A screenshot from Martin Scorcese’s ‘No Direction Home’; Photo YouTube
Bob Dylan finally got the nod the Nobel Prize committee has been sleeping on for years, awarding the 75-year-old lyric mastermind behind some of the most important songs in American history with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The committee’s explanation: “For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
The first time a musician has ever been awarded the prize, the rock-poet laureate joins a 116-year alumni of minds such as Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few.
We’re unabashedly over-the-moon about the decision. All you have to do is look at the lyric sheet for “Like a Rolling Stone” and understand the defiance and progression the dude exudes by its lonesome all on paper. The vicious, scathing midwestern howl and harmonica fills are a bonus prize.
Not everyone is happy about the decision, though. The New York Times earmarked a hilariously jealous tweet from Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh:
“I’m a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”
Harsh words from the man that wrote Trainspotting.
To that we cue Dylan circa 1965 after going electric and being called Judas at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, he turning to his band to demand, “Play it fucking loud,” and putting “Like a Rolling Stone” on blast:
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next mealHow does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone