I’m a big Bob Dylan fan – I still have my LP and cassette versions of Blood on the Tracks among others, and that was the first CD I ever bought when the technology came out here in Japan – but a Nobel Prize in Literature? Since when is music literature? Unlike non-laureates Keats or Wordsworth, say, Dylan’s lyrics are written to be heard, not seen. These are not poems but lyrics, and that’s not a criticism. You can’t recognize one without the other. I thought the lesson was learned with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1932, which was presented to Of Thee I Sing lyricist Ira Gershwin and the show’s book writers while pointedly leaving out composer George Gershwin. (The Pulitzer people have corrected their ways since.) Those lyrics were not written in a vacuum; they’re inseparable from the music that accompanies them. It’s the same with Dylan, who of course writes both together. A Peace Prize would have made more sense – or maybe Chemistry in honor of the reaction that occurs when music and lyrics gel into one perfect whole. Dylan is amply deserving of something, maybe a new Nobel Prize for Culture. But let’s not put him on the level of Faulkner, any more than we should give Faulkner a prize for lyrics.  Continue reading →