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Bob Dylan Is the First Pop Musician to Win a Pulitzer
April 09, 2008 10:00 AM
by
findingDulcinea Staff
Bob Dylan was awarded a special citation from the Pulitzer Board for his poetic contributions to popular music.
30-Second Summary
Bob Dylan was among the 2008 Pulitzer Prize recipients announced this week, making him the first pop musician to win the prize.
The Pulitzer Board has previously been criticized for only giving awards to musicians “in good standing of classical music's old-boy network.” Frequently, the pieces that won went unheard by the general public and “vanished without a trace.”
The board has been making efforts in recent years to better represent popular tastes by awarding the Pulitzer to jazz musicians, but rock music was previously “dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.”
However the response to Dylan’s award has been enthusiastic, especially from other recipients. David Lang, who won for his classical piece “The Little Match Girl Passion,” said, “I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes.”
Juot Diaz, who won the fiction prize, responded with similar enthusiasm. “I am in disbelief,” he said.
Dylan is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and won an Oscar in 2001 for his song “Things Have Changed.”
The Pulitzer Board has previously been criticized for only giving awards to musicians “in good standing of classical music's old-boy network.” Frequently, the pieces that won went unheard by the general public and “vanished without a trace.”
The board has been making efforts in recent years to better represent popular tastes by awarding the Pulitzer to jazz musicians, but rock music was previously “dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.”
However the response to Dylan’s award has been enthusiastic, especially from other recipients. David Lang, who won for his classical piece “The Little Match Girl Passion,” said, “I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes.”
Juot Diaz, who won the fiction prize, responded with similar enthusiasm. “I am in disbelief,” he said.
Dylan is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and won an Oscar in 2001 for his song “Things Have Changed.”
Headline Links: Dylan wins Pulitzer
The Pulitzer Board included Bob Dylan among its Pulitzer Prize recipients when it announced winners on April 7. Dylan received a special citation “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
Source: The Pulitzer Prizes
Dylan’s citation marks the first instance of the Pulitzer committee awarding a prize to a pop musician. Other recipients were pleased by Dylan’s inclusion. Fiction winner Juot Diaz even wrote about the singer in the original draft of his winning novel, “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” “I had one part that was 40 pages long, the entire chapter was organized around Bob Dylan's lyrics over a two year-period,” said Diaz.
Source: CNN [AP]
Background: Dylan’s previous awards
Folk rocker Dylan won his Pulitzer for his “poetic power,” but he has said, “I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word.” He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and his hall of fame page details his life, discography and the musical influences that made his songs “running commentary on a restless age.”
Source: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Dylan also won an Oscar for his song, “Things Have Changed,” featured on the “Wonder Boys” soundtrack. The chronic outsider thanked “the members of the academy who were bold enough to give me this award for this song.” Dylan was nominated for an Oscar for the soundtrack of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” in 1973 but did not win.
Source: MTV
Opinion and Analysis: Musicians and the Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize for music is usually awarded to classical musicians and this year’s recipient, composer David Lang, is no exception. Lang won for his piece, “The Little Match Girl Passion,” and like Dylan, is known for his innovation and genre-defying oeuvre. Lang is thrilled to be honored alongside Dylan, a favorite artist in his household: “I told my children I won the Pulitzer, and they were like, 'OK, big deal.' But when I said, 'OK, they gave a special award to Bob Dylan, just like me,' they said, 'Oh, this is really something.' "
Source: Los Angeles Times
In 2006, Slate magazine criticized the Pulitzer board for failing to honor contemporary musicians, despite a 1996 promise by the board to reflect a broader range of taste. That year, Thelonious Monk won a posthumous special citation for “a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz." According to Slate, the award was too little, too late. Ironically, the article specifically cites Dylan as worthy of a Pulitzer.
Source: Slate magazine
The following year, Ornette Coleman won the prize for his jazz album “Sound Grammar,” and the Wall Street Journal accused the board of “trying to atone for past blunders by playing an arbitrary game of catch-up.” Furthermore, the “good-but-not-great” album was “eight unrelated pieces,” and, as such didn’t entirely fulfill the prize’s mandate as an award for a “‘distinguished musical composition.’”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Related Topics: Dylan in books and movies
Dylan was given the citation for his contributions to music, but the singer is an author as well. In 2004, Dylan published “Chronicles: Volume One,” the first installation of his memoirs. According to Publishers Weekly’s starred review, Dylan “lingers not on moments of success and celebrity, but on the crises of his intellectual development.”
Source: Dulcinea Book Store
Dylan was also the subject of the recent film “I’m Not There,” in which six different actors portrayed the many faces of Bob Dylan. A New York Times magazine feature quotes Cate Blanchett, who stars as Dylan persona Jude Quinn: “I don’t think the film even strives to make sense, in a way.” Rather, the article argues, “I’m Not There” is director Todd Haynes’s effort to “take the experimental into the multiplex.” The official New York Times review of the movie was glowing, despite (or perhaps because of) its surrealistic aspects.
Source: The New York Times
© 2010 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
