Ain’t Gonna Work on Bob Dylan’s Farm No More

Denzel Washington. He must have been a fan of mine … years later he would play the boxer, Hurricane Carter, someone else I wrote a song about. I wondered if Denzel could play Woody Guthrie. In my dimension of reality, he certainly could have. —Bob Dylan

Yeah, Bob, and you could play Martin Luther King. Denzel playing Woody. But who would play Dylan? Maybe Russell Crowe. He could sing the songs himself. And Oprah Winfrey as Joan Baez. In my dimension of reality, all that would be possible, too—but it still don’t make it right!

Bob Dylan’s recent award of the Nobel Prize for Literature has raised questions as to the nature of literature, the role of songwriting in literature, and even the relevance of the prize itself. The Nobel Prize was bestowed on Dylan for a life’s work of introducing “literary values” into popular music—not for any actual literature, but for his songwriting alone, and more importantly, for its impact culturally.

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The industry that has been introducing “literary values” into popular culture most consistently for the past century has been the motion picture industry. Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Spielberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Lean, Preminger, Merchant–Ivory—the list is long. Where are the Nobel Prizes for the cultural impact of introducing “literary values” into popular film?

The New York Times and a few other major newspapers are trumpeting the erroneous claim that Dylan is the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize. As someone quipped recently, “The Times they are mistaken”. Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Literature Prize in 1913, wrote 2000 songs and three national anthems—those of India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka—and he published fifty books of real poetry, not song-lyrics. His towering achievement has yet to be surpassed.

The praise that many fellow artists lavish on Dylan reads like eulogies. Arlo Guthrie said, “Songwriting is like fishing in a stream; you put in your line and hope you catch something. And I don’t think anyone downstream from Bob Dylan ever caught anything.” Bruce Springsteen called him “The father of my country.” Joan Baez said:

Another step towards immortality … his gift with words is unsurpassable … no songs have been more moving and worthy in their depth, darkness, fury, mystery, beauty … none has been more of a pleasure to sing. None will come again.

Maybe for Ms Baez it is unsurpassable. But what a negative message to put out there to future young songwriters, not to mention to Dylan himself: None will come again—so give up. I have always respected Joan Baez as a singer and a courageous activist. But she never progressed beyond elementary level as a songwriter, when she had the rare and privileged close-up opportunity to learn from one of the best there was during Dylan’s prime writing period. So what does that tell us about her authority to criticise a song, or even comment on the future of songwriting? Show me, Joan, don’t tell me.

Fortunately, some artists have borrowed the famous Dylan scepticism that permeates some of his best works. Like this remark by the Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh: “I’m a Dylan fan but this [Prize] is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”

When Bob Dylan performed at the White House, he missed his sound check and refused to participate in a photo-call with President Obama and his family afterwards. He sang “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and then came down from the stage to shake Obama’s hand before turning and walking out. Obama later told Rolling Stone: “That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesin’ and grinnin’ with you. You want him to be a little sceptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.” More a reflection of the kindness of the US President to an ill-mannered senior citizen.

A little sceptical. I’ll say. Like this:

You see me on the street, you always act surprised.

You say “how are you?” “good luck”, but you don’t mean it.

When you know as well as me, you’d rather see me paralysed.

Why don’t you just come out once and scream it!

(“Positively Fourth Street”)

Ouch! Nobel Academy member and permanent secretary Sara Danius said of Dylan’s initial silence after being awarded the prize that she was not worried: “if he doesn’t want to come, he won’t come. It will be a big party in any case and the honour belongs to him.” Other members were not so diplomatic. Per Wastberg of the Swedish Academy said Dylan’s silence was “impolite and arrogant”.

Nor have all musicians and writers been particularly fawning in the past. Norman Mailer said, “If Dylan’s a poet, I’m a basketball player.” Joni Mitchell said, “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.” Kurt Vonnegut said, “He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish.”

The term “Dylan tragic” has been coined to describe the droves of myopic Dylan fans who accept whatever The Bob does with blind faith. If one tried to imagine what it would be like to be alive in a time where a major (or minor) religion was taking hold, I think this is about as close as we can get today.

Of course, there was the quasi-religious Beatlemania, which expressed itself in screaming, crying, cathartic fifteen-year-olds who would not have tolerated a single critical word about their deities, and we see it too often in fundamentalist Islam, and just about every other blinker-vision interpretation of faith, where even the most innocuous representation of the “prophet” can be met with violence or death. Such folks have been standing behind the podium and have been present and accounted for in fanatic movements throughout history.

