Posted on 04/08/2008 8:51:40 AM PDT by Borges
Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock 'n' roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall. Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.
"I am in disbelief," Dylan fan and fellow Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz said of Dylan's award.
Diaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," a tragic but humorous story of desire, politics and violence among Dominicans at home and in the United States, won the fiction prize. Diaz, 39, worked for more than a decade on his first novel — "I spent most of the time on dead-ends and doubts," he told The Associated Press on Monday — and at one point included a section about Dylan.
"Bob Dylan was a problem for me," Diaz, who has also published a story collection, "Drown," said with a laugh. "I had one part that was 40 pages long, the entire chapter was organized around Bob Dylan's lyrics over a two year-period (1967-69). By the end of it, I wanted to throttle my like of Bob Dylan."
The Pulitzer for drama was given to Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," which, like Diaz's novel, combines comedy and brutality. Letts calls the play "loosely autobiographical," a bruising family battle spanning several generations of unhappiness and unfulfilled dreams.
"It's a play I have been working on in my head and on paper for many years now," said Letts, reached by the AP in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, where "August: Osage County" had its world premiere last summer.
"There were just some details from my grandmother, my grandfather's suicide (for example) that I had played over and over in my head for many, many years. I always thought, `Well, that's the stuff of drama right there.'"
Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, already a National Book Award winner for "Time and Materials," won the poetry Pulitzer, as did Philip Schultz's "Failure."
"This is the book ... I have always wanted to write," Schultz told the AP. "Everyone is expert on one subject and failure seems to be mine. ... I was born into it. My father went bankrupt when I was 18 and he died soon afterward out of (a) terrible sense of shame. And we lost everything, my mother and I."
Other winners Monday: Daniel Walker Howe, for history, for "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"; Saul Friedlander, general nonfiction, for "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"; for biography, John Matteson's "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father."
"I wrote my book in a way that is generally accessible to the curious literate reader," Howe said. "And I think that's very important, and I wish more books were written that way."
"It's a special honor because it ties me even more to the country of which I'm now a citizen," said Friedlander, who became a U.S. citizen seven years ago and won the German Booksellers Association's 2007 Peace Prize for his work on documenting the Holocaust.
"I am surprised, grateful, overjoyed — and a little embarrassed to do this with my first book," said Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College in New York City who added that his 14-year-old daughter was an inspiration.
"Not only did I understand parenting better after writing the book, but being a parent helped me to write the book."
Dylan's victory doesn't mean that the Pulitzers have forgotten classical composers. The competitive prize for music was given to David Lang's "The Little Match Girl Passion," which opened last fall at Carnegie Hall, where Dylan has also performed.
"Bob Dylan is the most frequently played artist in my household so the idea that I am honored at the same time as Bob Dylan, that is humbling," Lang told the AP.
Long after most of his contemporaries either died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and release highly regarded CDs, most recently "Modern Times." Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics — even digging through his garbage for clues — since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as "Blowin' in the Wind" made Dylan a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation.
His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences. His memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One," received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature.
According to publisher Simon & Schuster, Dylan is working on a second volume of memoirs. No release date has been set.
You must be a youngster. Rod Stewart used to be pretty darned good, but I think you have to back as far as “ A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse” for aural evidence thereof. Likely recorded before you were born (I peeked at your home page, admiral).
If Rod Stewart dresses up as John Wayne in Rio Bravo, he's still gay.
“My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.”
I think what Dylan sings also suggests “bodes” where printed lyric has “boats” and various folks reactions that sort of stuff plays into the differing reactions to Dylan’s singing.
And you frequent these places often?
McQuinn took that line and then wrote the "Ballad of Easy Rider".
It would not surprise me that there are many changes in the lyrics as sung by one artist vs. the other.
That's Dylan, all right. He owns the songs and probably feels that he can repaint them anyway he wants. Stardom came quickly for Dylan and lasted because no matter whether folks hated him or loved him, they talked about him.
His success in getting attention though was supported by his talent, which was in part, his imitation of his favorite singers. He listened over and over to the music of his favorites. Yet one cannot become someone else so Dylan began with imitating his predecessors and then tweaked that imitation into his own unique style.
Initially I think he started out just trying to be as good as the musicians he had listened to as a kid. Then as time went on, while continuing to pay homage to his audio mentors, he also seemed to deliberately age his vocal sound to greater than his real life age and that's where the half-spoken, often hard to understand lyrics came in.
That's a very interesting observation, tdunbar. Bodes does fit in there quite nicely. LOL, I wouldn't be surprised to see Dylan change that line again in the future.
If you have time, listen to the linked audio version on YouTube of Dylan singing it. If you wish, you can just listen to the audio because the video is made up of lots of stills. Warning, it's a bit slower than The Byrds' version but Dylan pronounces each word precisely, very clearly.
Dylan singing My Back Pages (1964?)
Thanks for the article; it’s worth reading. Although I still wouldn’t buy any of his records I now have more respect for him; thanks for the clarity.
I liked Dylan’s poetry, but he had a voice like a man with a red hot poker being shoved up his butt.
"Bad Liver, Broken Heart" ping.
.
Thanks
Interesting thread!
Don’t know if Dylan can act, but that’s a face that belongs in a Western. Maybe even a Spaghetti Western.
A lot of people don’t get Tom Waits, just like a lot of people don’t get Bob Dylan, and complain that he can’t sing, revealing more about themselves than about him. Others don’t get opera, or don’t get James Joyce. On the other hand, there is nothing to get in Debbie Boone’s singing or Sheryl Crow’s for that matter. But a stylist like Dylan and Waits, or, heck, Ray Charles, has to be ‘gotten’.
Wow. That's so cool. I love these stories behind the songs. I saw Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, David Crosby and a few side musicians perform as "The Original Byrds" in a tribute to Roy Orbison. There's a long legal story about the name they used at the concert.
At the concert I don't recall having seen the incredibly talented singer, songwriter and co-founder of the Byrds, Gene Clark on stage and sadly he passed away the following year. Then two years later, the Byrds Drummer Michael Clarke also passed away.
When the "Original Byrds" began playing after the first few opening lines in "Mister Tambourine Man" out from stage left casually walked a most familiar figure, the subject of this thread, strumming his guitar and singing. If there was a person in the audience who hadn't been a Dylan fan before that, without a doubt they became one in that moment.
bd476, I’ll listen later (no audio now). Btw, I’m not arguing for either boats or bodes but rather for allusion to both. That sort of thing is very common in Dylan’s songs, imo, and one of the reasons no one sings Dylan like Dylan. Just as in his sonnets Shakespeare plays off various meanings of words, in his songs Dylan often bends the pronunciations to further the poetics. Sounds that way to me, anyway.
>a face that belongs in a Western
such as Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” :)
“Rod Stewart’s music is gay; I have no idea about the man himself. That you would hold him up as an exemplar of anything “good” about music speaks volumes about your taste, though.”
You should listen to Rod Stewart do the vocals on Jeff Beck’s Truth album.
I still have that album, one of the all time greats!
Understood, absolutely, and it was an excellent observation on your part.
Layers upon layers of meaning, all to be interpreted, or not, and enjoyed or not, and felt, or not, as in how a painter moves his audience with an odd stroke of the paintbrush, that is Dylan for me. © bd476
(Please note that the above is my attempt to go for the Most Awkward, Poorly Constructed Sentence in the World, all while listening to Dylan's music, and the local news.)
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