Although listening to that song now I find it somewhat sad and dispiriting, because the "change" that came in the decades following that proclamation, was it really a change? Looking at politics and society? I think of that song in the context of its use in "Watchmen" [0] as more realistic.
That film is without question my favourite set of opening credits, and honestly I think that short outdoes the rest of the film by an order of magnitude.
In the time since Dylan started signing black people went from having very limited rights to winning a presidential elections. Obviously, there are many more factors than Dylan at play, and establishing causality, or the lack of thereof, is impossible. But, in my opinion, saying that society has not changed would be a big mistake.
Attributing any of that "progress" to Bob Dylan is a huge reach. He has a lot of fans and reached some segment of the population with his act, but he's basically just another guy peddling records and tap dancing for nickels.
This is an unfortunate outlook in my opinion. Art and literature are definitely more important than mere entertainment. The greatness of an artist is determined by how much impact they had on a society.
You don't need to attribute the change to him for it to not be sad if he joins the mainstream. If mainstream values converge with Dylan's, why shouldn't he?
Found this 1968 song from an Israeli singer a couple of weeks ago, whose title says it all: "The Hippies Of Today Are The Assholes of Tomorrow" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joZU1fMFCAo).
Eh, I don't know unless you are referring to some event I am not familiar with.
Yeah he's not writing protest songs anymore (unless you ask him [1]), but since he went electric, he's been doing what he wants, not what's expected of him. I saw him on tour this year, and it was a strange experience. The performance, song choice, and delivery felt more like he was just doing his music thing and I was paying to watch -- he wasn't trying to entertain me.
Reminds me of Jean-Paul Sartre's letter in which he rejected the Nobel Prize:
> The writer who accepts an honour of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honoured him,” he said at the time. “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honourable circumstances, as in the present case. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/05/sartre-nobel-p...)
Great song - for those wondering, it is The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol by Bob Dylan. I think the lyrics are more powerful in context of the rest of the song[0].
Technically, Dylan has written a number of novels, short stories and Poems and as such would not really qualify as a "pure singer-songwriter", even though the Nobel Prize comittee's reasoning references his work as a singer-songwriter...
At the other end of spectrum is 'Changing of the Guards' in which Bob Dylan seems to be intentionally parodying his own songwriting (still an enjoyable song though).
>"Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": an amazing example of musical story-telling
This song and 'Tangled Up In Blue' and 'Hurricane' are practically novellas in song form. I think the 'long form storyteller' Dylan is often the least acknowledged, but probably my favorite Dylan song format.
Winston Churchill also won the Literature Nobel Prize (for his book on the second world war). Writing history is probably even better than songwriting as an alternative to fiction.
I started typing out a list, but there's really too many to name. Pretty much anything through Desire is definitely worth a listen, and he has some gems from past that period, too.
I always love playing "Lay Lady Lay" for people and asking if they know who it is. His voice is unrecognizable due to the months in the hospital w/o cigarettes.
He's always ... distorted his singing voice. The motorcycle wreck was 50 years ago and he about broke his neck. He cracked a vertabrae. At least in recordings his voice was different after that, but it's impossible to say how much was mechanical damage and how much was his Bobness reinventing himself again.
I've seen him in concert twice, once about ten years ago and another about 15, and though he didn't sound great, they were still great concerts. Lots of singing along and crowd pandering. He was clearly enjoying himself and so did we.
Despite being a massive admirer of Dylan's work, I'm not sure that I'm good with this
> for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition
There's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature? I'm not really sure they do, and much as I love the songs, the lyrics by themselves don't have anything like the impact (on me at least) of top-notch poetry
>There's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature?
They should. Literature and poetry started from rhapsodies, sagas, and other forms of song-based storytelling, and it's not very good that it diverted so much to some kind of literary ivory tower.
Most early poetry was sung, and we're fine with calling that literature. Calling Dylan's work poetry does step over some normative lines, but they're fairly arbitrary lines.
I know you were being sarcastic, but your comparison isn't really apt. Novels are not a lyric medium: they're prose. Song lyrics are lyrics set to music. Some poetry is "lyrics" without the music (although lyric poetry is not quite the same thing).
Playwrights have won several times. The problem with screenplays, as they exist today, is that they basically never really have 'an author' in the traditional sense.
And telling the stories in poetic form and then singing them was a way to memorize them and teach them to next generation at the time when people had no skill to write and read.
