Dylan Ping
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.
“I still have that album, one of the all time greats!”
A lot of the giants of the sixties are being mentioned here, Rod Stewart, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Bob Dylan, David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Mick Jagger.
Some day I would like to put together a list of what some people call the boomer scum of the sixties, responsible for everything bad, and then point out how many of them are not boomers at all (such as the above).
Count me as an anti-Dylanista.
He is way overrated. Although his son is a dream with talent obviously inherited from his Mother.
I got three hours credit from the head of my college English department head for a paper as long as pobrecito Diaz' on lyrics of a hundred Dylan songs up to the same period.
I work with a woman who went to Hibbing with [Zimmerman] who she says "serenaded us in the auditorium on the piano and it was not the type of music you might expect".
I saw Baez under a full moon in Redrocks in '72 and she was flawless musically but off one-eighty in zeitgeist--and held lifelong animosity against you-can-call-me-Bob for his "betrayal".
I had to tell some teens this week (as Like a Rolling Stone played on their FM) that once upon a time Dylan was roundly rebuked for being so e-lectric.
Some say I can't understand you when the showers running, calling to mind "you walk into the room with your pencil in your hand".
You know, it's a better use of a Pulitzer to give one to this guy than to Walter Duranty Stalin's butt boy and the darling of the New York Times.
I’m glad you enjoyed it devolve, I know how you like music of all sorts.
Yes, I recalled that you had written a paper on 100 of his songs.
Good comment. As a matter of fact, it’s meaningless to compare singers. If they’re any good, their music comes from a unique place.
>Don’t know if Dylan can act, but that’s a face that belongs in a Western. Maybe even a Spaghetti Western.<
Pat Gareet and Billy the Kid. Dylan played Alias, a knife thrower.
Another off-the-wall fave: On the Road Again
Well, I woke up in the morning
There’s frogs inside my socks
Your mama, she’s a-hidin’
Inside the icebox
Your daddy walks in wearin’
A Napoleon Bonaparte mask
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, do you have to ask?
Well, I go to pet your monkey
I get a face full of claws
I ask who’s in the fireplace
And you tell me Santa Claus
The milkman comes in
He’s wearing a derby hat
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you have to ask me that?
Well, I asked for something to eat
I’m hungry as a hog
So I get brown rice, seaweed
And a dirty hot dog
I’ve got a hole
Where my stomach disappeared
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, I gotta think you’re really weird.
Your grandpa’s cane
It turns into a sword
Your grandma prays to pictures
That are pasted on a board
Everything inside my pockets
Your uncle steals
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, I can’t believe that you’re for real.
Well, there’s fist fights in the kitchen
They’re enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in
Even he’s gotta take a side
Even the butler
He’s got something to prove
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you don’t move?
I’ll drink to that.
Is that not typical of a leftist, who preaches and loudly proclaims the uniqueness of individuality?
Who was Dylan betraying?
Her cause of liberalism? If he was not a true believer would that not be a bigger betrayal, one of hypocrisy?
Or by going electric? If he stayed true to his folk roots is he not then denying himself his right to develop musically?
Or the third possible betrayal, which she may be irked by, is the commercialization that the electric music brought to his songs, thus he was a sell out. But, is one to be restricted to conform to her idealism, if they do not believe?
One criticism that I can accept of Mr Dylan is that he has restrained himself by not allowing his true voice to be heard through open dialog clearly enunciating his views on today's issues. But to do that risks two things:
The loss of his fan base because he does not support their causes.
Criticism from those who will say, 'just shut up and mumble your stupid songs'.
As to my thoughts on it: he is what he is and as long as he is true to himself and his family, I have no Cross (or Star) to bear and will continue enjoying his music either through his vocals or that of others.
Unique group you have there.
Maybe I do not "get" Ray Charles -- but to me he was simply an awesome talent who loved music, simple and enjoyable and with few complexities. There are many like him (Solomon Burke, Bobby Blue Bland, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis) Ray stood above the others though in part because he had the ability to cross over into many genres that some of the others named did not share, at least to the same extent.
But Dylan and Waits are two that are unique. Their songs are often wonderfully performed by others:
Dylan - Watchtower, It's All over Now, Baby Blue, Wanted Man, Forever Young
Waits - Downtown Train, 'Ol 55, Keep the Devil Down in the Hole.
To me no one can do a Ray Charles song like Ray can, no one.
Yet for Dylan and Waits there are songs that no one else can do them as well as the original (Cold, Cold Ground, Tangled Up in Blue)
Sounds like you have some issues that have nothing at all to do with music.
Dylan did not respond to Baez' jibes that she "need some of that vagueness now, from you, you who are so good at being vague".
Do we want the commentary on the card next to the art hanging in the museum, is there someone who comes on stage after the Stones disappeared to overlay a grid of familiar concepts so we can crate it for the voyage home.
Dylan has been in the vanguard and never looked back to explain.
But he would, would he not, be the first to eschew orthodoxy, the iron fascism of the single interpretation demanded by the Left.
For all its posturing, the Left is anti-freedom and hence anti-art.
So we're faced with all these bitter pygmies sour-graping the pioneers.
But you and I we've been through that
ps, I like your tagline which fits well with mine.
The fun part is, every lyric Weird All sings in that song is a palindrome.
As an old fart, let me say that the summer of 1965 was one of the best summers of my life, and “Like A Rolling Stone” still IS the summer of ‘65. And everybody was doing Dylan - the Byrds, Sonny & Cher, the Turtles - and his music, like that of the Beatles, could be done in so many different styles and it still sounded good. “All I Really Want To Do” was on the charts by three different artists at the same time. I’m glad I didn’t miss it, what a great time it was.
It’s no more or less comprehensible than an actual Bob Dylan song as sung by “Mumbles” Dylan. :D :D
He certainly can repaint his songs however he feels. I know some who go to a Dylan concert and leave disappointed because none of his songs sound like they're 'supposed to', but that's why every Dylan concert is a new experience. I love the way he plays A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall nowadays, he gave it a rock beat and it sounds great, better than the original in fact. As far as I know the only way to hear the new version is live, which is kind of a shame as I'd like to have it in my collection.
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