Dylan’s initial silence about the award led to speculation. No doubt the Dylan tragics were ready for his decision, whatever it was: “If Bob accepts the prize, what a great thing for literature and songwriters.” Or, “If Bob rejects the prize, what a glorious day for a stand against hypocrisy and bureaucratic corruption. The Nobel is a meaningless award. Bob wrote ‘Masters of War’, after all.” Whatever Dylan does is always perfectly understandable to the Dylan tragics.

There’s the matter of “Masters of War”, that masterpiece, with its 1960s anti-Vietnam War protest:

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks …

Now which masters of war was he referring to? Dylan accepted the National Medal of Arts from the US Congress. He certainly couldn’t have been talking about President Obama, who has bombed seven countries during his years in office, and who presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012—the highest civilian award of the US government. He also took the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres and the Légion d’Honneur from the French government (the latter originally created by Napoleon, who famously said, “It is with such baubles that men are led”). Then there was the Premio Princesa de Asturias, from the Spanish government, and now the Nobel Prize, with a money component of almost a million dollars generated from the fortune created by Alfred Nobel, on copyrights of over thirty armaments, explosives, rockets, machine guns and honest-to-God-is-on-our-side weapons-of-war patents.

Randy Pitts, who operated the Freight and Salvage, the premiere folk music venue in Berkeley, California, for a decade, said this about Dylan’s brilliant speech for his Person of the Year Award 2015 for MusiCares (an instructive speech, I might add), where he not only acknowledges influences, but also dumps a bucket on those who “done him wrong”:

His slagging other writers, as he did on this occasion, remains petulant and childish, over some long forgotten, half imagined slights in his mind … he can’t be content, it seems to me, with being adjudged the best, he must be unassailable.

Andrew Bolt, in the Herald Sun, praised the giving of the prize to Dylan. Stephen Wright, in Overland, dissed Dylan for “whining and perpetuating ancient sexualised stereotypes of women”. There are interesting insights in Overland’s twisted take. Patrick McCauley offered the term, “misandrist”, reverse misogyny, to describe it. Wright’s essay is generally myopic, but also extremely odd in Overland, which is a bastion of the Left (like the inner circle of the Swedish Academy). And Andrew Bolt, normally tarred with the brush of the Right, has embraced Dylan. (Well, Andrew has always been a sook for music!) The main weakness with both these views is that they lean too much to one side or the other. Merge them together and we might get a better understanding of the paradox that is Bob Dylan.

But it demonstrates that the whole bunch of us merely have opinions (which contains the crying-when-cut word onions)—and there is no absolute truth on the matter, despite all the credentials. As Dylan said, “Having these colossal accolades and titles, they get in the way.”

There has been controversy for years about whether the Nobel Prize has validity for measuring anything at all. The Peace Prize was awarded to Obama after only nine months in office, and to Kissinger while he was bombing Hanoi. Yasser Arafat got one. The Chemistry Prize went to the inventor of the lobotomy. Literary giants such as James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain have been passed over for the Literature Prize. But without Twain, and his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, there could be no Bob Dylan songs. Poet Myron Lysenko recently posted on his Facebook page: “Our chicken has just hatched an egg. I wonder if that qualifies her for the Nobel Prize for Literature?” Lay Lady Lay.

Bob Dylan has written some of the most powerful songs ever written. Especially during his Golden Period, the late 1960s, which also happened to be the Golden Period of Commercial Folk Music, when folk songs became number-one hits on popular music charts. (Imagine that happening in today’s twerking world!) As young budding performers, we were surrounded back then by inspiring literate songwriters and true masters of memorable melodies. Dylan was especially gifted at this.

But songwriting is a category excluded from every single literary prize in the world. The form Dylan writes in—the rhyming, lyric-ballad structure—is discouraged and rejected in every major poetry contest, in Australia, and the world in general, in preference to deconstructive academic wankery. The poet-editors who pay lip service to Dylan have utter contempt for the very lyric structures he writes in—if they are done by anyone else but Dylan.

