One Writer's View On Why Bob Dylan Won The Nobel Prize

A big part of the reason that Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature has to do with the nature of his work and the impact it has had over the past 50 years in our culture.
A lot of people look at this event with a bit of a jaundiced eye. These are people who are basically out of touch with street level reality in different ways.
Maybe they are really rich and are so immersed in the culture of materialism and making money that they only see art as something to collect and re-sell.
Maybe they’re really young and have been suckled on hip hop and second rate screaming masquerading as rock music.
Maybe they are academics who, because of their classical leanings, can never see people like Bob Dylan as true poets.
Maybe they are complete propellerheads who consume themselves with the mechanics of everything and never really see the art in anything.
The thing that these people all have in common is that they do not have the slightest understanding of creativity and the many forms in which it can manifest at the highest levels.
I can see all of these people shaking their heads and wondering how it is that the most hoity-toity award in the world goes to someone who basically refers to himself as a ‘song and dance’ man.

The Dogs Are Running Free

Bob Dylan arrived in the music world just slightly ahead of the burgeoning cultural revolution of the later 1960s. His music and most especially his lyrics built on and re-popularized the roots music of the past 30 years.

He was pretty much on the leading edge of the cultural change that took place during the 1960s. He was doing things that nobody had really done before and that a lot of people had done before but with a much smaller audience. He was writing complex stories and in many cases philosophical treatises and setting them to music. He was singing these stories in a nasal and gravelly voice that sounded like everybody. He was telling the story of, not just America, but the world.
I discovered Bob Dylan very early in life when I was about 16 and extremely impressionable. I had grown bored with conventional rock music although I knew the words to pretty much everything out there. But when Dylan came along asking me “How does it feel? To be on your own….”
It really got me thinking about the transformation that I was starting, from a teenager to adult.
It made me ask quiet questions of myself about my own future. It helped give form to the abstract notion I carried around in my head of somehow being a writer. It was, in point of fact, the purest combination of inspiration and permission that I had ever encountered to that point around the notion of refining and pursuing my dreams.
I began to follow Bob Dylan almost immediately. Not just his music, but the music news about him, a lot of which was available through Rolling Stone magazine (no coincidence in the naming BTW). Here I was exposed to a lot of the artists and poets who formed the nucleus of the intellectual revolution and drew the blueprints for the cultural revolution.
It’s no exaggeration to say that I owe Bob Dylan my life.
Because if I had been bent slightly differently one way or the other, I may never have discovered him and would quite likely have had a very different life than the one I have enjoyed up to this point.
As I grew older, I started to understand the deeper meaning of Bob Dylan’s poetry, which was the thing that interested me the most about him, even more than his enigmatic personality.
He wrote in an almost purely symbolic style. But it was definitely an acquired taste, and as I grew older and got into advertising and developed friendships with other writers, art directors and designers, I discovered that there were a number of people in my life who felt exactly the same way I did about Dylan.
These were people who were completely self-motivated and their writing, although inspired by people like Bob Dylan, took on its own persona, as did my own.
I became a more traditional storyteller and did not use sustained metaphor to anywhere near the extent that Dylan did. But I never set out to emulate him. My work was not a tribute to him or Leonard Cohen or Irving Layton or Allen Ginsberg or any of the other poets I read.
It was simply inspiration. And I was never afraid to let these people inspire me.
Certainly, you would go through a period of imitation, but that was an almost necessary step that enabled you to find your sea legs in a certain medium. But very quickly, you became your own dog and ran free, just like the song above
And that’s why Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize. The ability to inspire people to be the best they can be…powered by love and not hate…energized by imagination and not machination…driven by acts of creation and not destruction.

Use Your Power For Good, Not Evil

The world we live in today appears to be a far cry from all of that, especially with recent events in world leading countries.
But a lot of very smart people I've been reading and listening to lately see this as nothing more than the world tripping over an untied shoelace. This, to them, is an aberration and will eventually correct itself.
Yes, a lot of people are in for a rough ride and it’s up to the rest of us to smooth the road as much as possible.

“The best is always yet to come
That's what they explain to me
Just do your thing, you'll be king
If dogs run free.”Bob Dylan

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PS: Just wanted to send a shout out to Grammarly.com. This is one of the better spellcheck programs out there.

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