Of course. Current youth generation's pop songs are always bad (mostly).
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. "
It is worth adding that though I agree that songs can be literature, songs also have non-literary elements, which means that songs that are not literature can still be good songs. Here I'm thinking of artists like DJ Shadow or the Beastie Boys, where some other element such as the soundscape or even just the beat carries the music.
I'm not a Bieber fan, but I think it's unfair to judge him strictly by his lyrics. Or Sinatra for that matter.
I believe this quote is apocryphal. AFAIK it's actually quoting a play by Aristophanes that poked fun at Socrates -- a play that put these words in his mouth.
>the lyrics by themselves don't have anything like the impact (on me at least) of top-notch poetry
To you they don't, to me and others they do. To the current Nobel committee they did this year.
At the end, Nobel prizes are highly subjective and people dependent recognitions - so arguments of the form of X deserves and Y does not are not too meaningful.
Science? No. People will disagree on whether some person who didn't get the price really should have gotten it, but no scientist disputes the value and importance of the work of the people who did get the prize.
In science, perhaps there are people who should have gotten the Nobel prize but they didn't. However, few people would say that the people who did get the prize didn't deserve it.
With Peace and Literature, people do this all the time.
Even in science there is a fair amount of subjectivity to the prizes. It was fairly questionable to give a Nobel to Kary Mullis for PCR, for example (the technique is certainly useful, but maybe not that deep scientifically and Mullis is kind of a nutjob who has used his fame to promote pseudoscience), not to mention prizes to work that hasn't held up well -- frontal lobotomies are not considered a great solution to mental illness anymore despite Egas Moniz's 1949 prize for it.
Really? I've spent pretty much all my spare time and money on music for the last 30 years, but no lyrics by themselves have ever had the effect on me that, for example "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" has had
... but then maybe I'm looking at this wrong, and the prize is being awarded for the songs rather than just the lyrics. If that's the case then I guess the prize is well-deserved
Tambourine Man definitely struck me in a similar way to Prufrock. In fact, I don't think songwriting gets the credit it really deserves. Dylan is verbose, but most great songwriting is better equated to a sonnet than Prufrock. And an album to a sonnet sequence.
One example I might offer on the same line as Prufrock is Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel. From "Save the Life of My Child" all the way to "At the Zoo" we follow a life (or many lives) and its roller coaster. "America" and "Hazy Shade of Winter" are particular favorites.
(as an aside, one of my favorite lyrics of all time is by Gordon Lightfoot in his excellent "Black Day in July" -
C'mon, look at 'Hard Rains Gonna Fall'? Writing something with such wisdom and poetic deft at 22 years old? This award is massively overdue - not undue.
There was a Spanish band which used to take poems by various authors such as García Lorca and make songs from them. Did this mean the poems suddenly became worse?
Now, I do agree that you can have a great song with lyrics that wouldn't be that great by themselves. But that doesn't mean genuinely good poems can't be written as lyrics.
Stephen Sondheim wrote that you can't fit as much complexity into sung lyrics as into read poetry. I wish I had the book in front of me to provide more details, but he reveals a lot about his craft here:
(For those not familiar with the genre, many think Sondheim is the great composer of musicals of all time; you might have seen some of his on film, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, recently. His lyrics (and stories) are not of the fun, clever, vapid variety often associated with musicals, but brilliant, creative, and multi-dimensional. - For those interested, Company and Sweeney Todd are probably good places to start.)
My understanding is that Homer's poems were recited or sung along with musical accompaniment. I'd agree it's an open issue as to whether this is analogous to Dylan's singing.
I feel ambivalent about this nobel prize. I absolutely feel Dylan is deserving of an award on this scale, and I have no problem viewing his work as literature. So in that sense, I have no real objection.
Still... novelists, playwrights, poets, there were a lot of people practicing more pure literary forms who were passed over here... and they certainly aren't going to be considered for any music awards. I'm just not convinced this was the right way to go. I do feel a kind of unease about it. I'm not really the best one to make the case against it, because I'm not convinced it's the wrong decision either.
They could. The psalms were originally set to music and are still quite popular works despite the music they were set to being long lost. But whether Dylan's lyrics really work on that level, well, that's a different question.
As part of the Bootleg Series, Dylan released recordings of the Rolling Thunder Review tour where this song features. It's one of my favorite live albums and Dylan at probably the most satisfied and happy point of his career.
