Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize has reignited thedebate about whether song lyrics can ever be considered literature. Is it timeto finally tear down these cultural barriers?
Every now and then an esteemed literaryfigure will see fit to pass judgement on the works of a pop star.
It's been going on since the early 1960s,when songwriters first began to aspire to something more than rhyming"moon" with "June".
The literary establishment, bothhorrified and fascinated by the attention being lavished on these long-hairedupstarts, felt it was incumbent upon them, as cultural gatekeepers, to saysomething.
In recent years, it is rap stars thathave found themselves in high culture's cross hairs.
In 2003, no less a figure than Nobellaureate Seamus Heaney hailed "this guy Eminem", who he said had"created a sense of what is possible" and "sent a voltage aroundhis generation".
'Bad poems'
John Sutherland, professor Emeritus of
Modern English Literature at University College London, hascompared the late Tupac Shakur's Hit Em Up- a blistering, foul-mouthedassault on his perceived rap rivals - to the vers libre of 19thCentury American poet Walt Whitman. Rap is a "very word-centred"form, argues Sutherland, and its essence is in rhyming and unfetteredself-expression.
But Eminem and Tupac were never going tobe the first songwriters to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. That honour wasprobably always going to belong to Bob Dylan.
Dylan is one of the very few musicalartists to have spawned their own cottage industry in academia, with Oxfordpoetry professor Christopher Ricks getting the ball rolling in the early 1970s,by comparing the folk-rock troubadour to Keats.
Dylan's lyrics - ambiguous, playful andallusive - lend themselves to furrowed-brow study in a way that the vastmajority of song words do not. Many music fans will be eternally by gratefulfor that. Lyrics are not meant to be "poetry" and vice versa, theywould argue.
"Songwriters are not poets,"
wrote Simon Armitage, one of the UK's most popular poets,in 2008 in The Guardian.
"Or songs are not poems, I shouldsay. In fact, songs are often bad poems. Take the music away and what you'releft with is often an awkward piece of creative writing full of lumpysyllables, cheesy rhymes, exhausted cliches and mixed metaphors."
Any songwriters feeling slighted by
Armitage's assessment of their craft can always seek out his own song lyrics,
written for his hobby band, which he admittedin a 2013 interview,were "on the whole, toowordy".
'Eloquent and relevant'
The poet is an admirer of Alex Turner,chief songwriter of The Arctic Monkeys, whose witty, punning lyrics abouteveryday life on the band's early albums were seen as being firmly in theEnglish social realist tradition of Jarvis Cocker or Ray Davis of The Kinks.
These writers clearly have a gift forputting words to music. Does it matter whether the results are consideredliterature or not?
Professor Howard Rambsy, who teaches acourse on rap lyrics at Southern Illinois University, firmly believes that itdoes.
He is "excited" by Bob Dylan'sNobel Prize - and he says he has no time for those on social media who say itshould have gone to a "more deserving" novelist or poet.
It helps settle the "bigdebate" about whether lyrics are worthy of serious literary consideration."At least for the Nobel Laureate committee, the answer is yes," hesays.
Prof Rambsy finds discussing the lyricsof rapper Jay-Z a good way to engage young literature students and get themthinking about concepts like allusion and alliteration.
"There are always good lines in rap,clever wordplay that brings various ideas together in a way that is botheloquent and relevant. But the ones that stand out are those who can weave theideas into a story," he says.
'Great mind'
Rap has some literary roots - such asSixties radicals The Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron, writer of The RevolutionWill Not Be Televised, who began his career as a novelist - but rap artiststend not to wear their literary ambitions on their sleeves in the way that BobDylan's generation of coffee house wordsmiths did.
There was two-way traffic between theliterary and musical worlds, which began with the Beat Poets in the previousdecade. Leonard Cohen, a published poet, slid effortlessly into the role offolk balladeer. John Lennon published a volume of nonsense verse In His OwnWrite.
Song words began to be printed ongatefold album sleeves, allowing the audience - educated young people desperatefor the music they loved to have some depth and meaning - the opportunity topore over them as if they were great works of literature.
Big-selling artists such as the Beatlesand The Rolling Stones, taking their cue from Dylan, began to expand their lyricalpalette and tackle more serious subject matter.
"The difference is that Dylan was
always effortlessly serious, he wasn't trying,"writes Dylan biographer Howard
Sounes."He was serious just because he had a great mind."
"Regardless of whether it's right tocall them poetry, his songs are highly poetic and highly literary - intricateand subtle and clever and funny and profound and sad: everything you can wantwriting to be. There's no one who deserves the Nobel Prize more."
Dylan himself has rarely expressed anygreat literary pretensions, despite taking his stage name from revered Welshpoet Dylan Thomas (he was born Robert Zimmerman).
Although the 1965 Dylan quote that has
often been held up as an example of his brilliant insouciance, when he
described Smokey Robinson as "America's greatest living poet"
wasrecently revealedto have been invented by a Motownrecords press officer.
"Why bother even telling Bob?,"Al Abrams the press officer in question recalls saying, in a 2011 book on theMotown publicity machine.
"That sounds just like somethinghe'd say anyway."
