It is very gratifying to see Bob Dylan getting this kind of recognition while he is still walking around on the earth. It wasn’t so for such giants of music as George Gershwin, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, all of whom received posthumous Special Citations from the Pulitzer jury.

Now, generally when authors received Pulitzers, they are then described in the press with that term, as in: “Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Doe has written a new blah blah …”. Will Bob now have that prepended to most mentions of his name? “Pulitzer prize-winning singer Bob Dylan will be appearing at the Iowa State Fair on July 15th …”.

I like the sound of that.

Since he got his Oscar for Things Have Changed, Dylan has often featured what must be a facsimile of the statuette on stage during his shows, perched on an amplifier or something. For the Pulitzer, perhaps it should be added to the spoken-word intro that kicks off his shows. That’s the one that everyone would know is taken from a local music writer’s piece in Buffalo, New York, in 2002 and it goes:

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock’n'roll; the voice of the promise of the ’sixties counterculture; the guy who forced folk into bed with rock; who donned make-up in the ’seventies and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse; who emerged to find Jesus; who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ’eighties and who suddenly shifted gears and released some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’nineties.”

People still wonder what the point of that is. I personally think it’s amusing to Bob because, after spending a career running away from people’s characterizations of him, this gives him a way of embracing almost all of them, but in an absurd manner. I think he revels in the fact that all the old labels are now defanged by the sheer longevity and vitality of his career. They don’t scare him; he can just laugh at them.

Anyhow, he can now consider making it, “Please welcome the Pulitzer prize-winning poet laureate of rock’n'roll …”. Although on second thoughts maybe that’s mixing an honorable label with too many ridiculous ones.

Bob’s receipt of the Pulitzer is also pleasing for selfish reasons. Those of us who have spent and who do spend a lot of time considering his work can, after all, claim some vindication: it’s not like we’ve been spending all this time fixated on just some rock star; that’s a Pulitzer prize-winning rock star to you now, thank you very much.

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