The Nobel peace prize has little to do with the 'real' Nobel prizes or Nobel committee. It's administered by an entirely different organization, in a different country and with different rules and criteria.
> It's administered by an entirely different organization, in a different country and with different rules and criteria.
This part is true, but that's because Nobel explicitly specified it this way. The peace prize is one of the original "real" ones. As opposed to the one for economics, which was made up later by others.
(And, well, that contributions to world peace are judged by "different rules and criteria" than physics... makes some sense.)
You're right that a basic failure here is the way the prize was set up. Unlike the Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature prizes, which are awarded by actual practitioners in those fields, the peace prize is awarded by whatever 5 people the Norwegian Parliament selects that year. Neither these people nor the Parliament selecting them necessarily have anything to do with "work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses", unfortunately. As a result, they don't seem to have quite as strong an incentive to make good choices, on either a personal or institutional level, as the selection processes for the other Nobel prizes.
I think this difference in _who_ is doing the awarding and how they are related to the people receiving the awards is what dagw was trying to get at above. It's the difference between experts in a field selecting prizes for other members of their field and democratically-elected politicians playing political football with prizes in a field they themselves are totally not involved in and likely not much interested in to start with. :(
Chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine are sciences that have practitioners. Literature is an art that has practitioners. But peace is not a science nor an art. Nevertheless, Alfred Nobel saw fit to set up the peace prize. The rumor is that he did this because of hurt feelings after being accused of profiting from munitions manufacturing (he made his fortunes through inventions in explosives).
Of course there is a difference in who is doing the awarding. Nobel's decision to give the prize-awarding responsibility to Norwegian parliament might have had something to do with knowing peace activists at the time when Sweden and Norway were approaching the dissolution of their union, and there was fear of war.
I can't really point out any significantly better subject matter experts in working for peace than Norwegian Parliament.
You may be right that at the time there were no better subject matter experts. That doesn't make the Norwegian Parliament any good as subject matter experts in perpetuity, unfortunately, and I think the spotty history of the Peace Prize awards and the resulting disdain for it is evidence of that. Not least because the priorities of both the electorate and their elected representatives can change. So we certainly have evidence of failure; it's not clear whether the failure could have been avoided.
In hindsight, it _may_ have been a good idea to have a process in place for handing off to a better-suited body at some point (e.g. past prize recipients, the UN). Hard to say, of course.
No, I trust the Norwegian parliament and its assigned panel a lot more. Nobel Peace Prize and its reputation is theirs. So far they've done a decent job, even if some of the appointments - like the premature selection of Obama - are disappointing.
All of the Nobel prizes are awarded by entirely different organizations except for Physics and Chemistry. The Nobel peace prize was established by Nobel's will exactly like the other Nobel prizes. It has just as much claim to being a real Nobel prize as any of the other Nobel prizes.
It seems right to me to applaud effort in this way even if perhaps I wouldn't make all those specific awards. Shining a spotlight on those statesmen trying to make the world a better place.
I think the president of Colombia is not an unreasonable choice. The selection criterion set out by Nobel in his will for the Peace Prize is "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". He has in fact been doing work in those directions, and it has in fact been good work. It hasn't been completely successful, but it also hasn't entirely failed yet (e.g. FARC is not back to open fighting, now is it?) and I think there is a very good chance that it will in fact succeed. We can start arguing about whether it was "the most" or "the best", but I think it's hard to argue that it wasn't substantive work aimed at the things Nobel's criteria indicate.
The Obama thing I agree was rather ridiculous, as were various other Peace Prize awards.
>giving Obama the peace price after he failed to shut down Guantanamo
That is a weird way to put it, considering that nominations for the peace prize closed just 11 days after Obama took office, and the prize was awarded 9 months later.
It's more reasonable to say that prize was given to Obama based on his campaign promises, before he even had any actual chance to close Guantanamo. (Which he still hasn't done, because obviously it is much easier to talk about it in a campaign than to really create a sustainable policy for what to do with the detainees.)
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
"Visions of Johanna"
I don't think that anyone in modern culture has impacted society in the ways Bob has.
The music industry packaged up singers like Dylan for whichever vertical they needed. Anyone who was able to navigate that system as successfully as he did was certainly not a rebel and the music itself was nothing extraordinarily unique if you look into the long tail of music being made at the time. It's like saying 7-Up is the uncola and you are rejecting the establishment by drinking it instead of Coke.