Les Murray, Geoff Page, and one or two others, are the only serious poet-editors in Australia open to the rhyming, lyric-ballad structure. Murray, intuitively, is a champion of the very forms Dylan lives and breathes. Garcia Lorca once said: “I can imagine no poetry other than the lyric.” Percy Grainger wrote: “There is no musical notation yet invented that can capture what happens when a folk singer sings.”

The quality of writing in the brilliant songs upon which Dylan built his reputation—“The Times They Are a-Changin’”, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and many other solid folksong-based masterpieces from the 1960s, and the surreal fragmented social commentary of the songs on one of his finest albums, Blonde on Blonde—has all but vanished from his work over the past three decades. His writing has become steeped in tepid Americana. But his devoted fans don’t care.

I resolved, after one recent Bob Dylan album, that I would never buy another one, no matter how the music parrots of the media gushed about it. I have stuck to my guns. I have refused on principle to buy Modern Times. After reading through the lyrics to the songs, I know I made the correct decision.

As for Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume I of his autobiography? I said, “No way I’m paying twenty-five bucks for Volume One. Next year, it will be another twenty-five bucks for Volume Two. What is this—the serialisation of Bob Dylan’s life? Why doesn’t the old man write his autobiography down properly and then publish it in one book: one twenty-five-dollar price tag. Then this old man can buy it. I can wait for that.” So I refused, on principle, even though I was interested in reading it. Because, after all, Dylan has been famous for not talking, or talking in Riddlesville, so I wanted to hear him talk like a normal person for a change.

Well, someone gave me the thing for Christmas! So I started reading it. Then I stopped. I don’t believe a word he says about anything any more. Dylan is the last person who can tell me what happened during that magic time when he was an authentic genius. He doesn’t know. If he knew he would still be able to do it now. He’d be writing more masterpieces, more songs like “Mr Tambourine Man” and “Like a Rolling Stone”. If you are a genius when you’re young, then you have an obligation to improve by becoming a master craftsperson as a lyric writer, poet or creator of memorable melodies and become more of a genius as you grow older. Study Beethoven. Study Bach. Picasso. Gaudi. Rodin. Sylvia Plath. They improved as they matured, as their technique and their experience improved. Dylan admits that those days are long gone, in this Sixty Minutes interview:

Interviewer: Do you ever look at music that you’ve written and look back at it and say “Whoa! That surprised me”?

Dylan: I used to. I don’t do that any more. I don’t know how I got to write those songs.

Interviewer: What do you mean you don’t know how?

Dylan: Well, those early songs were almost like magically written:

Darkness at the break of noon

shadows even the silver spoon

hand-made blade the child’s balloon

eclipse both the sun and moon

to understand you know too soon

there is no sense in trying …

                        [“It’s All Right Ma”]

Dylan: Well, try to sit down and write something like that—there’s a magic to that … a penetrating magic and you know I did it at one time.

Interviewer: You don’t think you can do it today?

Dylan: No … well, you can’t do something forever and I did it once and I can do other things now but I can’t do that.

I admire the honesty in this interview. I found it very moving and actually sad. I wish he could still do it now because I miss that kind of powerful, engaged songwriting.

In his recent work (in both melodies and lyrics) Dylan is setting the bar so low that even you can write a more interesting song than he can. I defy any person to tell me what the almighty vision is in Dylan’s latest album, Modern Times. Dylan, these days, is so cliché-ridden and so bad at putting language together that I can scarcely bear to make notes. I started on “Thunder on the Mountain”. When I reached the line, “I want some real good woman to do just what I say,” I thought, what is this waffle doing in my Bob Dylan song? Further down, he says:

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches,

I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages,

I’ve been to St Herman’s church, said my religious vows,

I’ve sucked the milk out of a thousand cows.

Sounds more to me as if he’s been sucking the crap out of a thousand sows. Is this the same mind that wrote:

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand,

At the mongrel dogs who teach,

Fearing not that I’d become my enemy,

In the instant that I preach.

(“My Back Pages”)

The next couple of songs I looked at—desperate to write some kind of affirmative comment for counter-balance—were so filled with nothingness that I just kept turning the pages until this corker stopped me dead:

I got troubles so hard, I can’t stand the strain,

Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains.

