Bob Dylan, Nobel Laureate in Literature, Was More Than a 1960s Protest Singer

"All I've ever done is sing songs that are honest, that express a vast, new reality. They say I spoke for a whole generation, but I have almost nothing in common with that generation, let alone any real understanding of it."

No one argues about Bob Dylan's hold on people. Whenever Rolling Stone redoes its ranking of the greatest musicians, this 75-year-old folk and rock singer has a good chance of coming out on top.

Even so, when the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature went to the American musician Bob Dylan on October 13, Swedish time, people were taken aback.

A folk singer who had published only one book of poetry, one book of sketches, and one memoir, whose main achievement lay in writing and performing a large body of popular music — what qualified him for the Nobel Prize in Literature? The citation from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Dylan had "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Nobel literature committee, tied Dylan to the literary tradition of the ancient Greek poets, trying to restore the link between poetry and music. "If you look back 2,500 years, you find Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetry that was meant to be listened to — meant to be performed, sometimes with instruments, just as Dylan does now," Danius said.

Those explanations still take some chewing over; they don't feel self-evident. But far fewer people thought to ask the next questions — why Bob Dylan, and not Leonard Cohen, a poet-singer too? Both had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature before. To some, it looks as though Dylan's social value and cultural weight as a person are what actually won him the prize. In that case, what about Joan Baez or Paul McCartney, who became famous alongside him in the 1960s?

That Dylan's influence outstrips any of theirs is hard to dispute. On nearly every list like Rolling Stone's "Greatest Musicians," "Greatest Songs," or "Top 10 Singer-Songwriters," he ranks highest. The Guardian ran a simple count of books about the world's rock musicians for exactly this reason, and found that in British library catalogs more books have been written about Bob Dylan than about anyone else — 138 of them.

After two stunned seconds, people started cheering the news across social media.

Where did that influence come from? The simplest answer: Bob Dylan was a protest singer.

In a hoarse voice, off-key, he sang about war, love, bewilderment, and disappointment, and he came to stand for 1960s America. It was an age of upheaval — anti-establishment feeling, opposition to the Vietnam War, hippies, student movements, the civil rights movement, feminism, and every other political movement and current of thought were all rising at once. Dylan, along with Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and others, threw himself into these movements and wrote a great many protest songs. He cut the figure of a dissenter. It was cool.

The most famous instance came on August 28, 1963, when the famous million-strong civil rights march reached the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Black civil rights leader, gave his impassioned "I Have a Dream" speech. A crowd of singers who supported the movement performed together onstage a song by Dylan, then only 22 years old, "Blowin' in the Wind." At the time it became something close to an anthem for the whole civil rights movement.

"How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man? How many times must the cannon balls fly before they're forever banned?"

No Direction Home, the Bob Dylan documentary made by the American director Martin Scorsese, brings that day back to life on film. A Black woman interviewed in it says Dylan's song spoke what an entire era was feeling.

In 1964 Dylan released the album The Times They Are A-Changin'. People at the time read many of its songs as a political manifesto. Words like anti-war, equal rights, and the pursuit of freedom and equality were pinned on him, and he became, in effect, the voice of 1960s America — an idol of rebellion and anti-establishment feeling for the young.

In the fall of 1965 Dylan released Highway 61 Revisited, which included a song called "Ballad of a Thin Man." The lyric ran: "Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is." That line "caught exactly the moral, generational, and racial splits in America at the time — people defined themselves not by what they were, but by what they were not," the American music critic Greil Marcus wrote. Another song on the album was the famous "Like a Rolling Stone," which also became a classic piece of popular music about that era and that world. It was later covered by the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Green Day, and others.

The moment Highway 61 Revisited came out, its songs were being sung on every street. Before 1965 was over, the album had taken the No. 3 spot on the charts. "Like a Rolling Stone" was later named by Rolling Stone one of the greatest songs of all time.

Taken as a symbolic idol of resistance, Dylan has something in common with earlier laureates like Solzhenitsyn and Alexievich. That quality of defiance, of political weight, of speaking for an era, seems to be one of the Nobel committee's favorite choices — and one of its safest and most politically correct.

In 2011 Dylan played concerts in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. At his nearly two-hour show at the Beijing Workers' Stadium, he did not sing the protest songs Chinese listeners knew best and were hoping for, "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'." According to a BBC report, one Beijing concertgoer told Reuters that it was a bit disappointing — Dylan hadn't sung many songs for political reasons, and what exactly was the government afraid of?

But that is not necessarily how Dylan saw it.

Was he only a protest singer, only a stand-in for an era? Was politics really the reason he left those famous songs out? At the start of last year he put out a new album, Shadows in the Night, with no new songs of his own on it — every track was a cover of another legendary singer, Frank Sinatra.

It is more accurate to say he thought of himself as nothing more than a folk singer.

"The biggest trouble is that the media always wanted to make me a microphone, a spokesman, even the conscience of a generation. It's ridiculous. All I've ever done is sing songs that are honest, that express a vast, new reality. They say I spoke for a whole generation, but I have almost nothing in common with that generation, let alone any real understanding of it. I'd been away from home barely ten years, and I never spoke up loudly for anybody's views. My fate was to take things as they came, and that has nothing to do with representing any civilization. Facing yourself honestly is the thing that matters most. I was less a Pied Piper than a cowherd," Dylan wrote in his memoir 《像一块滚石》(Like a Rolling Stone), retitled 《编年史》(Chronicles) in the newer Chinese edition.