I think you are looking at things from an incorrect lens here as far as "the system" goes. To give some context, the music industry was a whole different animal when Bob Dylan started in the 1960s. The "establishment" back then could be represented by, say, musicians from the Grand Ole Opry type of tradition, and the long tail end of the crooner / sweet music / big band era. Maybe some of the doo-wop which got popular in the 1950s was kind of "establishment" by then.
Folk along with rock and roll were the rising youth movements of the time and I'm not sure the older generation at the time understood it very well. Today it does seem like much of top pop promoted music is half "written by committee" but I'm not sure that was the case back then (see Frank Zappa's take on this from the eighties, which I personally think is even more true today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4wsURn3rw)
Look at the top of the charts from 1962 when Bob Dylan released his first album. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...) There's some R&B and rock for sure but also a heck of a lot of big band / jazz type instrumental (your Kenny Balls, Acker Bilks, David Rose, etc.), some country as well (Johnny Tillotson, Claude King, etc.), and cutesy pop numbers (the "Mashed Potato Time" is #3 for 1962).
The "folk music revival" Dylan started in was also fairly massive in the early 1960s but I would say at the time the top was represented by Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio (both are on the Hot 100 chart in 1962). Bob Dylan won't appear on the Hot 100 until 1965, #41 for "Like a Rolling Stone". (Of course, Peter Paul and Mary brought Dylan to a national audience with "Blowin' in the Wind".) In 1962 this wasn't even a decade out from when Pete Seeger / the Weavers got tangled in that McCarthyism drama, so it's fair to say that the whiff of anti-establishment the folk revival movement had was a somewhat justified feeling.
Of course, Bob Dylan went well beyond the folk revival. I personally don't get the vibe that Dylan was quite as anti-establishment or political as many of the others in the folk revival, nor do I imagine that he thinks of himself as a "rebel". He's more of a poet plain and simple; what makes him unique is more his words / lyrics than anything else.
361 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadYou've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatenin' my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood that runs in your veins
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUDdQS2UxA
While that's true, Bob Dylan was most likely the reason behind Hurricane's retrial, so that's something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_(Bob_Dylan_song)
Yeah he's not writing protest songs anymore (unless you ask him [1]), but since he went electric, he's been doing what he wants, not what's expected of him. I saw him on tour this year, and it was a strange experience. The performance, song choice, and delivery felt more like he was just doing his music thing and I was paying to watch -- he wasn't trying to entertain me.
[1] I saw a video of this interview, but I can't seem to find it now, so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_songs_in_the_United_St... will have to do. Search for "all my songs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fKszPYmj7s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guOaI6_cF10
> The writer who accepts an honour of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honoured him,” he said at the time. “The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honourable circumstances, as in the present case. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/05/sartre-nobel-p...)
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears
0- https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tjwyq4ppzw6s7xatkamydg...
Here are three Dylan songs with big literary value:
* "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts": an amazing example of musical story-telling
* "The Ballad of a Thin Man": Some of the most post-modern lyrics ever put to music...
* "Like a Rolling Stone": One of the most influential songs of all time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_(Bob_Dylan_song)
Here's a great video on 'All Along The Watchtower'. I'm rewatching this today to celebrate!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In6gCrGeZfA
"He not busy being born is busy dying" must be one of greatest lines ever.
At the other end of spectrum is 'Changing of the Guards' in which Bob Dylan seems to be intentionally parodying his own songwriting (still an enjoyable song though).
May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young
May you stay forever young.
This song and 'Tangled Up In Blue' and 'Hurricane' are practically novellas in song form. I think the 'long form storyteller' Dylan is often the least acknowledged, but probably my favorite Dylan song format.
Was that before or after he invented the Internet?
- - -
By the way, you're a mean person peter303, Al Gore is a nice person.
- - -
Edit: Oh, I spoke too soon. He actually has a Nobel, a Grammy and an Emmy award. That's actually even more impressive than I expected.
"He's so unhip when you say Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Dylan Thomas / Whoever he was" http://genius.com/Simon-and-garfunkel-a-simple-desultory-phi...
> for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition
There's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature? I'm not really sure they do, and much as I love the songs, the lyrics by themselves don't have anything like the impact (on me at least) of top-notch poetry
They should. Literature and poetry started from rhapsodies, sagas, and other forms of song-based storytelling, and it's not very good that it diverted so much to some kind of literary ivory tower.
