How Many Roads Must a Man Walk Down, Before You Can Call Him a Nobel Laureate?

Well, it's official - Bob Dylan is the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. And it didn't take long for people to start the debate over whether or not he deserved it. For my part, I'm happy that he's getting some kind of recognition...because, lest we forget, we're living in a world where Kanye West has more Grammy Awards than Bob Dylan.

I first heard Dylan when I was around 13 or 14 years old, and it was the first time I can remember hearing lyrics and thinking that they were on a different level than most songwriting. And I'm hardly the only person to have felt that way - just about everybody that has picked up a musical instrument or put a pen to paper has been influenced by him to a lesser or greater degree. He has an irrefutable and lasting impact on American culture and the written word. But the real problem with this particular honor is one of definitions - does songwriting count as literature? 

I guess that kind of depends on what we as a society agree we mean by the word "literature." The most generally understood definition includes books, novels, or possibly poetry, and lyrics could fall under the latter category. There's been a considerable amount of people that don't quite accept this, however. Others have pointed out that Dylan has written a couple of books - a slim volume of poetry titled "Tarantula," a memoir titled "Chronicles Vol. 1" (published over ten years ago and with no second volume in sight), and some people have actually sited "The Bob Dylan Songbook," which, while technically a book, I'm going to say doesn't really count. 

There's a fair amount of intellectual snobbery when it comes to things like the Nobel Prize. Bob Dylan, while enjoying a fairly universal degree of admiration, is seen by some as not being deserving of such a prestigious award. If you look back at a list of previous recipients of the award, you have to go back to 1993 to find a winner that the common man might be expected to recognize - the poet, Toni Morrison. For the most part, Literature Laureates are composed of European writers with unpronounceable and unrecognizable names. Having not heard of most of them, let alone read their work, I'm not going to say that none of them were deserving of the honor, but I will venture to say that Bob Dylan has brought more joy to the world than Svetlana Alexievich (2015 winner) and that the writings of Bob Dylan have been more celebrated by the general population than have the writings of Tomas Transtromer (2011 winner). 

The problem with the art community's compulsion to hand out awards to artists is that art, in any form and over any medium, is a highly subjective thing. The art that I appreciate does not always sync up with the art that you might appreciate. Whether it's a Nobel Prize, and Academy Award, or a Golden Raspberry Award, there are going to be people who disagree as to whether the winner was deserving. The Nobel Prize for Literature doesn't have an excellent track record when it comes to recognizing writers, having snubbed Mark Twain, James Joyce, and Leo Tolstoy. And, at the end of the day, Bob Dylan may have written some of the most cherished songs of the twentieth century, but he also went through a regrettable country phase, a baffling Christian rock phase, and a sickening run of overproduced pseudo-disco material in the 1980's. So let's not take the Nobel Prize OR Dylan too seriously, because neither of them are infallible, and it's a fairly fitting honor to bestow upon the man. And if you think about it, the Nobel Prize doesn't seem so unreasonable when you consider the fact that over in the UK they honor their beloved musicians with KNIGHTHOOD, the same honor that was given to the companions of King Arthur, so let's keep this whole thing in perspective.