We, Minnesotans, have another reason to be proud: Our very own local-kid-makes-good, Robert Allen Zimmerman, has just won the Nobel Prize for literature.
That kid, now 75, is singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
He is the second Minnesotan to win the Nobel for literature, the first being that other major writer/eagle-eyed social observer – Sauk Centre-born novelist Sinclair Lewis.
Why Dylan? The prize is usually given to novelists or poets, not singer-songwriters. Dylan is a new and perfect choice for the prize: a poet who happens to sing his visions. His more than 500 songs have astonished us for decades. That “spokesman of his generation” is the most oft-quoted poet-songwriter of the past 50 years.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” (from Subterranean Homesick Blues – 1965).
I have long argued Dylan is the Shakespeare of our time. Both of those wordsmiths forged a new language, mixing together street-corner vernacular with traditional forms of oral and written language, combining low and high cultural forms – hipster slang meets the Bible, for example:
“God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’
Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’
God said, ‘No,’ Abe said ‘What?’
God said, ‘You can do what you want, Abe,
But the next time you see me comin’, you better run.’ “
(From the song Highway 61 Revisited – 1965)
Shakespeare and Dylan helped us see anew; they fine-tuned our vision. In shaping language to both reflect and to create realities, they influenced the way we see the world, the way we think, the way we react. They brought a sharp focus to what the rest of us could only see blurry in this world of sometimes bewildering realities.
In the 1960s, we would listen to Dylan songs and ask ourselves: “How did he know that? How come we didn’t notice that?”
Like Sinclair Lewis, Dylan was not only an eagle-eyed observer; he was clairvoyant, time and again seeing changes ahead of his time, our time.
There is a vivid clarity, like a feverish dream, to everything he wrote. Dylan’s songs brought a breathtaking breadth and depth to music, inviting us to explore and question all life experiences: political, social, cultural, economic, spiritual, interpersonal.
Why is he so important? To fully appreciate the range of his great gifts, it helps to be older – like over 60. His magic is partly a “had-to-be-there” kind of thing. We who are now duffers grew up on radio-pop songs – fun but mostly trite teen-angst love ditties.
Then, one day in the fall of 1965, I put on my Decca record player an album called Highway 61 Revisited. I was rendered speechless as I stuttered, yelling for my younger brother, Michael, to quick run upstairs to hear this new stuff. We were stunned when we heard these opening lines from a song called Desolation Row.
“They’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown.
The beauty parlor’s filled with sailors, the circus is in town.
Here comes the blind commissioner, they’ve got him in a trance.
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker, the other is in his pants.
And the riot squad they’re restless, they need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row.”
When I heard those strangely beautiful lyrics, I knew instantly I was listening to a brand-new force in music. He was giving us a refocused vision of our complicated world. In the case of Desolation Row, Dylan was painting in words a hallucinatory picture of a disturbing and grotesquely comic society off its rails, far from Eden. It took my breath away – still does.
That same year, in mid-November, I saw-heard Dylan perform in Minneapolis Auditorium. The first half of the show was acoustic, his early folk songs, those lightning flashes illuminating injustices. After intermission, the second half was “electric” as Dylan and his band exploded into his folk-rock songs and let loose those cascading phrases of astonishing images. Half of the audience, the “folk purists so-called,” walked out in protest; they didn’t like his going electric, his rock ‘n’ roll “sell-out.” Oh, what “purist” fools they were; oh, what they missed!
For those of us who have listened to Dylan from the beginning with intense fascination and endless pleasure, we are happy he has been honored with the Nobel. It’s a long-overdue recognition this scruffy kid from Minnesota with the “voice like a dog caught in a barbed-wire fence” is one of the towering geniuses and pervasive cultural influences of our time, of all time.
And, by the way, naysayers, make no mistake – this Nobel laureate wouldn’t make the Sunday choir, but he is not only a great writer, he is a great singer, too – that is, if you’re lucky enough to have a sensibility and ears attuned to his expressive brilliance.
