Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize: So much more than the voice of a generation

Bob Dylan has surpassed Walt Whitman as the defining American artist, celebrating the capacity for self-invention as the highest form of freedom.

"He not busy being born is busy dying," Dylan sang, in "It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)."

Reinventer of folk music, voice of the 1960s, blues singer, rock star, born-again Christian, champion of gospel, country singer, old-style crooner and now winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has found a million different ways to say the same thing.

I have been to just one Bob Dylan concert, about a decade ago. He concluded with his 1965 masterpiece, "Like A Rolling Stone," whose brutal lyrics seem to exult in the suffering of someone brought low. The song starts with a sneer: "Once upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime/didn't you?" The first stanza ends: "Now you don't talk so loud/Now you don't seem so proud/About having to be scrounging for your next meal."

Dylan said in an interview that the song originated in a "long piece of vomit," beginning with "steady hatred directed at some place that was honest" and ending with a kind of revenge, captured in the famous chorus: "How does it feel/To be on your own/With no direction home/Like a complete unknown/Like a rolling stone?"

In concert, however, the song was turned upside down. As people sang the chorus along with Dylan, they were exhilarated. Far from laid low, they were unchained. As Dylan sang it, "Like A Rolling Stone" had become a declaration of independence.

But of course, that declaration was there all along. Even in 1965, the chorus was a cry of defiance: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose."

But in the last stanza, there's a radical change; the dream is over. Dylan shifts from the procession to the mundane: "Yes, I received your letter yesterday/About the time the door knob broke/When you asked me how I was doing/Or was that some kind of joke?" He seems to be describing a note from a family member, perhaps his mother — mundane, chatty. He concludes:

"All these people that you mention

"Yes, I know them, they're quite lame

"I had to rearrange their faces

"And give them all another name

"Don't send me no more letters no

"Not unless you mail them

"From Desolation Row."

That's not exactly nice. But it captures what Dylan cherishes in Jack Kerouac, who understood freedom in much the same way, and who wrote, "The only people for me are the mad ones … ."

Though sometimes cruel, Dylan is also capable of great tenderness. Consider the surpassing sweetness of "Forever Young," written for his son: "May your hands always be busy/May your feet always be swift/May you have a strong foundation/When the winds of changes shift/May your heart always be joyful/And may your song always be sung/May you stay forever young."

In his sort-of autobiography, "Chronicles: Volume 1," Dylan wrote that "songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment"; they were a "different republic, some liberated republic." He didn't plan to stir things up, but "thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window … ."

America's poet of rootlessness lit a flame, and it burns right through that frost.