Bob Dylan the Artist
Anyone who knows me, knows I love Bob Dylan. His music is prolific. His lyrics are poetic. But, as much as his songs, Dylan himself is art.
Born Robert Zimmerman into a Jewish family in Minnesota, Dylan quickly discarded his name and identity. Instead, during his 50-year career Dylan wore masks — as a folk activist, as a rock pioneer, as a gospel singer (and sermonizer), and most recently as a crooner. Dylan defied definition, and in doing so, he turned himself into an embodiment of Picasso’s cubism or Orson Welles’, Citizen Cane — proving no subject is singular; it is the sum of its parts.
During his career Dylan went beyond refusing to adopt a sound, he fought against it. At Newport he went electric and played guitar to booing folk fans (boos get loud at 4:56) and later he went Christian giving sermons to booing liberals. In doing so, Dylan forced his fans to explore the fluid nature of his identity, as well as their own.
And because Dylan’s music covers the themes of love, freedom, religion, and more through historical time periods and his own personal epochs, it provides a unique view of each subject. For example, as Dylan explores and re-explores love in blues ballads (Boots of Spanish Leather), Beattle-esque psychedelia (Fourth Time Around), Christian rock overtones (Precious Angel) and from hundreds of other angles, we realize that love can’t be understood, it must be experienced over and over. Or, as T. S Eliot says, “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
I like this idea that no person or subject is definable. That instead, the objects we see and people we know are a reflection of our histories intersecting with theirs at a moment in time.
This idea is also an important reminder that nothing in the world is fixed. For example, we might call ourselves Americans but this is just a word. We define and redefine what the word means every day with our choices.
Overall, I’m excited that Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature. Literature helps us explore new places and emotions without having to see them or experience them. Stories help us imagine a world different from where we live today, which is the first step to getting there. Dylan’s music and Dylan himself have been doing this for 50+ years.
