[Kona]

Do they give a Nobel Prize for being crabby? The guy who started this thread would win.

He's Boby Dylan for crying out loud. He deserves it.

He wins the Nobel Prize and somebody on here says "Damn Feminists." It reminds me of the thread where the blamed Harrambe's brutal massacre on feminists.

Aloha!

[Slim Shady]

But he did write those songs. He didn't just sing them. At some point he wrote them down, either with pencil or pen, in a little notebook, or even on the back of a tissue paper.

And it was so good, that that scribbled piece on toilet paper was better than the pseudointellectual drivel in the great modern books.

I don't think all great musicians should be given Literature prizes. But Bob Dylan's songs can stand on the power of the lyrics alone - it certainly wasn't his great singing or guitar solos.

The liberals may have an agenda, sure, but I always saw Dylan as more of a classical liberal anyways.

He's the bard, goddamnit! There are two guys in rock and roll who I'd call top level poets - Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison.

[Prufrock]

Johnny Cash on Bob Dylan:

“I had a portable record player that I’d take along on the road,” Cash wrote in Cash: The Autobiography. “And I’d put on [The] Freewheelin’ [Bob Dylan] backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off. After a while at that, I wrote Bob a letter telling him how much of a fan I was. He wrote back almost immediately, saying he’d been following my music since ‘I Walk the Line,’ and so we began a correspondence.”

If he's good enough for Johnny Cash, then he's good enough for me.

Also, if you know anything about Bob Dylan, then you know he's spent his entire career pissing off his liberal fans. From going electric, to releasing Self Portrait, to becoming a Christian.

[Onto]

Idiot Wind - Bob Dylan

Quote:

Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press
Whoever it is I wish they’d cut it out but when they will I can only guess
They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky

People see me all the time and they just can’t remember how to act
Their minds are filled with big ideas, images and distorted facts
Even you, yesterday you had to ask me where it was at
I couldn’t believe after all these years, you didn’t know me better than that
Sweet lady

Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads headin’ south
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

I ran into the fortune-teller, who said beware of lightning that might strike
I haven’t known peace and quiet for so long I can’t remember what it’s like
There’s a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin’ out of a boxcar door
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin’ every battle

I woke up on the roadside, daydreamin’ ’bout the way things sometimes are
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head and are makin’ me see stars
You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle

Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

It was gravity which pulled us down and destiny which broke us apart
You tamed the lion in my cage but it just wasn’t enough to change my heart
Now everything’s a little upside down, as a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good, you’ll find out when you reach the top
You’re on the bottom

I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind
I can’t remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes
don’t look into mine
The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while the
building burned
I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the
springtime turned
Slowly into Autumn

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

I can’t feel you anymore, I can’t even touch the books you’ve read
Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin’ I was somebody else instead
Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin’ glory

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I’m finally free
I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me
You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

[Teutatis]

I didn't know there were so many Dylan fans on here, I know maybe two or three songs of his or so and never cared about them or his voice to be honest, but what are some good song lyrics or poems I should read to be introduced to his work?

[TooFineAPoint]

(10-13-2016 10:29 PM)Germanicus Wrote:  

(10-13-2016 09:09 PM)Slim Shady Wrote:  

I have been laughing at everyone mad about Dylan winning.

Fuck all the haters. Point me to anyone in "literature" writing something better than "It's alright ma" or "Visions of Johanna". I'll wait.

I had the honor of seeing Bob Dylan perform this Summer to a huge crowd. He is still very good, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, and he is still writing more.

He has evolved greatly.

Hahahaha, it's not poetry? Really? What is poetry then? And trust me, I have studied literature, I have read all of the classics.

Everything is rhetoric. It is expression vs communication. Bob Dylan is incredibly great not simple because of the quality of the content he expresses, but also because of how he communicates it. Rhetoric has two parts, not just one.

If anything, this helps redeem the Nobel committee for giving a prize to Obama.

Mad? Scoffing, yes. Rolling my eyes, yes. Mad? Nope. It's just amusing to watch nutthuggers gleefully suck Old Balls McGee's leftist dick when he gets a scooby snack for his art in category he's not actually entitled to.

