Bob Dylan's Presidential Medal of Freedom Says Times
Really Have Changed

by Malcolm Jones
May 29, 2012 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/29/bob-dylan-s-presidential-medal-of-freedom-says-times-really-have-changed.html

Tuesday afternoon, Bob Dylan became one of the 13 latest
recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dylan
is one of only two artists singled out this year, the
other being Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.
With the exceptions of Morrison, John Glenn, and
Madeleine Albright, Dylan's is probably the most famous
name on the list.

After that, things start getting a mite strange-but this
is Dylan we're talking about, so what did you expect?

For starters, cast your eye down the list of 29
musicians who have received this honor since it was
begun in 1963, and it's obvious that, here as always,
Dylan is the joker in the deck. Unless you want to count
Eubie Blake as a singer/songwriter, Dylan is the only
person ever honored who fits that description. He is
also the only recipient who could be called a folksinger
or even a rock musician.

The other musical honorees range from the utterly
predictable (Irving Berlin, Mstislov Rostropovich,
Marian Anderson) to the utterly weird (Ernest Jennings
"Tennessee Ernie" Ford). Most of the names on the list
are either classical music icons (Pablo Casals, Isaac
Stern, Beverly Sills) or safe-as-milk pop stars (Ella
Fitzgerald, B.B. King, Kate Smith, Aretha Franklin).

No medal winner in music, with the exception of Frank
Sinatra, carries any notoriety, which may explain the
absence of, say, Chuck Berry or Jerry Lee Lewis or even
Willie Nelson. Tennessee Ernie Ford is the only musician
included who could even possibly be called a country
musician. And don't feel too put upon, country fans,
because the lone representative from the world of
musical theater, a genre invented by Americans, is
Meredith Willson, and he received his medal
posthumously. For that matter, Aaron Copland is the only
classical composer on the list.

No president has ever deemed it worthwhile to so honor
Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bill Monroe, Sarah Vaughn,
Johnny Mercer, Charles Mingus, Doc Watson, Mary Lou
Williams, Miles Davis, Merle Haggard, Richard Rodgers,
Maybelle Carter, Stephen Sondheim, Philip Glass, Brian
Wilson, or Terry Riley, to name a few.  Dylan does
precisely resemble his fellow honorees in one category:
He's old. If you live past 70 and keep your nose clean,
you've got a shot.

President Barack Obama shakes hands with rock legend Bob
Dylan after presenting him with a Medal of Freedom,
Tuesday, May 29, 2012, during a ceremony at the White
House in Washington. (Charles Dharapak / AP Photo)

Even then, you have to jump another couple of hurdles.
To get that medal around your neck, it would seem that
you must either be a personal favorite of a sitting
president, or be a musician that the president thinks
represents or appeals to a particular constituency. Or
you must be an artist whose career and body of work
radically altered the musical landscape. That's where
Dylan belongs, although here again, he's almost
completely by himself, with only Duke Ellington as an
artist of equal influence.

You don't have to like or admire Dylan to admit that he
was a game changer. He made folk music hip. He made rock
lyrics literate or, put another way, he made his
audience pay attention to lyrics because he made them
mean something. He blew a hole in the notion that radio
hits have to clock in at less than three minutes. He
proved that you can stand on a stage with just a guitar
and not much of a voice and hold people's attention for,
oh, about five decades. He wrote songs in his 20s that
he can still sing today without a trace of
embarrassment.

Dylan does precisely resemble his fellow honorees in one
category: He's old. If you live past 70 and keep your
nose clean, you've got a shot.

Some people's songs are associated only with them.
Dylan, like Ellington, has written scores of songs that
while they may not be in the public domain, are
considered public property. In clubs, living rooms, and
at backyard barbecues, people perform Dylan's songs not
because they want to "cover" Bob Dylan-indeed, a lot of
them decidedly don't want to sound like him-but because
they love his material. And it's a shared love-Dylan
songs get traded back and forth in informal jams because
the songs are like a lingua franca-everyone in the room
can navigate the changes in "Mr. Tambourine Man" or
"Tangled Up in Blue."

The world has changed a lot since 1963, when the first
Medals of Freedom were bestowed. That was the year,
coincidentally, that John Glenn became the first man to
orbit Earth. It's quite conceivable that Glenn could
have received the medal as soon as his space capsule
splashed down-who didn't love an astronaut in 1963?
(Indeed, what the hell has taken the White House so
long?) Dylan, on the other hand, had only released his
first album the year before. Not only that, but the kind
of music Dylan was then composing and performing was
folk music, which then only reached a broad listening
audience through the palliative treatment of bands like
the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary.

Dylan was distinctly an outsider, and there he remained
for quite a while. It's juvenile fun watching old press
conferences when reporters did finally come calling
later in the decade. The questions are so dorky. But
what you realize is that the national press at that time
had almost no one in its ranks that we would recognize
as music writers. Most of the reporters sent to
interview Dylan were 40-somethings in suits who treated
him like Chubby Checker, just another flash in the pan
phenom to be indulged. Instead, they found a musician
who was the smartest man in any room, and someone who
was more than happy to make fun of them ("You walk into
the room, with your pencil in your hand .").

The point is, in the mid-60s there really was an
establishment and an anti-establishment (to be upgraded
to a counterculture in a couple of years), and no one
doubted which side of the line Dylan stood on. Back
then, there were bitter fights over high culture and
low, insiders and outsiders, and who got to say who was
who. In 1965, the Pulitzer board refused to give a prize
to Duke Ellington.

Over the years, all of that has more or less collapsed
in on itself. Pulp fiction writers are in the American
canon. Brian Wilson is understood to be a great American
artist and not merely a great pop songwriter. The times
did change, and Dylan was in the thick of making it
happen.

And then Dylan's constituency grew up and became
whatever passes for the establishment. More important,
they didn't turn their backs on Dylan as they grew up
but took his music with them ("Some are mathematicians,
some are carpenters' wives ."). It's cheap and easy to
say that Dylan is now a member of the establishment.
It's also wrong, because there is no longer an
establishment as we once knew it. And Dylan and his
music had everything to do with that.

In the past decade or so, Dylan has made a point of
referencing old songs and old artists, such as Charley
Patton or Dock Boggs, in his music. He's showing us the
bones that structure his songs, as if to say, this music
I'm playing is part of a continuum, a tradition that, in
my own idiosyncratic way, I'm carrying on as I stand on
the shoulders of giants. It's the sort of generous
gesture that only the greatest, most self-assured
artists allow themselves. So yes, please Mr. President,
hang a medal on the man for that.

___________________________________________

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