Commentary

BRADLEY R. GITZ: Somethin' happenin' here

Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was a welcome diversion from our hideous presidential election.

When I read about it, I burst out laughing. With all due respect to one of the idols of my youth, I couldn't help myself.

Like many baby boomers, I went through my Dylan phase, wearing out copies of his greatest hits albums and reducing Anthony Scaduto's wonderful biography to a broken-spine, marked-up mess. I scrutinized the lyrics that apparently so impressed the Nobel Committee, even making a project out of memorizing those from "Desolation Row," in an effort to figure out what it all meant.

At some point, though, I realized it didn't really mean much of anything, and that far from a prophet for the age (which, to his credit, he never claimed to be), Dylan was simply a superb songwriter who came along at the right time and had an unequaled capacity for making gibberish rhyme.

The last Dylan album I bought was Desire (1976), and I haven't listened to anything he's done since. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde were my favorites, but the ones I go back to most often are the under-rated Nashville Skyline and the original issue of The Basement Tapes, a slapdash collage of songs and scraps of songs that, like The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street and The Beatles' White Album, is much more than the sum of its parts.

My interest was temporarily revived awhile back when I heard that Dylan had recorded a tribute album to an idol from my more mature years, Frank Sinatra (who back in the 1960s could have seen that coming?), but I simply couldn't wrap my mind around the idea of perhaps the most famously bad voice in music history, at least by traditional criteria, singing songs made famous by "The Voice."

On my "desert island" list are the duet albums recorded by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, an incongruous pairing no doubt, but Dylan rasping Frank was going too far.

Almost as funny as Dylan winning his Nobel was reading a piece by Alex Shephard for the New Republic in which, just days before the announcement, he predicted "Bob Dylan 100 percent is not going to win." The chortles stopped when remembering that I had Donald Trump's odds of winning the GOP nomination at 200-1 against in a column from about a year ago.

In all, the reaction to Dylan's improbable prize fell into fairly predictable camps, with those who never really "got" him remaining baffled and his devotees rapturous. Indeed, the latter are sufficiently referential they would probably applaud if the man from Hibbing, Minn., won the presidency next month on a write-in vote or was someday elected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences (if literature is an elastic concept, why not science too?)

In this, I was reminded somewhat of the way people tend to react to Supreme Court rulings--if you support legal abortion and same-sex marriage, for instance, you applaud when the court makes those things happen, with scant regard for the legal reasoning offered up.

Once I realized that what I was reading wasn't an Onion parody, I thought of certain important authors--Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, et al.--who had just been snubbed. And that if the Nobel Committee truly wanted to make a definitional point, a more judicious one might have been to try to erode the irritating distinction between "literary" and "genre" fiction, perhaps by recognizing the science fiction/fantasy of Ursula K. Le Guin or the spy thrillers of John le Carre (my own favorite, along such lines, would have been Tom Wolfe, who, after revolutionizing journalism in the 1960s, has written stimulating essays on all kinds of topics and books like The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities that no one else could have written).

Finally, there was the thought that if songwriters are really just poets of a different sort, why weren't George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, or Cole Porter ever considered for the Nobel, or, for that matter, Dylan contemporaries John Lennon and Paul McCartney?

In the end, the hunch is that the Nobel Committee just wanted to make a splash this time around, perhaps to compensate for a certain recent drift toward the obscure and only modestly relevant (Elfriede Jelinek? Herta Müller?). An award that once routinely went to household names like Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck needed to finally go again to one that more than a few hundred people would recognize.

But if Dylan is indeed "our greatest living poet," as some implausibly claim (with the word implausible applied to both "greatest" and "poet"), then things have obviously gone a bit downhill in the world of verse and meter since William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot collected their prizes.

Bob Dylan never claimed to be anything more than a folk singer in the grand tradition of Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, but that was good enough. His most ardent fans were more pretentious and obnoxious on his behalf than he ever was.

I haven't heard Dylan comment yet on his prize, but whatever he eventually says, I'm sure he had a good laugh about it too.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 10/24/2016

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