He may be a fine musician...but yeah, he's a musician. He got a literature award...for his music. No one said it wasn't a kind of poetry. But a literature award kind of implies, you know, a reward for something that was published explicitly for print. So he's still able to strum his guitar while making pleasant sounds with his throat. It doesn't matter how great he is at that. It doesn't matter how he expresses via sound because he chose to communicate in a medium that is not the printed word i.e. not in the same category as every other work that was ever considered for that particular prize.

So, anybody want to give Francis Ford Coppola next year's literature prize for the movie adaptations of The Godfather or Apocalypse Now? Those were really good and came from scripts which were in turn based on books. By the nutthug precedent, it's possible. Anybody care to hazard a guess when Haruki Murikami will be getting a Grammy for his novels?

This is the main point here:

(10-13-2016 09:25 PM)MajorStyles Wrote:  

I'm with you on this one, and Dylan is one of my all-time favorites. As a lyricist, he has no modern rivals. However, the art of writing novels, for example, is an altogether different beast: character development, logical order or ideas, mechanics, style, etc. It's the paragon of artistic forms, in my opinion. Anyone who has attempted to write a novel can attest to this. And it's far more challenging than a poem even (which Dylan's work is more readily compared to).

Reward the man for his music? Ok, with a music prize. Don't hand him a literature award just cause a bunch of now elderly Swedes reminisce about the time they were 19 and protesting Vietnam with Dylan's songs in the background or smoking up while reading the Communist Manifesto and listening to The Times They Are A-Changing.

Quote:

There had to be a handful of novelists who were far more deserving of this award.

Probably not, actually. Which is the other half of why I'm not mad about this. It's a bullshit award that hasn't been given to a quality author in decades. This award is a handjob and Dylan just got a tug for being a leftist that other leftists love. Nothing new here in the least.

You seem to think Dylan is a leftist, or easily categorizable at all.

[Goldin Boy]

(10-13-2016 08:52 PM)Germanicus Wrote:  

Yes, Sam is smart enough to know this. However, lyrics set to music doesn't qualify a bunch of songs to be up for an award given for the printed word medium of novels, selected non-fiction, and poetry unaccompanied by music.

It's very hard to Samuel seriously on this topic since he didn't look up the criteria of the Literature award, or read any Bob Dylan lyrics before taking his position. It's like taking advice on girls for a guy you know has never approached. Alfred Nobel wrote in his will the prize is to be awarded:

Quote:

"in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"

Your definition, is just that, your personal, subjective, not-based-in-objective-reality, definition. It differs from the actual one used by the committee which is why you're argument is 100% wrong.

No this isn't a "rhetorical flourish" it's the criteria for the award from the person who invented it.

Quote:

Well thank you for showing off your Latin knowledge.

With your handle I knew you'd appreciate it, ha

You know I meant that literature is anything artistic that one writes, Dylan wrote the lyrics, ergo song lyrics are literature. In your effort to cobble together your argument you had ignore that obvious fact, quickly make an intellectually dishonest snide comment and keep it moving.

To claim that process of writing song lyrics is somehow different, distinct, or inferior to write a piece of prose or a poem not set to music is strange. Explain how the writing process is different?

Quote:

It's still a silly stretch to reward a songwriter with a literature award. 100% of movie scripts are written down-- with letters-- and I very much doubt it would be deemed acceptable to give the Nobel prize to a filmmaker for his movie, even if it was very well done.

In your effort to be snarky you complete missed that Dylan got the award for the lyrics he wrote, not the recorded songs/soundwaves/etc themselves. That's what you and OP are missing. You're a smart guy and you know that you can read song lyrics without listening to songs themselves? That's what the Nobel committee did, read the lyrics not listened to his albums. And yes, Germanicus, you can't win a Literature award for a movie, as if this obvious fact to be said, because a movie is moving pictures on a screen(a visual medium).

[renotime]

Well if they gave it to fucking Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama I'd say Bob Dylan is a step up.

[Elster]

This was too good and opportunity to let pass to drop this one:

More on topic, I have never had much respect for the Noble awards truth be told-

(10-14-2016 05:03 AM)renotime Wrote:  

Well if they gave it to fucking Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama I'd say Bob Dylan is a step up.

and completely dismissed them when I heard Obama got the prize on grounds of his race previlege.


