I’m not saying Bob Dylan isn’t deserving of laurels, though one might consider Dylan to have been adequately lauded in his own century. When the Nobel Prize for literature goes to a songwriter, what does that say about the committee’s regard for contemporary literature?
Not My Tribe
The Myth of Middle Ground
Could be worse. Bill O, Really? has a lot of books on the same theme as the Killing Reagan one. Just cranks them out and cranks buy them.
Basically selling his signature, really. Some of his accomplices at Fox used to do it regularly. But the committee members probably have a higher education than 6th grade, don’t live in trailer parks and, as most of them just ain’t going to be U.S. citizens they probably wouldn’t give a used kleenex to Beck or O’Reilly or Limbaugh. I mean, because of course their xenophobic rants would offend any foreign citizen and most U.S. citizens.
Dylan has been writing since before I was born. When I go to shop at a certain store that rhymes with Ring Stupor I slide by the Top Ten Bestsellers rack and, not really being one to judge a book by its cover, I’ll go right ahead and do exactly that. With a smile on my face and a song in my heart. “Tacky” and “Lurid” come to mind.
It’s like novel-length editions of National Enquirer.
Cheers for the Troubadour. I’m super glad I’m not a critic or an editor for a publishing house. I would become a straight up loony by the end of my first year. Reading is easy on the brain if the writing is done right. So is music, same conditionals. Dylan, in the parlance of the old South, “you done good, son… real good”
I got addicted to this really goofy and insane TV show, “Family Guy”, had an episode with Anne Murray. She mentions that she didn’t write the songs, just had really good writers. Somebody who writes and performs good music is gifted indeed. I’ll enjoy it.
Then, also, the classics were, in their own days, drowned out in a a sea of bullshit. In the day of Mark Twain there were thousands of books published in America alone that just didn’t make the cut. And the newest fad was suddenly pulp paper. Extra cheap. People could afford to write whatever trash they wanted. But it was fragile, after a century the amount of first editions printed on pulp fell apart. The pulp was still there. But the glue that held the fibers together wasn’t.
Stuff written in the 1920s is getting rare. In the same period people were preserving the pulp by taking pictures on film. As in acetone, or acetate, or cellophane. As in “cellulose nitrate” or “smokeless gunpowder”. If it doesn’t break down in a microsecond due to being ignited by a primer in an explosive device like a rifle cartridge or bomb, it still deteriorates. And it was expensive. How many people did you know in say, 1970 who actually had a home movie camera, how many of those had the technology to make those films into microfiche or converted them to digital videotape? And of all those last distillations, how many were Oscar quality movies?
The contemporary works of Mark Twain and made a splash, the 99.9% of them were bullshit, those that would probably be a good read, most of them went the way of Uncle George’s home movies.
How many of the top 10 hits of 1824 can you recite? If you know more than just Beethoven’s Ninth you got me at least doubled. But there were songwriters and song-wrongers a-plenty. If somebody would prove to me there weren’t thousands of new songs in 1824 I will kick my own ass. Which is a spectacular sight. I personally have never seen it. It would get hundreds of millions hits on youtube the first day. And the next week nobody would remember it.
I just had to do this, I got on Amazon, typed in Bob Dylan Lyrics and got a book with all the 492 songs HE RELEASED. In the 90s the surviving Beatles recorded a remix of “Free as a bird” by John Lennon. Which I haven’t heard yet. Sure, I got criticisms from people who DID hear it but I just ain’t scored me a copy of it. I do know it wasn’t a top 10. I’ll try to get it and I’ll probably like it. One thing I can’t do is remember just who exactly was in the top 10 that week. And I’m a trivia freak.
But here’s the part that probably made up the collective mind of the Committee to award the prize. The impact made, over more than 55 years. And a lot of it was collaborations with others who made an impact. Woodie Guthrie. Johnny Cash, Just a start. That’s the awesome part. Their collective songs actually changed politics, instead of chronicling politics, and not just in the U.S. nor just in the English conquered countries. Music has a certain ethereal quality to it, like fog only more entertaining. And he’s very expert in how to use it.