EDIT: Eugene O'Neil, Jacinto Benavente, Dario Fo
I know you were being sarcastic, but your comparison isn't really apt. Novels are not a lyric medium: they're prose. Song lyrics are lyrics set to music. Some poetry is "lyrics" without the music (although lyric poetry is not quite the same thing).
Or the Nibelungenlied ("Lied" is German for song).
Song and story are very much related, especially since back when the people couldn't read, singing stories was more popular than today.
But then again, remember that Sinatra vs. Bieber meme... http://weknowmemes.com/2012/02/music-what-happened/
It suppose it goes without saying, but that meme is some selective criticism.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. "
- Socrates, circa 470 BC
I'm not a Bieber fan, but I think it's unfair to judge him strictly by his lyrics. Or Sinatra for that matter.
To you they don't, to me and others they do. To the current Nobel committee they did this year.
At the end, Nobel prizes are highly subjective and people dependent recognitions - so arguments of the form of X deserves and Y does not are not too meaningful.
Literature and Peace, yes.
Science? No. People will disagree on whether some person who didn't get the price really should have gotten it, but no scientist disputes the value and importance of the work of the people who did get the prize.
In science, perhaps there are people who should have gotten the Nobel prize but they didn't. However, few people would say that the people who did get the prize didn't deserve it.
With Peace and Literature, people do this all the time.
Really? I've spent pretty much all my spare time and money on music for the last 30 years, but no lyrics by themselves have ever had the effect on me that, for example "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" has had
... but then maybe I'm looking at this wrong, and the prize is being awarded for the songs rather than just the lyrics. If that's the case then I guess the prize is well-deserved
One example I might offer on the same line as Prufrock is Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel. From "Save the Life of My Child" all the way to "At the Zoo" we follow a life (or many lives) and its roller coaster. "America" and "Hazy Shade of Winter" are particular favorites.
(as an aside, one of my favorite lyrics of all time is by Gordon Lightfoot in his excellent "Black Day in July" -
"And then the tanks go rolling in
To patch things up as best they can"
Talk about summing up so much in a few words.)
If it's solely because of lyrics, Bob Dylan is not the best lyricist.
It's a weird comfort-food-like pick either way.
Now, I do agree that you can have a great song with lyrics that wouldn't be that great by themselves. But that doesn't mean genuinely good poems can't be written as lyrics.
...don't see why lyrics shouldn't count. Radio plays, films etc. also count.
Anything with text is potentially literature. The rest is up to the snobbery of the judges.
Stephen Sondheim wrote that you can't fit as much complexity into sung lyrics as into read poetry. I wish I had the book in front of me to provide more details, but he reveals a lot about his craft here:
Hat Box
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215415/hat-box-by-st...
(For those not familiar with the genre, many think Sondheim is the great composer of musicals of all time; you might have seen some of his on film, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, recently. His lyrics (and stories) are not of the fun, clever, vapid variety often associated with musicals, but brilliant, creative, and multi-dimensional. - For those interested, Company and Sweeney Todd are probably good places to start.)
I feel ambivalent about this nobel prize. I absolutely feel Dylan is deserving of an award on this scale, and I have no problem viewing his work as literature. So in that sense, I have no real objection.
Still... novelists, playwrights, poets, there were a lot of people practicing more pure literary forms who were passed over here... and they certainly aren't going to be considered for any music awards. I'm just not convinced this was the right way to go. I do feel a kind of unease about it. I'm not really the best one to make the case against it, because I'm not convinced it's the wrong decision either.
[1] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/hurricane.html
There's still time for Leonard Cohen; he'd have been my choice. But another songwriter probably won't happen again so soon.
With God on Our Side (Live 1966)
Other examples of useless shit they done:
* giving Obama the peace price after he failed to shut down Guantanamo
* giving president of Colombia the peace price after he failed to make peace with FARC.
This part is true, but that's because Nobel explicitly specified it this way. The peace prize is one of the original "real" ones. As opposed to the one for economics, which was made up later by others.
(And, well, that contributions to world peace are judged by "different rules and criteria" than physics... makes some sense.)