But Kissinger was awarded a nobel prize?!!!!

Fuck it,folks. I'm voting Megatron

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Kissinger being awarded the Nobel Prize is just further evidence that the Nobel Prize Committee has been deeply corrupted for several decades, not just in recent years like we might conclude from seeing the local SJW onslaught. They've been totally worthless for almost 100 years already.

Note: the Nobel Prize Committee is 116 years old.

[nomadbrah]

I knew Dylan fanatics wouldn't take criticism kindly Dylan is allright, but it's sort of like who go nuts when you mention that the Beatles were actually a boyband.

[Vicious]

Quote:

The last time Nobel Prize in Literature was even remotely relevant was about 100 years ago.

The fact that it generates so much discussion and division is proof of the opposite.

[FireStarter]

I'm fine with Dylan winning this award. Sure, he is famous for his music rather than literature. But take the music away and you're still left with awesome poetry. That poetry is worthy of a Nobel award. At least it's more worthy of a literature award than Obama is worthy of a peace award.

And regardless of how accurate it is, Hurricane is one hell of a story. I can't believe that some of you guys saying you don't know Bob Dylan songs have never heard this song.

[JWLZG]

The anti-leftist masturbation is strong in this one.

I thought we'd be a bit more mature than to sling out comments such as:

Quote:

(((Robert Allen Zimmerman)))

C'mon, like it's a given to rip into any figure remotely associated with (((the left))).

[Slim Shady]

Don't you dare mention Dylan and the Beatles in the same sentence...like I just did.

(10-14-2016 06:56 AM)nomadbrah Wrote:  

I knew Dylan fanatics wouldn't take criticism kindly Dylan is allright, but it's sort of like who go nuts when you mention that the Beatles were actually a boyband.

[Mister Fingers]

I never listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, but "Masters of War" always stands out to me for some reason when I hear his name mentioned. There were some powerful lyrics in that one.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

(10-14-2016 07:03 AM)Vicious Wrote:  

Quote:

The last time Nobel Prize in Literature was even remotely relevant was about 100 years ago.

The fact that it generates so much discussion and division is proof of the opposite.

Give me $300 million and I could make even an award for LOLcat of the year globally famous.

Just the fact that something is controversial and receives a lot of press does not mean that it is positive or admirable or that it deserves to be taken seriously.

All in all, it's a great pity that they've tainted serious prizes like Physics or Biology with Emperor's New Clothes material like Literature and Peace prizes.

[iknowexactly]

Dylan, Freud...

Genius can be debated but not ignored.

I write songs, so I'd be an idiot if I didn't try to find out about the best lyricist of the twentieth century.

I read his books, and I studied studied every interview I could find with Dylan and people who had worked with Dylan.

One big surprise: Geniuses bust ass. Or to be more precise they have such a fascination and a self-motivating facility ( the better your product, the more fun it is to keep generating it) that they can focus like others can't. They seem to spend more time admiring and learning from greatness than bitching about who ever is "tainting" and "corrupting" things.

In one of Dylan's books he commented that on arrival in New York " I didn't care about love or money."

In particular early in NY he was very impressed by Robert Johnson.

"his {Dylan's} approach to songwriting seems to have been revolutionized by Johnson’s example. “I copied Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper so I could more closely examine the lyrics and patterns, the construction of his old-style lines and the free association that he used, the sparkling allegories, big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction . . .” It is easy to see how that description leads to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

On one album with Lanois producing, some associates commented on his intense efforts in writing:

Mason Ruffner, guitarist: “Bob was doodling a lot with the lyrics. He used a pencil. He didn’t use no ink-pen. Always making changes and additions and subtractions. An elephant could’ve walked in and he wouldn’t have seen it. His concentration is unbelievable.”

Howard: “He would always be working on his lyrics. He’d have a piece of paper with thousands of words on it, all different ways, you couldn’t even read it. Words going upside-down, sideways, all over this page. I never saw him eat. He drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, and he’d sit chipping away at the words, pulling in words from other songs.”

A favorite verse from Desolation Row:
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row.

The evocative, surreal density of storytelling..is stunning. Just the creative image of "the heart attack machine" condenses so much about
middle class culture.

