by Thomas Alkemeyer
On the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan
In music, the everyday, the social and the political come at least as much through the sound, through the gesture, as through the lyrics. Gesture is something different from style, it is not the signature of an artist, but the concretisation of a social attitude. The gesture of Dylan's performances arises from the coexistence of allusive music and a grumpy voice, of brittle intonation and mysterious lyrics, the likes of which have never been heard before. In this togetherness, different origins and pasts are brought together without ever harmonising. It is this fragile, constantly new fusion of differences in which the overall attitude not only of parts of one generation, but of several generations long since, is sensually and sensuously condensed. This is precisely where the affective energy, the exemplifying power, the immensely touching quality of this art lies. It makes what is diffuse and inarticulate in the affective depths of one's own socialised body resonate and take shape, what cannot be said but can only be shown. Dylan's art is a performative art of showing; it creates sensual figures that shape collective experience and cultural memory.
When I heard him for the first time well over 40 years ago, a friend to this day had excitedly brought along his first record, I was thunderstruck. It was breathtaking, we were speechless and felt: yes, that's it, no, that's it.
They say Dylan has reinvented himself again and again. But he has just as much been reinvented again and again: as a seismograph of subterranean political moods and attitudes that are almost impossible to grasp analytically, as an articulator who captures the atmospheric in sounds and combines them into melodies in which one discovers the tone of a time, a movement, a milieu, if one has developed a corresponding sensorium and has listened to it.
Yesterday, of course, I listened to Dylan, his early, equally sombre and lyrical late work "Time out of Mind". Unprecedented times, constantly re-imagined. The Nobel Prize Committee could not have made a better decision.
Thomas Alkemeyer, Dr phil. habil., is Professor of Sociology and Sports Sociology at the Institute of Sport Science at the University of Oldenburg.
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