I think this difference in _who_ is doing the awarding and how they are related to the people receiving the awards is what dagw was trying to get at above. It's the difference between experts in a field selecting prizes for other members of their field and democratically-elected politicians playing political football with prizes in a field they themselves are totally not involved in and likely not much interested in to start with. :(
Chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine are sciences that have practitioners. Literature is an art that has practitioners. But peace is not a science nor an art. Nevertheless, Alfred Nobel saw fit to set up the peace prize. The rumor is that he did this because of hurt feelings after being accused of profiting from munitions manufacturing (he made his fortunes through inventions in explosives).
Of course there is a difference in who is doing the awarding. Nobel's decision to give the prize-awarding responsibility to Norwegian parliament might have had something to do with knowing peace activists at the time when Sweden and Norway were approaching the dissolution of their union, and there was fear of war.
I can't really point out any significantly better subject matter experts in working for peace than Norwegian Parliament.
In hindsight, it _may_ have been a good idea to have a process in place for handing off to a better-suited body at some point (e.g. past prize recipients, the UN). Hard to say, of course.
No, I trust the Norwegian parliament and its assigned panel a lot more. Nobel Peace Prize and its reputation is theirs. So far they've done a decent job, even if some of the appointments - like the premature selection of Obama - are disappointing.
I trust them more than the UN too, fwiw, but that's because it's a really low bar.
> Nobel Peace Prize and its reputation is theirs.
Yes, but they don't seem to care very much about its reputation.
> So far they've done a decent job
This opinion is not universally shared.
The Obama thing I agree was rather ridiculous, as were various other Peace Prize awards.
That is a weird way to put it, considering that nominations for the peace prize closed just 11 days after Obama took office, and the prize was awarded 9 months later.
It's more reasonable to say that prize was given to Obama based on his campaign promises, before he even had any actual chance to close Guantanamo. (Which he still hasn't done, because obviously it is much easier to talk about it in a campaign than to really create a sustainable policy for what to do with the detainees.)
"Visions of Johanna"
I don't think that anyone in modern culture has impacted society in the ways Bob has.
Yours truly, Tambourine Man
Without ideals or violence
She doesn't have to say she's faithful
Yet she's true like ice, like fire
So, er, have you ever actually heard him sing?
(I'm not a big fan myself, though I admire his craft. But generic? Really?)
What singers like Dylan? Have you ever listened to him? His voice is... not exactly a common sound.
>the music itself was nothing extraordinarily unique if you look into the long tail of music being made at the time.
No music is entirely unique. But some people do it better than others, add their own twists, and build something unique.
>It's like saying 7-Up is the uncola and you are rejecting the establishment by drinking it instead of Coke.
Frankly, he's no longer anti-esblishment, if he ever was. But that doesn't mean he's a talentless hack, which seems to be what you're claiming.
Folk along with rock and roll were the rising youth movements of the time and I'm not sure the older generation at the time understood it very well. Today it does seem like much of top pop promoted music is half "written by committee" but I'm not sure that was the case back then (see Frank Zappa's take on this from the eighties, which I personally think is even more true today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4wsURn3rw)
Look at the top of the charts from 1962 when Bob Dylan released his first album. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...) There's some R&B and rock for sure but also a heck of a lot of big band / jazz type instrumental (your Kenny Balls, Acker Bilks, David Rose, etc.), some country as well (Johnny Tillotson, Claude King, etc.), and cutesy pop numbers (the "Mashed Potato Time" is #3 for 1962).
The "folk music revival" Dylan started in was also fairly massive in the early 1960s but I would say at the time the top was represented by Peter Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio (both are on the Hot 100 chart in 1962). Bob Dylan won't appear on the Hot 100 until 1965, #41 for "Like a Rolling Stone". (Of course, Peter Paul and Mary brought Dylan to a national audience with "Blowin' in the Wind".) In 1962 this wasn't even a decade out from when Pete Seeger / the Weavers got tangled in that McCarthyism drama, so it's fair to say that the whiff of anti-establishment the folk revival movement had was a somewhat justified feeling.
Of course, Bob Dylan went well beyond the folk revival. I personally don't get the vibe that Dylan was quite as anti-establishment or political as many of the others in the folk revival, nor do I imagine that he thinks of himself as a "rebel". He's more of a poet plain and simple; what makes him unique is more his words / lyrics than anything else.
On the whole I agree with Rorem. But on the range of Nobelists for Literature, I guess that Bob Dylan isn't all that much an outlier.