Read more at http://www.uncut.co.uk/features/life-wit...85HycZO.99

[Vicious]

Quote:

Give me $300 million and I could make even an award for LOLcat of the year globally famous.

Just the fact that something is controversial and receives a lot of press does not mean that it is positive or admirable or that it deserves to be taken seriously.

All in all, it's a great pity that they've tainted serious prizes like Physics or Biology with Emperor's New Clothes material like Literature and Peace prizes.

But you don't have 300 mil, and if you did I highly doubt you or anyone on here would put it up to the betterment of mankind in the shape of an award. No one else in the history of mankind has to this degree. The prize funds total about 0.5 billion USD today.

Who decides that Bob Dylan receiving this award is admirable or not? Obviously that is subjective, I don't need more than 10 sec on Google to confirm that there are plenty of institutions that applaud him getting the award.

It's always people disagreeing with the awards recipients that try to smear the award with being "tainted". That's just their personal preferences shining through in an attempt to poison the well.

[eradicator]

(10-13-2016 09:12 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

"The last time Nobel Prize in Literature was even remotely relevant was about 100 years ago."

I think we can all agree on that.

John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemminway, T.S. Elliot were some of the other Americans winning Literature Nobel Prizes.

Some of the politics of the day meant that Russian greats like Tolstoy and Chekov never won.(they were around a hundred years ago, so it doesn't seem to have much to do with era, politics was still playing a role 100 years ago, Mark Twain never won, would have been too 'predictable')

While most of the winners are Europeans that I've never heard of, that is to be expected to some extent, it is a European award(based in Sweden)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_No...Literature

[Poker]

My favourite song is Bob Dylan's 'Hurricane', a song about the imprisonment of the Boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter in 1966. In my opinion the lyrics are deep and powerful and the instrumentals are brilliant, so fast paced, like a storm, especially the violins. The anger in Dylans voice at what he believes to be a miscarriage of justice also adds to the song and matches its fast paced tempo, overall it's a cracking song.

Here are some of the lyrics:

"When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that
In Paterson that's just the way things go
If you're black you might as well not show up on the street
'Less you want to draw the heat"

....

"Four in the mornin' and they haul Rubin in
They took him to the hospital and they brought him upstairs
The wounded man looks up through his one dyin' eye
Says, wha'd you bring him in here for? He ain't the guy!
Here's the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For somethin' that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world"

....

"Four months later, the ghettos are in flame
Rubin's in South America, fightin' for his name
While Arthur Dexter Bradley's still in the robbery game
And the cops are puttin' the screws to him, lookin' for somebody to blame
Remember that murder that happened in a bar
Remember you said you saw the getaway car
You think you'd like to play ball with the law
Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw runnin' that night
Don't forget that you are white"

....

"All of Rubin's cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance
The judge made Rubin's witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum
And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger
And though they could not produce the gun
The D.A. said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed"

....

"Rubin Carter was falsely tried
The crime was murder one, guess who testified
Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers, they all went along for the ride
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool's hand
To see him obviously framed
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game

....

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell
That's the story of the Hurricane
But it won't be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time he's done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world"



Unfortunately I have been unable to find the CD version on youtube, but if you can grab a hold of the song, give it a listen, he is without a doubt a lyrical genius.

[TooFineAPoint]

(10-15-2016 10:40 AM)Mister Fingers Wrote:  

I never listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, but "Masters of War" always stands out to me for some reason when I hear his name mentioned. There were some powerful lyrics in that one.

He was 21 years old when he wrote that song. 21!!!!

Along with Hard Rain and Don't Think Twice.

I'm not saying these are his best songs. But it's fucking mindblowing to think of a 21 year old being able to articulate these thoughts with such impact.

I offer my personal list of greatest Dylan albums (although with few exceptions I think they are all great and worth listens):

1. Blood On The Tracks
2. Bringing It All Back Home
3. Highway 61 Revisited
4. Oh Mercy
5. Love And Theft
6. Desire
7. John Wesley Harding
8. The Times They Are a-Changin'
9. Blonde on Blonde
10. Time Out of Mind

And if you're into unreleased stuff (and Dylan has shitloads), the best songs are
1. Blind Willie McTell
2. Foot Of Pride
3. Dignity
4. Farewell, Angelina
5. When I Paint My Masterpiece