When you #AlwaysUnfollow
“Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you / To be just like them / They say sing while you slave”
And Bob Dylan has been himself ever since he stepped into the scene in 1961. For him music was not just about the catch phrases and pulsating rhythms. It needed to reflect life in all its myriad ways. He always said, “I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.” Art, he concluded, was not immune from moral measure.
With the Nobel Prize, the poet Bob Dylan, who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota, USA, has T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett for company. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection has been termed as perhaps the most radical choice in a history going back to 1901.
Considered one of the more influential figures in contemporary culture, Dylan was a natural rebel. He wrote the greatest protest songs ever created, but then quickly moved away from them. He plugged in at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and spend the next year playing incredibly loud rock & roll shows to crowds full of booing folkies. He made a country album at the peak of the psychedelic era, and 10 years after that, made a gospel album and went on a tour featuring just that material.
He resisted every label slapped on him – folk singer, protest poet, folk-rock hipster. True to his nature, he hasn’t commented on his win, instead he was doing what he does best – performing.
The Swedish Academy Award is given for a lifetime of writing, instead of a single body of work and his many albums Bringing It All Back Home, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, Oh Mercy, Time Out Of Mind, Love and Theft and Modern Times, have been described as having a tremendous impact on popular music.
And as President Barack Obama said, “There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music. All these years later, he’s still chasing that sound, still searching for a little bit of truth.”