That little literary jewel of misogyny was festering there in the middle of a verse of his song “Rolling and Tumbling”. The first line goes, “I rolled and I tumbled, I cried the whole night long.” Sound familiar? It’s taken word-for-word from Muddy Waters’s classic song also called “Rolling and Tumbling”. Did Dylan copy the title and key images from Muddy’s song, without giving him a credit, for a reason? To serve some larger purpose? Read it over. There is no reason. There is no larger purpose. Just plain laziness and bad writing—and he thinks he can get away with it because he’s Bob Dylan. Well, he ain’t Bob Dylan no more, and I ain’t gonna work on Bob Dylan’s farm no more. He’s a husk of a shell of a vapour of a whiff of someone who shook the little finger of Bob Dylan—at least the Bob Dylan I was influenced by.

Here is Dylan’s Mobius strip of quotations about himself and poetry:

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

I don’t call myself a poet, because I don’t like the word.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

I don’t call myself a poet … man … my songs are songs … have you ever met these people who call themselves poets … oh, give me a break.

There is a chapter in Chronicles: Volume I that seems to shed some light on the “Bob Dylan method” of songwriting that goes a long way to explain why Dylan these days is an egg short of a chicken crossing the road. When Dylan teamed up with the remarkable Daniel Lanois, who produced one of his albums for him, he arrived at the session with a bunch of lyrics. Lanois asked him if any of his new songs were like “With God on My Side”, which Lanois liked. Dylan said, “Not much.” They spent all day working on “Political World”, trying different rhythms and melodies. At nightfall, Dylan left and took a tape home with him. He wasn’t happy. The next morning, Lanois played for him what he had done to the song after Dylan left—his trademark atmospheric and funky stuff. Dylan told him, “I think we missed it.”

What this little chapter tells me is that Dylan has not only lost the plot but misplaced the book. He wants to be in a band and perform, not write songs. He’s continued to develop as a performance artist and a vocal stylist, as Frank Sinatra did. Once you have the song, then you can’t miss, if you believe in what you’ve written, if it has to be heard, if you have to record it. It’s just a matter of going into the studio and telling the story.

Dylan no longer has the songs. He has a voice, but he’s lost the vision. Therefore, he distracts himself with a changing array of gifted producers and fresh sounds and hopes that someone can fix his problem for him. In that case, I would suggest his next producer should be Doctor Phil. Dylan is sitting on a thousand stories that really do need telling—but he has no way to reach them. I suggest it’s about time he retired from the Mindless Tour Syndrome, as the Beatles were insightful enough to do. Maybe then he’ll have something worth writing about.

I acknowledge Dylan’s cultural importance and have been inspired by his early music, knowing many of his best songs by heart, having performed them in concert myself. Some of my own songs couldn’t have been written without Bob Dylan’s influence. Some might say that this article is filled with venomous, bilious, bitter, mean-spirited and immodest comments (in that case, just think of me as The Fool in King Lear)—forgetting that Bob Dylan, in his prime as a songwriter, was also venomous, bilious, bitter, mean-spirited and immodest. (“I’m speaking for all of us. I’m the spokesman for a generation,” he once said.) Read the following account of a typical exchange, from a phone conversation between Dylan and journalist A.J. Weberman, a legendary Dylan tragic of the 1970s:

Dylan reveals a strong animosity toward Roger McGuinn [of the Byrds, who, with their hit recording of “Mr Tambourine Man”, brought Dylan to mainstream attention]. “F*ck him. You can put that in [your article] twice.” In another amusing exchange, Dylan asks rhetorically who writes better songs than he does, and Weberman replies, “I can name you a hundred,” to which Dylan replies, “Bullsh*t!” Weberman proceeds to name some pretty lame songwriters, along with some good ones, and Dylan gives his opinions, mostly negative. John Lennon: “Never!” Creedence Clearwater: “Bullsh*t!” George Harrison: “Maybe.” Dylan insists that Weberman … leave mention of his children out of any article … and says, if they are included, “My wife will hit me, man.”

There is a very strange collection of people out there in Dylanland, almost as strange as the ones in Elvistown. Weberman, and the “Dylan Liberation Front”, claimed Dylan had sold out and been brainwashed by Albert Grossman and the record company mafia. They wore badges that said “Free Bob Dylan”. Weberman pioneered the charming practice of “garbology”—literally probing through Dylan’s garbage to find out details about his personal life. He was even beaten up when he refused to desist:

I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherf*cker … I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming about me going through the garbage. Dylan said if I ever f*cked with his wife, he’d beat the sh*t out of me. A couple of days later, I’m on Elizabeth Street and someone jumps me, starts punching me. I turn around and it’s like—Dylan. I’m thinking, Can you believe this? I’m getting the crap beat out of me by Bob Dylan! I said, “Hey, man, how you doin’?” But he keeps knocking my head against the sidewalk. He’s little, but he’s strong. He works out. I wouldn’t fight back, you know, because I knew I was wrong. He gets up, rips off my Free Bob Dylan button and walks away. Never says a word. The Bowery bums were coming over, asking, “How much he get?” Like I got rolled … I guess you got to hand it to Dylan, coming over himself, not sending some f*cking lawyer.

