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Write it like Bob Dylan
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An attempt to decipher Bob Dylan, post Pulitzer
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Pulitzer winner Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, the recipient of this year’s Pulitzer, has more literary awards than hair in his grizzled mane. Anyone who can write lyrics like
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin,
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin
surely deserves the Pulitzer and more . But at what cost? Is the greatest iconoclast in pop music becoming an establishment figure? Bob Dylan sounded old, wise and cynical even as a baby-faced, if slightly stoned, teenager, but he was never less than cool. In the late 50s and early 60s, the heir to folk music icon Woody Guthrie wrote and sang flower power anthems like The Times They Are A-Changin and Blowin’ in the Wind.
However, Dylan hated being pinned down as a folk or protest singer. His dark side and artistic ambition broke out in works like Mr. Tambourine man, a surreal, psychedelic plea to a drug dealer for some dope.
Dylan risked becoming a folk music pariah by playing the electric guitar and by inventing folk rock. In a live recording from 1966, after a scream of “Judas!” from the audience, Dylan turned to his band and said, “Play it f@%^*#* loud”. The band did just that. Dylan and folk rock won that war, and albums like Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde are now considered among the greatest in rock history.
D.A. Pennebaker’s 1965 documentary Don’t Look Back shows Dylan in his prime: languid and loose-limbed, arrogant, taunting a journalist, with bright wary eyes that glisten with contempt. The most notable thing about this documentary is not the pot, booze, girls or nicotine. It is the portable typewriter, and Dylan banging away on it, as if possessed, sometimes through the night.
In the late 1960s, after a motorbike accident crippled him for months, Dylan’s material became more personal, drawing on marital friction, anger, apocalyptic visions, the blues, gospel, jazz and rock.
A decade later, he switched to born-again Christianity, but remained a world-weary troublemaker. He had one great protest song left in him — the angry ballad against the imprisonment of Hurricane Carter.
Dylan’s output since the 1970s has been prolific but uneven, returning at irregular intervals with artistic and commercial hits. His 2006 album, Modern Times, made him the oldest artist to debut at No. 1.
What makes Dylan great? In nearly five decades, Dylan has inhabited so many genres and invented so many artistic personas, it seems natural it took six different actors (including a woman) to portray him in the movie I’m Not There.
No one has the galactic sweep or oceanic depths of his song-writing talent. No one cares more about language and the rhythm and texture of words. Densely metaphoric as Dylan Thomas, teasingly allusive as T.S. Eliot, direct as Philip Larkin, garrulous and confessional like Robert Lowell... some of Dylan’s works can have a poetic ambition seemingly too big for pop music; but mostly they are tightly crafted poems, plain as a child’s grief.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she’s like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.
RAJIV. M
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