I hope Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature will help me to persuade our children that he’s worth listening to. At the moment, whenever I put on a song of his in the car they sing out in unison: “It’s Krusty the Clown!” It is not surprising, I suppose. They are currently wedded to Tinie Tempah and the like (who, admittedly, can be catchy).
I love Bob Dylan’s music and his unconventional singing voice is part of the attraction. What is it that appeals? Strong feeling, surging tunes, a sense of being connected to history – his rewriting of American folk music, “at once a recapturing of the past and the opening of a door to what had never been heard and had never been said”, as the rock writer Greil Marcus has it.
