Bob Dylan Wins Pulitzer Prize

Bob Dylan has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for being Bob Dylan.

NEW YORK -- Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock 'n' roll has finally broken through the Pulitzer wall.

Dylan, the most acclaimed and influential songwriter of the past half century, who more than anyone brought rock from the streets to the lecture hall, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Monday, cited for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."

It was the first time Pulitzer judges, who have long favored classical music, and, more recently, jazz, awarded an art form once dismissed as barbaric, even subversive.

...Long after most of his contemporaries either died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and release highly regarded CDs, most recently "Modern Times." Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics — even digging through his garbage for clues — since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as "Blowin' in the Wind" made Dylan a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation.

His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences. His memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One," received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature.

Does Dylan deserve this special recognition?

Yes.

Considering Dylan has received so much attention and his work has been so thoroughly analyzed, I think he's misunderstood.

He's an icon but he's a human being. Even as a young man, he was defined as an almost supernatural figure. That's an unrealistic burden to force on anyone.

There's a huge difference between being a talented artist and being God.

If you aren't familiar with Dylan, I highly recommend Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan: No Direction Home. It chronicles Dylan's early years. The film allows you to come to your own conclusions about him.

When it first aired on PBS in September 2005, I wrote on another blog:

Sometimes PBS gets it right.

For nearly twenty years now, American Masters has offered some fascinating biographical portraits.

Some of the biographies have been disappointments to me. They’ve had as much depth as encyclopedia entries or three paragraph obituaries. Others manage to tap into something special about the highlighted individual.

I think that Martin Scorsese’s film, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, was definitely one of the best of the series.

Is my opinion colored by that fact that I’m a fan of Dylan’s poetry and music, and I’m an admirer of Scorsese’s artistry and film-making?

Of course. So what?

This isn’t the first time Scorsese has made a film about a musical artist, nor is it the first time he filmed Dylan. In his 1978 classic, The Last Waltz, Scorsese chronicled the farewell concert of The Band. Scorsese brilliantly caught Dylan’s performance in that.

Not surprisingly, Scorsese did a fantastic job of telling the story of the young Bob Dylan in this film.

I especially enjoyed seeing the previously unreleased footage, photographs, and tapes from The Bob Dylan Archives—a treat for any Dylan fan.

I have a long list of specific favorite moments in the film; but generally speaking, the interview portions with today’s Dylan were the most enjoyable and enlightening for me.

The furrowed face of the sixty-four-year-old Dylan juxtaposed with the baby-faced Dylan of the early 1960s emphasized the perspective that can only be achieved with the passing of time.

I love it that Dylan chose not to go the Botox route and run away from his years.

It makes complete sense to me, and I see it as the underlying truth of the film.

Dylan is genuine. He has always done what he wants to do. He isn’t a manufactured product.

Political movements of the early 60s and the media deemed him a prophet and the voice of a generation. They cast Dylan in that role even though he didn’t want to play it.

This god of protest songs was not a political person. He never considered being on the side of someone who’s hurting or suffering injustices to be a political stance. That’s simply being a decent human being.

The segments where the young Dylan addresses the press are so funny. As he said, the status they gave him was absurd. He wanted to write songs and sing them. He didn’t want to be anyone’s leader or someone else’s voice.

At the end of the film, as Dylan takes to the stage for a concert, an audience member shouts out, “Judas,” a reference to Dylan being a traitor to acoustic folk music after he introduced drums and went electric.

Dylan answered back, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar. Play it f---ing loud!”

It was the perfect way to end the film.

Dylan was no traitor. He didn’t sell out. He didn’t allow his audience to dictate the direction he took musically. He just made the music he wanted to make.

That’s not a betrayal.

The title of the film, of course, is a line from “Like a Rolling Stone.” Still, I think "No Direction Home" is somewhat of an ironic choice.

Scorsese makes it very evident that Dylan wasn't afraid to determine his own direction.

Congratulations to Bob Dylan.
___________________

Congratulations to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dave Umhoefer. He received a Pulitzer for local reporting.

It is the first Pulitzer ever awarded to a member of the staff of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The newspaper had been finalists for the prize in 2003 and 2006. The predecessor Milwaukee Journal was awarded five Pulitzers.

Umhoefer won for an investigation published last summer detailing pension deals for county workers. He built his own database to show how hundreds of county workers boosted their pensions - violating county ordinances and IRS rules in the process. The lucrative county pension deal allowed select workers to "buy back" service time for seasonal and part-time jobs held decades ago. The program was marked by cronyism, conflicts of interest and back-room deals.

"Did the newsroom need some good news?" Umhoefer shouted when news of the Pulitzer ran across the Associated Press wire shortly after 2 p.m. today. "I hope everyone feels proud about this and shares in the pride.

"This is an honest newsroom and an honest paper. ... This is something that is a culture that has grown up here. It's not an accident it happened at this paper now. ... We've ramped up this kind of work the last several years."

Journal Sentinel Editor Martin Kaiser said, "The category to win it ... that's what we're all about. Writing on what goes on in our community. We do it for readers. We do it for our communities."

Added Publisher Elizabeth Brenner, "This is what great local newspapers do."

________________

2008 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes yesterday, the largest number in the paper's history, for coverage that ranged from an exposé of poor care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to an examination of Vice President Cheney's behind-the-scenes clout to coverage of the massacre at Virginia Tech.

Those stories, along with an investigation of violence by military contractors in Iraq and the writing of business columnist Steven Pearlstein and magazine columnist Gene Weingarten, enabled the paper to break its previous record of four Pulitzers, awarded in 2006.