Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom.
Reinventer of folk music, voice of the 1960s, blues singer, rock star, born-again Christian, champion of gospel, country singer, old-style crooner, and now winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has found a million different ways to say the same thing.
I have been to just one Bob Dylan concert, about a decade ago. He concluded with his 1965 masterpiece "Like A Rolling Stone," whose brutal lyrics seem to exult in the suffering of someone brought low.
In concert, however, the song was turned upside down. As people sang the chorus along with Dylan, they were exhilarated, jubilant, exultant. Far from laid low, they were unchained. As Dylan sang it, "Like A Rolling Stone" had become a declaration of independence.
But of course, that declaration was there all along. Even in 1965 the chorus was a cry of defiance. "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose"--and that's not all bad.
Though sometimes cruel, Dylan is also capable of great tenderness. "Lay Lady Lay," his most celebrated romantic song, is uncharacteristically mawkish. Much better and more real, and in its own way a celebration of freedom, is "Buckets of Rain": I like your smile/And your fingertips/I like the way that you move your hips/I like the cool way you look at me/Everything about you is bringing me/Misery.
Or consider the surpassing sweetness of "Forever Young," written for his son: May your hands always be busy/May your feet always be swift/May you have a strong foundation/When the winds of changes shift/May your heart always be joyful/And may your song always be sung/May you stay forever young.
Dylan is often categorized as a folk singer, but he doesn't like that.
He hates being described as the "voice of his generation." Asked by an interviewer in 1965 how he thinks of himself, he said "as a song and dance man." Booed in the 1960s for turning away from protest songs, he said, with sarcasm and contempt (and a kind of truth too): "All my songs are protest songs. That's all I do is protest."
In his sort-of autobiography Chronicles: Volume 1, Dylan wrote that "songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment"; they were a "different republic, some liberated republic." He didn't plan to stir things up, but "thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with."
America's poet of rootlessness lit a flame, and it burns right through that frost.
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Cass Sunstein, a Bloomberg View columnist, is director of the Harvard Law School's program on behavioral economics and public policy.
Editorial on 10/14/2016