Many of the people reading this weren’t even born when Dylan was singing the songs that influenced me the most. They have only known the modern Bob. So there are a few Bob Dylans out there, just as there are several David Bowies, and it is easy to be misunderstood when talking about just one.

Why did Dylan, much like Bowie (who had much more control over his character jumps), change his musical persona so often? One simple reason could be just to keep from being bored. Night after night of doing shows, singing the same repertoire, long bus trips, airports. I think these changes happened unconsciously.

A good deal of this might have had to do with self-preservation of the part of the inner person he had to keep out of the limelight. As a long-time performaholic, he was battered nightly by fanatical fans, adulation, voice-of-a-generation labels, photo sessions, interviews, groupies, people throwing money at him. This would utterly demolish any vulnerable creative person, and it has done so to many in the entertainment business. So, like Eve’s three faces, Dylan warp-drives a character leap into a new persona, to put a buffer between him and his demanding and adoring audience—just as Eve unconsciously made her leaps from personality to personality when one side of her was unable to integrate trauma and pain effectively.

Unfortunately his new characters don’t play the old characters’ songs very well. (“I can’t act!” he once said.) Many of his masterpieces now get mangled in live performance, with mumbled lyrics, where some of his previous characters used to be masters of diction.

Here are some of Dylan’s musical personae. There are many variations of these as well:

• Woody Guthrie/Jack Kerouac Man, 1962

• Surreal Man (Blonde on Blonde), 1966

• Outlaw Man (John Wesley Harding, with lines like “He opened many a door, but he was never known to hurt an honest man”, whereas the real John Wesley Hardin killed between twenty-seven and forty-five men), 1967

• Country Pie Man (à la Johnny Cash), 1969

• Old Testament/Prophet Man, 1979

• Americana Man, 1992

• Santa Claus Man, 2009

• Ol’ Blue Eyes Man, 2016

Just as Dylan’s lyrics cannot stand well without the melodies that he once wrote for them, remarkable melodies that lifted his words into the poetic stratosphere, his characters, or personae, become dramatically lifeless without song structures to buttress them.

This is painfully obvious when he tries to play a character in a movie without a song persona to reinforce it. Watch the recent film Masked and Anonymous. It is like Mick Jagger’s cringeworthy performance in Ned Kelly: Dylan stumbles awkwardly through his part and only comes to life when he sings with the little throw-together band in the film. Watch him in the poorly edited videoclip of his great song “Cross the Green Mountain”, from the American Civil War film Glory. He is wooden, over-costumed in period attire, and walks around like someone who has accidentally wandered onto the set. And in that bizarre Victoria’s Secret commercial he just glares at all the supermodels in their lingerie. Well, he did say he was no actor.

Dylan’s only work of actual literature, Tarantula, demonstrates the weakness of his real literary ability—a book that was written, paradoxically, during the same period of some of his greatest song lyrics. His “characters” sang the songs; but the Emperor with No Clothes wrote the book.

Unlike Bowie, Dylan has no control over his personae and when they decide to transmute. Like the time-traveller in The Time Traveler’s Wife, the previous Dylan begins to fade and the new Dylan begins to emerge from the cocoon. Like a pod-person in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the new one looks like the old one, but if you look closely, you can see the control mechanism in the back of the neck.

This is one reason why he mangles his old songs now. He is unable to reproduce the authentic character personae that originally wrote and performed those songs. So he tells himself he is “re-inventing” the songs when, in fact, he has reinvented himself but, unfortunately, is also required to play the old classic material, night after night, from his other long abandoned incarnations. Kathy McCabe wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

Few people fell in love with Dylan and his work simply by reading his words … anyone who has attended a Dylan concert in the last decade would be well aware the majority of his songs are barely recognisable from their original recorded forms. While his voice has always been an acquired taste, it has become an instrument to twist his lyrics into distorted mumbles which are a language only Dylan fans can understand. Something close to Klingon.

