Poet, composer, musician, artist, writer and even movie actor – all this is about Bob Dylan, whose real name is Robert Allen Zimmerman. He became a key cultural figure of the 20th century and it is quite difficult to rank anyone with him. Of course, we could remember The Beatles, talk about The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Freddie Mercury. However, none of them managed to go beyond one single role, but Bob Dylan changed with the era – sometimes it is not even completely clear whether he defines the time he lives in or whether it defines him?
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Robert was different – he has 39 numbered records. In his songs he appeared as a teenager with a harmonica and rather simple verses, a lonely and romantic shepherd, and then turned into a good-natured family man. Bob Dylan was constantly moving – and never stopped in his development. That’s why he’s called “the poet of the road”. And it’s the same reason why different people like very different Bob Dylan songs.
t was only in the 1990s that he finally had a more or less established image. By that time he had matured enough – he began to sing in a huskier voice, and his vocal style hinted that he already knew everything, had seen everything and had experienced everything. In his compositions, Dylan does not refer to his own past – he travels on the waves of common history and shares those stories that today’s youth can only read about in textbooks. For him, these are memories.
Critics compare Bob Dylan to America – this “patchwork” country, in which each region is unique and not like the other. The singer absorbed so much that one wonders how he was not torn by so many characters. This, by the way, was perfectly embodied in the 2007 movie I’m Not There. It brings together six stories and six very different actors, each of whom personifies a certain period of Dylan’s work.
In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. “For creating new poetic expressions in the great American song tradition,” was the wording proposed by the Nobel Committee. Sooner or later it was certainly to be given. As much as Bob Dylan himself did not deny his poetic talent, his poems can be safely parsed in foreign philology seminars – only John Lennon’s lyrics can be called as difficult (just for the sake of interest read the original Norwegian Wood).
Of course, the singer was against it. He never considered his songs as poetry. Songs are songs. They should be listened to, not read. This is what he stated in his Nobel lecture: “Such are the songs. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are not like literature. They are supposed to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were supposed to be acted out on stage. The words of songs are supposed to be sung, not read on the page. And I hope that some of you will have the chance to hear these words the way they were originally meant to be heard – in a concert or on a recording, or however people listen to songs nowadays.
Dylan’s songs were not just listened to – they were listened to in a way that other artists never dreamed of. Just imagine, his songs were covered by the greatest artists of their time – Elvis Presley, for example, sang Tomorrow Is A Long Time, and Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door by Guns N’ Roses seems to have become more famous than Bob Dylan’s original version. Even legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix was impressed and released his own version of All Along The Watchtower. This shows that Bob Dylan’s songs are so talented that they are extremely successful even in other music – they do not lose their cultural value. And not every composer can boast of that.
