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Culture, however vaguely you define it, unfortunately is not nearly as equitable and all-embracing as, say, sports. If you are a Tam-Brahm who grew up in greater Mylapore you are that much more likely to appreciate Carnatic music. If you are from some sort of a privileged background from Mysore-Karnataka, it is much more likely that you have read more Jnanpith winners than those from other parts of the country.
Or take my case. Just because I had a father who was more Westernised than what was the norm then, and a fan of music beyond what was easily available, my kindergarten was defined by tunes from Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, and the Beatles rather than MS Subbulakshmi, or ABBA and Boney M, like it was for the rest of my generation. There is one conversation that I remember distinctly from that time period. Of my mother recommending Kraftwerk to a neighbour. Not the typical across-the-wall banter one would expect in Bangalore. We were, for whatever privileged reason, a fairly evolved family when it came to music.
But despite all this, Bob Dylan was a mere a satellite figure for us. It had nothing to do with how good or bad he was, I think. It surely had more to do with the supply-demand economics of pirated music in Bangalore. You did not get Bob Dylan tapes easily. The only songs you could get were those that were part of some random compilations, as decided by whichever pirate was making that tape.
Heck, I am lying when I say “songs”. I cannot think of anything outside of “Blowin’ in the Wind” — so “song”.
Bob Dylan, the 2016 Nobel laureate in Literature, popped into my life through fairly conventional means. MTV, or Channel V, I can never remember which. There were videos of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, and ‘Things Have Changed’ (from the OST of Wonder Boys ) that would appear on TV fairly often.
And I never took a shine to him. That voice was all wrong. That voice was that of beggars who turned up in second class coaches on the Indian railway network. That voice was the worst sort of throat infection. The voice was not G.O.A.T (greatest of all time)., it was just goat.
I slowly got around to tolerating the voice. With some patience and perseverance, I was managing to tolerate Dylan’s songs. And at times, like with ‘Hurricane’, or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, loving them too. In his voice, even — you could have at times caught me humming them. By the time I was doing post-graduation, I was happily quoting Dylan in a term paper, much to my benefit (I quoted lines from ‘All Along the Watchtower’ in an Advanced Strategy paper. It has never mattered much, ever). But this is not about Dylan’s singing. This is not about a Grammy that Dylan did or did not win for his singing abilities.
This is about a Nobel Prize in Literature that he won. A prize that has for long been the domain of authors I did not read, except for the rare Doris Lessing or Herman Hesse here and there. A writer who recorded oral histories from erstwhile Russan republics won last year. And a couple of years before now, a poet, whose name I still cannot roll my tongue around, did.
And now, Bob Dylan has. While she has not done so yet, I can already hear my best friend from school and college, a huge fan of Bob Dylan’s songs and music, making fun of me.
But, I will not complain. I am happy, in fact. Dylan did not win the Nobel for his singing. He did not win for how well he performed those songs. He won it for his words.
Those words that Dylan sang worked, in that anguished and tortured voice that should not have. They mesmerised. And when sung through other voices, be it Jimi Hendrix singing ‘All Along the Watchtower’, or Guns ‘N Roses singing ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, you heard the beauty of the words even better, without the distraction of the voice that was intolerable.
Here is what Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize citation says he won for; “for having created new poetic expressions”.
A writer, or a poet if you want to limit definitions, first and foremost describes the world around him. This is what Bob Dylan did. Many of us aspire for this, but instead end up like Ravi Shastri, using a limited set of expressions to define a limited set of experiences. Bob Dylan instead did better. There was first and foremost the mastery of his craft, like Ravichandran Ashwin and his off-spin. But there was something more than that. Dylan, like Sehwag perhaps, gave us those small snatches of brilliance that we can never forget, or — to be more exact — we will recall appropriately.
Like this October, when I decided that I would finally get around to reading Dante’s Divine Comedy (translated and annotated, of course.) And what is the first thing that I can remember? This bit from ‘Tangled Up in Blue’
"I thought you'd never say hello," she said
"You look like the silent type"
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the 13th Century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue
Bob Dylan is useful too when you want to sing mush. Like this from ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ from 1964.
But if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean
I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss
For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’
Or that elaborate shrug of cynicism that always comes handy. I wonder if Dylan himself might be using this line at all the sudden adulation he might suddenly receive. From the fairly recent ‘Things Have Changed’
People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
A great writer does more than display brilliance with words. A great writer influences other great artists, other great works of art. At this point, you can either explore the number of Bob Dylan covers that exist. Or see how pretty much every singer-songwriter operating today owes Dylan a debt in some form or other.
The Swedish Academy, the group of people who decide which great writer is slapped with the label of being a Nobel laureate has for more than a century now defined what greatness is when it comes to writers.
And they have kept this definition narrow. Poets, novelists, and at times descriptive non-fiction of a few sorts of Winston Churchill to Svetlana Alexievich. This is the first time they have recognised songs as literature.
Songs have always been literature. So have many other mediums that the Nobels have not looked at yet. Graphic novels, for example. Screenplays. WWE story arcs, even!
Now that Bob Dylan has won one, we can look forward to people like Marjane Satrapi, or Aaron Sorkin winning some time.
Philip Roth and Murakami will have to wait a bit though. But I think they are used to it.
