Bob Dylan Spits Fire in Nobel Lecture
Who are the five best folk artists of all time? Think about it. Dylan. Dylan. Dylan, Dylan and Dylan.
Bob Dylan gave his Nobel Lecture in Literature last weekend. The lecture that Nobel prize winners are required to give in order to receive their gaudy cash prize — roughly $900,000 in Bob’s case. A cash prize he wouldn’t have received had he not turned in a lecture by June 10. But I could give a shit about the politics of the Nobel bureaucracy, or Dylan’s feelings about it for that matter. What’s important is that the world now has 27 more minutes of The Folk GOAT on record — and set to some soothing piano to boot.
On the recording, Dylan’s voice oscillates between “geriatric Mitch Hedberg” and “chain smoker that really needs to take a shit”. Classic Dylan. It’s captivating. He makes what would read like a 5th grade book report, sound like he’s dropping straight knowledge. Which, he eventually does.
The lyrical apex of his talk comes at the 4:09 mark when Dylan showcases his internalization of the early folk vernacular. It’s a crystalline example of his wordsmithing. But the true knowledge dropping doesn’t come until a while later.
Over the course of this 27-minute ‘I-promise-I’m-versed-in-literature’ lecture, Dylan notes differences and similarities between literature and songwriting, gives entire synopses of Moby Dick and the Odyssey, and breathes spellbinding life into otherwise vanilla four-word sentences. However, it was at the 24-minute mark when shit got real.
At this moment, he takes a machete to the inflated intellectual egos of the literary establishment, tactfully… if you can be tactful with a machete. At 24:10 he starts venting, and an undeniable tone of authenticity takes hold. Not that he was bullshitting before, but after listening for 24 minutes you could tell that it was all to say what he was going to say next:
I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it — what it all means. When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don’t think he would have worried about it either — what it all means. John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, “The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests.” I don’t know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.
I imagine it gets old for poets; the constant interrogation about what the ‘deeper meaning’ is behind their words. What does it mean, this coded knowledge? Well, Dylan says that it doesn’t matter. In music like in literature, all that matters is if it moves you.
Dylan detractors often come back to the “his lyrics are gibberish” argument. Sure, but it’s fire gibberish. It sounds good. That’s the point right? It’s supposed to pick you up. Envelop you for three, four, five minutes. Transport you and set you back down, a little different than you were before. His prose is abstract enough for anyone to take and find personal relevance in. And yes, sometimes it touches, directly, on real issues. And sometimes it makes decidedly lucid arguments for or against cultural situations. But it always moves the listener.
At least it always moves me.
Cheers Bob.