The Bob Dylan that influenced me profoundly does not exist any more. There is another one out there performing at the moment.

I said Dylan should be producing his own albums instead of letting other producers steer his vision. Well, he actually produced Modern Times, under the pseudonym “Jack Frost”. Asked why he chose to do this one himself, he said (emphasis added): “I don’t like to make records … I do it reluctantly … I feel like I’ve always produced my own records, anyway, except I just had someone there in the way.” The illustrious pantheon of producers he has worked with on his thirty-one albums must love that. They were all in the way.

Alexis Petridis of the Guardian was the first major critic to ridicule the hype of Modern Times, which he called a “competition to see who can slather Bob Dylan’s 32nd studio album with the most deranged praise known to man”. Jim DeRogatis, of the Chicago Sun-Times, was particularly critical of the ballads: “smarmy ’30s and ’40s balladry”. The title of the album is the same as Charlie Chaplin’s famous 1936 film. The cover photo, Taxi, New York Night (1947) by Ted Croner, had already been used as a cover by the defunct band Luna in 1997.

Dylan has said, “I don’t listen to any of my records. When you’re inside of it all, all you’re listening to is a replica.” Well, if what we were listening to were replicas, then we would call them replicas, not records. A record is precisely that: a record—of what happened in the studio. If Dylan isn’t interested in listening to what he does during his recording sessions, why should we?

The usual reason an artist doesn’t like listening to their own recordings is because either the recording so completely fails to match the original vision that it doesn’t represent the songs, or the artist, correctly—or else nothing interesting happened in the studio: no miracles, nothing that escapes your control and becomes bigger than yourself. To me, those are the real goals of recording. To prepare and perform, and prepare and perform. And then go into the studio and not just make a musical documentary, but allow magic to happen. And record it. I would think any artist who succeeded in those goals would like to be reminded of it. Dylan once said:

I’ve had a rough time recording. I’ve managed to come up with songs, but I’ve had a rough time recording. But maybe it should be that way. Because other stuff which sounds incredible, that can move you to tears—for all those who were knocked off our feet by listening to music from yesteryear, how many of those songs are really good? Or was it just the record that was great? Well, the record was great. The record was an art form. And you know, when all’s said and done, maybe I was never part of that art form, because my records really weren’t artistic at all. They were just documentation. Maybe bad players playing bad changes, but still something coming through.

Probably true, most of the time. But he got it right often enough that he ought to know the difference and say so.

But this is the key to why I think Dylan has chosen to remain steadfastly uncritical of himself. The American novelist Jonathan Lethem has written (emphasis added):

Puncturing myths, boycotting analysis and ignoring chronology are likely part of a long and lately quite successful campaign not to be incarcerated within his own legend. Dylan’s greatest accomplishment since his Sixties apotheosis may simply be that he has claimed his story as his own.

Fair enough. After all, who amongst us can truly understand the pressure these goldfish-bowl icons have to live with their whole lives?

The cul-de-sac of pop artists peaking early is one of the main reasons I shifted to classical composers like Beethoven and Schubert for songwriting and performing inspiration. Their success was slow coming. They never seemed to peak. All through my fragile youth, fellow musical influences were either killing themselves, overdosing, or burning out. Maybe it was too much fame and fortune at an early age. Who knows? I just knew I didn’t want to follow them that far. I probably was lucky not to be successful during those days. That’s probably why I am still alive. The Beatles were one of my lifelines through the mighty shipwrecks of Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Sylvia Plath, all incredibly strong influences on me. When the Beatles finally short-circuited, I even clung to the shirt-tails of their producer, George Martin, which led me to the mystical harbours of J.S. Bach, that composer-of-all-composers who figured out the most important lesson of all: how to integrate and balance your personal genius with your everyday life—not sacrifice one for the other. In some ways, Dylan, too, is a survivor in this aspect, although I cannot understand how he can sustain a creative relationship, and family life, with that obsessive touring schedule. It may be one of the reasons he doesn’t practise one of the key components of confessional songwriting or poetry: writing about parents and family.

