E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I AM NOT THE ONE YOU NEED Yesterday Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The award has been met with annual scorn and scepticism by many in the English press for decades, though the list of winners of the past 30 or so years includes Mahfouz, Fo, Brodsky, Lessing, Gordimer, Pamuk, Grass, Coetzee, Walcott, Heaney, Morrison, Munro, Pinter, Naipul, Modiano and Transtromer - all major figures in their genres. It is surely the case that Adonis, Roth, Murakami, Atwood, Ashbery, Muldoon , or Le Carre - to name just a few other world-famous writers now living - have an arguable case to be advanced, as well. Their time may yet come.   It cannot, however, be claimed that the Nobel ALWAYS misses the greats. In its odd career, it has managed to reward Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Milosz, Bellow, Neruda, Beckett, Steinbeck, Singer, Sartre, Camus, Pasternak, Gide, Hesse, Churchill, Mistral, Pirandello, Bergson, Shaw, O'Neill, Tagore, and Kipling . Any pr...

I am trying to compare Bob Dylan to anyone else.  As a poet, he is not more memorably gifted than Leonard Cohen, Yeats, John Berryman , or indeed Dylan Thomas .  As a singer, he is no match for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley , or Pavarotti .  As a songwriter, he is equalled by, perhaps,  John Lennon , Kurt Weill , Kurt Cobain, Bob Marley,  and Elvis Costello .  Why is it then that he is singled out as the paramount genius of popular music?  The answer, my friends, is 50 years.  Dylan, that enigmatic, sexy, sly trickster figure has been in constant transformation for fifty years of unequalled song composition and performance, or reperformance, his interpretations and variations creating Borgesian complications.  His personal journey has had more make-overs than Lady Gaga .  He has been a Christian, a cowboy, a peacenik, a fierce Zionist, and a praiser of Scotland.  He is, arguably, the Shakespeare of song - an uncanny talent of unlimi...

Alan Baban on the Music of the 00s Culturally we inhabit the margins. If the major movement in pop music over the last ten years was stealing other people’s ideas, we’re now in a position to see exactly what we got away with. What did we get away with? We got away with wholesale theft. Many of the decade’s most lauded bands did double-up as penciled-in, papier-mâché versions of older (always better) acts. You can footnote The Strokes at Marquee Moon . The National did a fairly risible REM. Our own Libertines tried to do The Strokes, then they did The Clash, then they did The Strokes again. Too many bands copped Talking Heads. Not enough copped Pavement— not even the band’s erstwhile frontman Stephen Malkmus, who shot off into acid-psyche territory with his new band The Jicks, and in the process put out this decade’s best guitar album (2005’s utterly loopy Pig Lib ). Sidenote: too many people played guitar, then again, too many people didn’t. Radiohead did and didn’t. (I liked them bett...

Peter Robinson writes on Bob Dylan's ‘Back in the Rain’ Protesting too much, the Biograph (1985) notes on the out-take recording of ‘You’re a Big Girl Now’ include twenty-four lines of irritated outburst from Bob Dylan about what interpreters (‘Stupid and misleading jerks’) have made of his work. Though he does get on to the question of whether he has been playing roles and reinventing himself over the years, the beginning and end of this passage both confront the notion that Dylan has at times been an autobiographical and a confessional ‘poet’ in his song-writing career: You’re A Big Girl Now well, I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? To clinch his point, and he does have one, Dylan ends by admitting that he did once write a song straight from life: I don’t write confessional songs. Emotion’s got nothing to do with it. It ...

Every artist (infinite in potential) limits their range and delineates their limit. In this way the tradition is revised, enhanced and made bountiful in conserved seriousness which establishes new norms and points to farther reaches. Modern Times by Bob Dylan , released yesterday, is a supremely modest, mature and controlled offering of ten songs whose generous appeal and broad, open manner present the most crafted, popular sound of his late career. Those who come to this album hoping for explicit expressions of critique or contempt for these modern, fraught, American times will be turned away not empty-handed, but handed signs and symbols wrapped in tuneful enigmas, swaddled in traditional folk, blues, swing and country sounds and tropes. Of Dylan's three great albums of the decade begun in 1997, this is the second strongest, the least cryptic, and the most romantic: deeper, socio-political losses figured as absenteed women on the road of a lonesome cowboy band. However, critics ...

As I - and the world - await the coming of the third in Dylan's late series of masterworks, it is appropriate to once again ask: what is the greatest work of art of the 21st century? I confess to a short list of one: Bob Dylan's album, which had been set for release on 9-11, "Love and Theft". There have been major works in cinema, by Wong Kar-wai and Lynch and Ozon ; several good collections of poetry, a handful of novels, some art installations - but without a doubt, the most troubling, complex, uncanny and relevant work has been "Love and Theft". This is an album I return to, often, for a simple reason. Bob Dylan is the American Shakespeare , in the sense that Harold Bloom has talked about Shakespeare, and this is his late masterwork - his King Lear , if you will. Nothing I can write will sustain these claims - you must listen to the album. What I will say is that Dylan has achieved an extraordinary texture and flow of voice, music and meaning here - a...

The Mercury Prize (that bastion of the uber-hip and ultra-hyped but often worthwile work)s hortlist has just been released in London this morning. Eyewear has yet to hear half the popular music (& indie-textured) albums on the list, but is especially eager to listen to Mr. Thom Yorke's notes on The Eraser , which has songs of - to put it mildly - a political nature. Seeing Scritti Politti on the list is a thrill - he was one of the most ingenious wordsmiths of the 80s - recall his line "I need a new hermeneutic"? - a first then, no doubt, for a pop song. Arctic Monkeys , whose lustre has gone a bit cold, despite this blog's raves, are likely to seize the day. Still, The Back Room by Editors (they deleted the the) has grown in majesty over the last months, and, while surely not the safe bet, is the dark horse worth backing. Meanwhile, the album of the year is likely to be Dylan's latest, forthcoming while we all hold our collective breath. http://news.bb...