For its fine prose, the book was named a best book of 2004 by dozens of outlets, among them The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Washington Post, People, The Guardian, and Publishers Weekly.

Judging by his own life, Dylan was not all that interested in resisting the world either. In 1966 he had a motorcycle crash and vanished from view for a while. The times were still a storm, but once he recovered he pulled away from them completely, choosing instead to shut himself in a basement with his band and tinker with strange, odd tapes. Later he refused to join any protest-song event, refused to play the famous Woodstock festival, and quietly turned to rock. This let down the left-wing folk singers who had admired him, and it made his fans angry.

At a 1966 concert in England, Dylan threw over the acoustic guitar that stood for folk, picked up an electric guitar, played rock, and sang "Like a Rolling Stone." Furious fans accused him of betraying folk music, shouting "Traitor! Judas! You're not Bob Dylan!" The scene nearly went out of control, but he shot back coldly, "I don't believe you! You're a liar!" Then he stamped his foot and told the band, "Play it fucking loud!" — and played on through the chaos, as if none of it were happening. At the Newport Folk Festival, he and his band were all but booed off the stage.

Then, in the late 1960s, when rock was becoming the mainstream, Dylan — as everyone knows — went back to folk. That, too, repays some thought.

There is a well-known exchange about why he gave up protest songs. His former girlfriend and 1960s comrade-in-arms Joan Baez was still taking part in social movements. She could not understand why Dylan had stopped, and asked him what the difference between them was. "It's simple — you believe you can change the world, and I know that no single person can really change the world," Dylan said.

The Old, Weird America, published in 1977 by the well-known American music critic Greil Marcus, offers a clue for making sense of this.

What was rising in American music in the 1960s was a folk revival. Young people who listened to folk then were also listening for a kind of nostalgia — nostalgia for an older America — and folk was never simply political song. What mattered more was truthfulness: expressing and facing yourself honestly.

In 1993 the historian Robert Cantwell wrote: "[The folk revival] made a romantic demand of the whole folk culture — it asked that folk culture be oral, timely, respectful of tradition, literate, and public, a culture with personality, reflecting rights and obligations and even beliefs, set against the culture of the middleman, the expert, the impersonal, the technocratic."

So, as Marcus saw it, folk's value system put the countryside above the city, labor above capital, sincerity above education, the unspoiled dignity of ordinary men and women above merchants and politicians. And that quality merged naturally with the political movements of the time.

What set Dylan apart from the folk singers of his own generation — Joan Baez and Pete Seeger among them — was that he wanted not only to revive folk music but also, as the Nobel citation put it, to "create new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

"We have to treat these songs [meaning folk songs] as traditional music, traditional music rooted in hexagrams. The roots of folk music are really built on myth, the Bible, plague, famine, all kinds of mysterious things, and you can find it in every one of these songs. A rose opens in someone's heart; a naked cat lies on a bed with a spear growing out of its back; seven years to do this, eight years to do that — these are all abstract, things people can't touch. 'Which Side Are You On' and 'I Loves You, Porgy' aren't folk songs; they're political songs, and they're already dead," Dylan said, as quoted in The Old, Weird America.

To bring his own language closer to that tradition, Dylan went to the New York Public Library, sat in a reading room upstairs, and used microfilm to read newspapers from 1855 to 1865, trying to learn what daily life had been like.

"I was more interested in the language and the rhetoric of the time than in what actually happened," Dylan wrote in his memoir 《像一块滚石》. "Reading those papers, I didn't feel they described another world, only a world with more urgency than this one. Everyone used the same God, quoted the same Bible, the same laws, the same literary classics."

The music he made underground came out in 1967 as The Basement Tapes. The songs on it sound thoroughly strange, and yet they fit exactly the old American folk tradition Dylan was after.

Through the 1970s and after the 1980s, Dylan put out albums at an unhurried pace, then set off on a world tour he called the Never Ending Tour. His influence has grown ever since. In the words of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: "Dylan has become an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is a constant source for others' artistic re-creation." Adele, Guns N' Roses, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Maroon 5, and Avril Lavigne have all covered his songs. So far, curiously, every one of them has ignored the Nobel news.

In 2013 Bill Wyman, former guitarist of the Rolling Stones, wrote a piece in The New York Times opinion pages about Dylan and the Nobel Prize in Literature. He said:

"Dylan's work has never stuck to convention, never played moral games, and was never meant as spiritual nourishment or comfort for the listener. His lyric style is enormously abundant, and the things and people he writes about are plainly untouched by time. In any era, it is hard to find more than a few poets whose work carries the kind of impact Dylan's does."

This past May Dylan released a new album, Fallen Angels, his 37th studio album. Bear in mind that at 75 he has put out six studio albums since 2000 and has even begun trying his hand at jazz, still exercising his own creative power — truly like a rolling stone.

(This article draws on the books 《时代的噪音》[The Noise of the Times], 《像一块滚石》[Like a Rolling Stone], and 《老美国志异》[The Old, Weird America].)

Cover image from: livenet