Steve Breen for October 14, 2016

Oh! I want that order, donkey included!

It also does a juggling act for entertainment …………

Where is Juan Valdez?

Really great, he deserves it!!

I have mixed feelings about this. I wasn’t a fan when he first appeared, and many considered him a weak Woody Guthrie imitator. Mike Royko wrote a scathing column about it long ago. Who knows? I’ll read the Nobel committee’s full explanation.

Will they still be singing his songs in a hundred years?

Probably.

Unfortunately, this decision killed Dario Fo.

Groan…

I like it!

Very nice, Mr. Breen!

Awww. What a cutie

GREAT songs and lyrics, but sorry, lousy voice. Like many early Beatles songs, orchestral, or other singers versions, were better. Yes, a true poet, and deserving of the first award to a lyricist.

Fritzoid: thinking musically, not emotionally, there IS power when he sings.

Well, there’s not a Nobel prize for singing, he surely wouldn’t win it. Poet, maybe a very good one, but not great in my opinion.

Dylan is primarily a writer but he is also a good tunesmith. In my opinion Dylan in his unique way, changed writing and the perception of and limits of poetry. I have seen him in concert 3 times, he doesn’t have the best delivery or voice. At the Gorge in George, WA he looked at the audience and said, " all I see are a line of tombstones." He is a strange cat. If you’ve ever tried to write a Dylan type tune you will find it nearly impossible.

He’s an impressive poet, in many ways. Elsewhere I have discussed why I think his poetry deserves the prize. But since the comments above are about his music, here’s my take. His voice is rough, but there’s a long tradition of rough voices in American music. I might mention Louis Armstrong, who is widely considered one of the most important jazz singers. On the blues side, where do we start? Robert Johnson? Charley Patton? So I don’t fault his voice. His intonation, by the way, is superb and that matters a lot. His own guitar playing is adequate, nothing special, likewise his piano, but his harmonica playing has been very influential, and his ability to work with a band is just about unmatched. The story of the organ line in Like a Rolling Stone is an example.

why do you require a “good voice” when many songwriters sing their own songs, and should, like Leonard Cohen – he has a craggy 85 year old voice and I hope he sings forever

I figured it to be a Democrat buying votes.

I never liked to listen to Dylan sing. But hearing him sing “Masters of War” after having only heard Judy Collins singing an abridged edition of it, I realized that he was a powerful lyricist and that sometimes a pretty voice does not convey the message.

One of the important tasks for a literary scholar is putting aside matters of personal taste. For instance, i don’t happen to like D. H. Lawrence. He’s just not my kind of writer. But I would never say that he’s a bad writer, nor would I say that those who do like him are wrong. He’s clearly a great writer, just a great writer I don’t happen to like. When I judge him, I can see why he’s good, I can see why other people like him, I can see why he’s important, but I still don’t like him. Or take someone more recent: I don’t like Saul Bellow. But he got a Nobel Prize. I would never ever think of saying he didn’t deserve it. But I will never read another book of his. (I’ve read five or six, I would suppose, and that’s enough.) When I do literary scholarship I’m not trying to impose my own taste and preferences, I’m trying to figure out what the story or poem means, and I try to figure out how the writer creates that meaning and how the audience figures out that meaning. But I leave it up to each reader to say “I like it” or “I don’t like it”.