Bob Dylan, Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2017
Off the Page
In October 2016 the Swedish Academy gave Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature. He did not say anything publicly for two weeks. He skipped the December banquet in Stockholm, but Academy rules said he had to deliver a lecture by June 10 to receive the prize money of eight million Swedish kronor. On June 4, 2017, in a studio in Los Angeles, he finally recorded his speech. Jazz pianist Alan Pasqua played soft chords in the background. The speech ran twenty-seven minutes and was sent to Stockholm just days before the deadline.
Most of the talk was about three books Dylan read in school, including Moby-Dick and the Odyssey. He was polite about the honor, but at the end he drew a hard line between books and his craft. He said, "But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read." A poem stays on the printed paper, but a song needs a human body to exist. Words on a page wait for an eye, but music vanishes into the air the moment the sound stops. People try to treat songs like written poetry to make them seem serious, but that misses how they work.
Therefore
Do not judge a song by reading it off a screen. Listen to the person singing it, because the sound carries the meaning.
Andrea Pitzer, 2017
In June 2017, writer Andrea Pitzer wrote an article for the magazine Slate about Dylan's lecture. Dylan had recited lines about Captain Ahab and the white whale that did not appear anywhere in Herman Melville's novel. Pitzer checked study guides and discovered that Dylan had lifted phrases straight from the website SparkNotes. He was not giving an academic paper or pretending to be a scholar. He was assembling a spoken talk from memory and quick notes, the same way musicians patch together old tunes. He treated the literary lecture like another performance.
A small reminder, on the desk or the stereo, that songs live in the air and belong to the voice.
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