Until Liam Gallagher of Oasis came along, Dylan held the unofficial record as the rudest intellectual bully in music history for his power trips on media, women and the general public, especially back in the late 1960s. Just watch Don’t Look Back and Martin Scorsese’s documentary, and cringe at the way he takes advantage of the unaware, the wide-eyed and the vulnerable from his position of celebrity. Has he changed? His people skills have improved but he is still capable of dumping a bucket:

I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like … static … I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, “Everybody’s getting music for free,” I was like, “Well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.”

I would like all my fellow musicians and recording artists who fawn over Dylan to pay particular attention to the above quote. Anything you have recorded in the past twenty years he considers worthless. People who continue to admire those who put them down are called masochists.

Let’s take one of Dylan’s recent songs and try to figure out what he wants to say and what he has actually said. There has been quite a bit of praise for the song “High Water” from the CD Love and Theft. It is a good song, but spoiled by several things.

The first is name dropping, along with Dylan’s habit, lately, of using colourful but superficial imagery and lines lifted from other people’s songs. He mentions quite a few people by name in “High Water” but does not develop their characters in the song. This would not fly in a film script and it doesn’t fly in a song lyric. He is assuming we either know of these folks or will go and find out. He never used to write with this kind of “go figure it out yourself” attitude. His best songs tell you everything you need to know. In “High Water” he mentions Charley Patton, Big Joe Turner, Bertha Mason, George Lewis and someone called Fat Nancy. Fat Nancy is the only one I am familiar with. She’s the one down at the Commonwealth Bank who wouldn’t give me a loan for a new weed-eater. Who are these people?

Charley Patton, in the dedication, was the “father of Delta blues”. We don’t really have to know anything except Dylan admires him. But if you are interested, long before Jimi Hendrix, in 1900, Patton was the entertainer’s entertainer with dazzling showmanship, often playing guitar on his knees and behind his head, as well as behind his back. Although Patton was a small man of about five foot five and 135 pounds, the sound of his whiskey- and cigarette-scarred voice was rumoured to have carried over 500 yards without amplification.

Big Joe Turner was a blues shouter who wrote “Shake Rattle & Roll”, and “Corrina Corrina” (recorded by Dylan on Freewheelin’). So why doesn’t Dylan tell us something about this in the song?

Bertha Mason was a character in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Rochester’s clandestine wife, Bertha, is a formerly beautiful and wealthy Creole woman who has become insane, violent and bestial. She lives locked in a secret room on the third storey of Thornfield and is guarded by Grace Poole, whose occasional bouts of inebriation sometimes enable Bertha to escape. Bertha eventually burns down Thornfield, plunging to her death in the flames. Some critics have seen her as a symbolic representation of the trapped Victorian wife, who is expected never to travel or work outside the house and becomes ever more frenzied as she finds no outlet for her frustration and anxiety. But if Bronte had wanted to speak out in the name of the oppressed slaves of Jamaica, she would have cast Bertha Mason in a better light. Bertha is the most obvious character used to represent colonialism in the Caribbean. But Bertha Mason has nothing to do with Dylan’s song theme, even if he had told us something about her, which he hasn’t.

George Lewis was a jazz clarinettist from New Orleans. Everyone knows that. Right?

Fat Nancy, as I mentioned before, is the loans officer at my branch of the Commonwealth Bank. She should be fired from the bank—and the song.

“The cuckoo is a pretty bird” is pinched from an old traditional song for no good reason. “I believe I’ll dust my broom” is pinched from a Robert Johnson song. No context for it to be in Dylan’s song. “I’m no pig without a wig” is probably just some slang he heard somewhere. It just jars here and distracts. What about this B-grade throwback verse to “Highway 61” (off Blonde on Blonde)?

Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew,

“You can’t open your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view.”

They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five,

Judge says to the High Sheriff, “I want him dead or alive,

Either one, I don’t care.”

High water everywhere.

Notice the jerky tone when he brings back the High Water theme? Cut and paste—as though someone were imitating a Dylan lyric. This verse should have either been rewritten to actually say something or omitted. The first couplet has no message worth learning, and the second couplet has no meaning worth extracting, no matter how long you ponder over it. You can read meanings into lyrics, of course, just as you can “hear” the voice of Satan if you play Beatles songs backwards.

I asked Fat Nancy for something to eat, she said, “Take it off the shelf—

As great as you are a man, you’ll never be greater than yourself.”

I told her I didn’t really care,

High water everywhere.

Another bit of woof-woof. The second line goes around in circles and comes back on itself, but says nothing.

Why does Dylan ruin such a good atmospheric song idea by including all this lazy writing mixed in with all the good writing? He doesn’t seem to have the judgment any longer to know one from the other.

Sir Christopher Ricks, the world’s most academically qualified Dylan tragic, recently said Dylan was “The greatest living user of the English language.” What an ugly sentence for someone who was Oxford Professor of Poetry. Has Ricks ever written a poem or a song lyric himself? As I advise my own music and lyric-writing students: show me, don’t tell me. Richard Wagner also said: “If a person can’t do what you can do, do not give them authority to criticise it.”

Here are Ricks’s comments, in his loopy style, on Dylan’s great song “Hattie Carroll”:

The way in which it’s come up with a cadence that’s given to him purely coincidentally by the names—Hattie Carroll’s first and her second name both have unstressed final syllables. The man who killed her, William Zantzinger, has that same pattern. It’s a newspaper item that gives him a cadence and a rhythm.

What an utterly superficial insight. One of the errors critics make in comparing artists is employing terms like greatest. It should be about uniqueness of personal vision, not the Cosmic Top Forty. The one thing remarkable artists share is this: they create a space of their own. Their work is beyond comparison, especially with each other—but not within their own body of work. It is quite possible to contrast good and poor poetry and songwriting, mature work and juvenilia within the career of the same artist. Certainly Dylan is way up there in the songwriting pantheon for all time, but so are thousands of others who have left us the world’s great song repository. One day Dylan may be just another Anon like so many writers lost in the mists of history.

Artists have to be brave enough to construct, and de-construct, their own work, with an almighty amount of focused consciousness, as well as intuition, in order to keep improving.

Self-growth is really about personal best so you have to compare it to other work in the artist’s own catalogue. Dylan’s later work pales in comparison with his best work. He is on a descending path. He performs hard—but he writes too easily.

Who knows why? Why did J.S. Bach create fifty solid years of masterpieces that only ceased with his death? How could Beethoven create his Choral Symphony—the key work that influenced Wagner’s music-dramas—at the end of his life, when he was deaf? Some folks keep going, some explode, some implode and some fade away. Dylan is on the slow fade. I’ve been holding my breath for two decades hoping for another real album masterpiece from him, but I think it’s time to exhale.

As far as the enormous role he has played in shaping and influencing popular music, well, it was the same for Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. Elvis, another young genius, morphed into a pill-popper in a white jumpsuit flashing a phoney FBI badge in Las Vegas, and Sinatra, the good-looking string-bean in a suit, with the awesome vocal phrasing, the first one who made girls swoon and scream in their seats, long before Elvis and the Beatles, ended up preferring gangsters to writers, and probably had interests in the very Las Vegas casinos that Elvis later played in. Must we hold our tongues about criticising Elvis and Frankie, too, because of their contributions to popular culture?

I think it is one of the responsibilities of the artist to shine some light on this process of disintegration which we see happening before our very eyes, over and over again. There is something much greater at stake besides lemming-like popular culture. Artists become extremely famous and rich. They become god-like. Then their work atrophies, or they self-destruct. I respect the emotional connection people have with Dylan. I have one too, but in a different way. Let’s remember fondly, and be inspired by, the best work—but let’s also correctly identify, and learn something from, their mistakes.

Bob Dylan needs neither the honour nor the income from the Nobel Prize. But there are plenty of brilliant novelists and poets who do. The awarding of a literature prize to a songwriter of this obvious stature and great wealth can only be a move by the Academy to inject some vitality back into what has become an irrelevant award; to bring, as Leonard Cohen said, some “new skin for an old ceremony”.

In the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein said:

Would the literary world be better off without the Nobel Prize in Literature? Certainly it would be no worse off without the Nobel, for as currently awarded the prize neither sets a true standard for literary production nor raises the prestige of literature itself.

But, on the brighter side, one of the benefits of the great misunderstanding of Dylan receiving this weird old award could be more respect and weight being given to the great lyric-ballad forms, once again, in the minds of the academic literary gatekeepers. Perhaps the level of intelligent songwriting, in popular music, which is now at an all-time low, will begin to reascend to the heights achieved during the Golden Age of the Folk Song, the 1960s, when folk-informed artists like Peter, Paul and Mary, Donovan and the Byrds topped the charts. A turn back to the hymn, the ballad, the rhyme: the way children learn to sing and are first exposed to writing.