indeed, I think Dylan is uniquely important because, not only has he inspired so many other musicians to produce brilliant music of their own but also, of all the artists whose songs have been covered extensively, it is Dylan who has inspired others to produce outstanding cover versions of his songs. Unlike Beatles covers, which rarely add much to the original, they include what became definitive versions of the song: after all how many people think of Dylan's versions of All Along The Watchtower or Mr Tambourine Man?

A unique genius.