Celebrating Roger TallonThe inventor who changed our everyday livesCulture, page 38

Richard WilliamsThere will be some people who doubt Bob Dylan’s right to win the Nobel prize in literature. But in Dylan, the words and music simply cannot be separated

In the latest of many distinctions garlanding a career stretching back fi ve and a half dec-ades, Bob Dylan has become the fi rst mem-ber of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to win the Nobel prize in literature. Some will argue against the award . Others will feel that he deserves the creation of a special Nobel prize

simply for being Bob Dylan .So, to confront the familiar argument, can

what he does be called literature? Essentially, in the work of Bob Dylan, the words and the music cannot be separated. Just take your favourite Dylan line. Yours might be the ever timely “Where preachers preach of evil fates / Teach-ers teach that knowledge waits / Can lead to hundred-dollar plates / Goodness hides behind its gates / But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked”, from It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) in 1965. Or the eternal “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” (Visions of Johanna, 1966) or the mysterious “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl” (All Along the Watchtower, 1968). Whichever it is, when you say them to yourself, as we all do in times of need,

you’ll be hearing his voice, his sound, his music.Mine happens to be from Brownsville Girl :

“Strange how people who suff er together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” Dylan phrases it so perfectly in a single breath that the meaning is rendered starkly and with profound resonance. That’s what he does.

The admirable delicacy of the Nobel commit-tee’s citation – “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” – will certainly have provoked a buzz

among analysts of Dylan’s career. For one thing, the last two albums con-

sisted entirely of material drawn from what has become known as the Great American Songbook:

compositions by the very Broad-way tunesmiths, in fact, who Dylan the songwriter seemed in the eyes

of his own generation to have been invented to destroy.

Dylan, however, has always been fond of turning his

own iconoclasm on the idea of iconoclasm

itself, his protests against being

called a protest singer just one example of that refusal to conform .

Similarly, he never wanted to tear down the walls of Tin Pan Alley. That was an inference drawn by others, useful in the early phase of his career, when he drew from what he had heard in the collection of antique songs on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and somehow infused it all with the onrushing anti-authoritar-ian, anti-deferential spirit of his own era.

As the Nobel citation correctly suggests, Dylan knitted himself into the warp and weft of Ameri-can popular music. Borrowing wholesale from the past, reshuffl ing melodies, images, characters and attitudes, he helped assemble the components of a rapidly changing present.

Fifty years ago he used a fairly minor motor-cycle accident as an excuse to step away from the spotlight. But the end of the “perfect” Dylan – the one who fused what he had learned from Woody Guthrie and the symbolist poets with the energy of rock’n’roll, and who mocked the world from behind impenetrable shades – did not mean the end of his creativity. In songs such as Tangled Up in Blue (1975), Blind Willie McTell (1983) and Cross the Green Mountain (2002) he explored ways of playing games with time, voice and per-spective, continuing to expand the possibilities of song in ways that disarm all possible criticism of this new and perhaps greatest honour.

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Award was just another example of Nobel’s gender bias

I woke up to the news that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel prize in literature. What’s even more galling than the fact that a singer has won an award for a literary prize is that people are calling this radical . Dylan has been awarded the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

T he permanent secretary of the Swedish acad-emy, Sara Danius, said it had “not been a diffi cult decision”, and she hoped the academy would not be criticised.

But of course it will be criticised, and it should

be. Giving the award to any white male writer is in no way innovative . It is simply a return to the status quo – albeit in a diff erent genre.

The Nobel prize in literature is infamous for its conventionality . In its 115-year history, only 14 women have been awarded the prize, and only four of those women have been writers of colour. The Nobel prize has one of the worst gender ratios in any major literary award .

The Guardian listed Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Don DeLillo and Haruki Murakami as favourites – and all would have been a better choice than Dylan.

And what about Margaret Atwood, who has writ-ten poetry, fi ction and non-fi ction, and whose work has been endlessly republished, studied around the world ? Or Joyce Carol Oates, who has published more than 40 books of fi ction ?

It is particularly frustrating that Dylan’s win is being packaged as revolutionary when it is any-thing but. It proves, once again, how the times just aren’t a-changin’. Natalie Kon-yu

Natalie Kon-yu is a Melbourne-based writer and academic

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one thing, the last two albums consisted entirely of material drawnfrom what has become known as the Great American Songbook:

compositions by the very Broad-way tunesmiths, in fact, who Dylanthe songwriter seemed in the eyes

of his own generation to have been invented to destroy.

Dylan, however, has always been fond of turning his

own iconoclasm on theidea of iconoclasm

itself, his protestagainst being