The 2016 Nobel Prizes Thread

[Ziggy Stardust]

Did somebody slip the Swedish Academy some LSD this year? Bob Dylan?!

[jwl]

Since they decided to put barely anything in the press release document, here is an interview instead:
https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/7 ... 3709820928

[SpottedKitty]

Did somebody slip the Swedish Academy some LSD this year? Bob Dylan?!

Thanks for the mental image of a roomful of stuffy old academics listening to a stack of Dylan CDs and saying to each other "Hey, man, this is real good stuff".

(Or however you say that in Swedish...)

[Broomstick]

Obviously, Dylan won for the poetry of his lyrics and not the quality of his singing voice.

But, yeah, no one saw that coming...

[jwl]

Obviously, Dylan won for the poetry of his lyrics and not the quality of his singing voice.

But, yeah, no one saw that coming...

The official Nobel prize twitter account, interestingly, retweeted people who (sort of) did see it coming: https://twitter.com/naomiattar/status/7 ... 2883213312
https://twitter.com/NobelPrize/status/7 ... 7283704832

[Ziggy Stardust]

Yeah, Bob Dylan has been mentioned pretty much every year for the past 20 as a potential candidate, but it's rarely if ever taken seriously.

Honestly, I think the timing of it is stranger than the choice itself. Dylan is a great lyricist, and some of his greatest songs do have lyrics that are competitive with most contemporary poetry. But, Dylan's prime was a very, very long time ago. It's rather unusual for the Swedish Academy to award anyone that doesn't have some major recent work (a big reason Rushdie never won was the perceived drop-off in quality for his works after his first few seminal novels, and ditto for Murakami). It seems the Academy is just trying to make a statement about the relationship of songwriting to poetry and literature in general. Which, well, IS a good thing in general, because there is no non-arbitrary a priori reason that you can't consider Dylan's work to be literary in nature, and I do applaud any attempts by the Academy to break down arbitrary conventions like this. But, still ... it's been so long since Dylan had any direct relevance to culture that it feels odd.

Though, does this lay the groundwork for one day a hip-hop artist winning the prize? Now that songwriting has been officially recognized as literature, it would seem that is the next hurdle for the genre.

[LaCroix]

Though, does this lay the groundwork for one day a hip-hop artist winning the prize? Now that songwriting has been officially recognized as literature, it would seem that is the next hurdle for the genre.

Any bets that Mr. West will demand one for himself, soon?