Third, his work is in a new genre of song, call it “literary pop song” hence, it can be thought of as being on the edges of literature, or as containing elements of it. First, should Dylan’s songs be regarded as poems? Second, if they cannot, doesn’t Dylan still count, and in a prize-worthy way, as a “literary figure”? Besides blazing the new path in songwriting, he influenced many aspiring writers of poetry and prose, captured key elements of the zeitgeist, and contributed many widely quoted phrases to our speech. The debate over Dylan’s Nobel Prize has instead been shaped by four key questions. Such worries are probably lurking behind a good deal of the resistance to the prize that has been expressed. We have reason to continue to worry about these costs, given their connection to certain corrosive cultural trends of democratization and sophist-tication. And there has been hardly any discussion of how this change brought real artistic costs alongside the obvious benefits. In the debate that has unfolded since the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dylan, there has been surprisingly little attention to the way Dylan’s achievement initiated a new range of possibility for songwriting. Still, scanning the landscape of pre-1963 songwriting, there were very few songs that confronted the listener, as Dylan’s songs did on a regular basis, with prophetic protest, philosophic reflection, psychological analysis, or real poetry. True, the most artful songwriters might hint at hidden depths Dylan suggested, for example, that bluesman Robert Johnson regularly did so. The love song was the commonest kind of song, and it focused on certain universal features of the love affair without the baggage of confessional reflection.įolk traditions white and black allowed a substantially greater range of topics and expression, but even here, song patterns were fairly set. Their lyrics avoided literary elusiveness, philosophic depth, and controversial political statement. This was especially the case with the songs that came from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, even with the better ones we call the “standards” of the Great American Songbook. Prior to Dylan, popular songwriting was far more formulaic, both in its selection of subject matter and its approach to it. The most significant aspect of Bob Dylan’s achievement is the revolution he unleashed in songwriting. This essay appears in the Spring 2017 issue of Modern Age.
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