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’ve been listening to Dylan for 40+ years and have never failed to understand a lyric. (As in hearing the words he’s saying; some of the messages he’s trying to put forth still escape me, LOL!)
Heh. On the other hand, you could tell that was what Sting had intended to say, as oppposed to Mumbles - where you couldn’t and can’t tell if those were the lyrics or if he meant to say something else.
When asked for comment, Mr. Dylan replied “WAHSzuh HurUUUNas WammbaHAUH!”
Son jacob may be a better musician, but son Jacob does not hold a candle to him as a songwriter
I can understand Little Richard AND Mick Jagger just fine. The rest I either don’t care for or haven’t listened to.
I don’t understand how you can’t understand what Michael Stipe is singing. He’s a lot easier to understand than old Mumbles.
I would be curious to know who would you consider to be his equal in terms of song writing skills?
You must be speaking for yourself; I have no problem hearing what Dylan is saying.
You should see what Cash did with NiN’s “Hurt”. F-ing amazing.
He can carry a tune, just not all tunes.
As for Rod Stewart - what does his being gay have to do with anything? As Steve Tyler once said, the number of gay people in the music industry is surprising.
I have yet to find a Dylan song where what he’s saying is 100% clear. Most of it sounds like “bleh bleah blah BLAH!”
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I think you’ve finally outed yourself as someone who really hasn’t listened to much Dylan. Your continued harping on ‘he can’t sing’ just sounds like so much of the boilerplate criticism we hear about him routinely. Nasal voice? You betcha. Imcomprehensible? That’s just silly.
Go download a few tunes from Blood on the Tracks, or even Blond on Blond. If you can’t make out what he’s saying on ‘To Johanna’, or ‘Shelter from the Storm’ or even ‘Lilly Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts’, you aren’t trying.
What is the Johnny Cash song set around “moving down the line” and using imagry of a water pump? That thing was burned in my brain as brilliant for a month, and now I can’t even humm the tune.
See post 83 - I’m not the only one.
Way to go Mr. Zimmerman!
Ping
I’ve heard far more Dylan than I ever wanted to hear. Guess what my parents had a huge collection of and played often?
“I don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.”
I’m a Dylan fan and a Sting fan, but comparing them is a futile exercise. I can think of dozens of Dylan lyrics that would qualify for the Pulitzer, so I believe the award is well met. Sting? Not so much.
I would be curious to know who would you consider to be his equal in terms of song writing skills?
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I have a bootleg Arlo Guthrie recording on which he talks about Dylan and songwriting. Compares it to fishing. And Dylan is almost always upstream from everybody else.
Then he turns around and absolutely butcher's "Danny Boy".
There are some songs that once Cash does them, he own's them, but then there are exceptions.
LOL!
My personal favorite all time Dylan album. "Tangled Up in Blue" is Dylan at his story tellin best.
Sorry, but Sting’s got it all over Dylan in terms of imagination and use of imagery. He’s not a contemporary, of course - he has the advantage of time.
***
Hes the king of the ninth world
The twisted son of the fog bells toll
In each and every lobster cage
A tortured human soul
These are the souls of broken factories
The subject slaves of the broken crown
The dead accounting of old guilty promises
These are the souls of the broken town
***
Hm, Greek/Roman mythology and imagery, adapted to modern times in a pop song. Not by Dylan.
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