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Human history is a long time, to put it mildly. Naturally, it contains the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci and his Vitruvian Man, PSY and his ‘Gangnam Style’, and Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel ceiling. But I haven’t seen that apparently beauteous ceiling myself, and I can’t afford to go to Rome or wherever it is to lay my peepers on it, perhaps I never will. But I can pluck Bob Dylan’s New Morning off the shelf, pop it on and drink it in. For me, that is every bit as beautiful. Bearing in mind that New Morning isn’t even considered his masterpiece, that is some achievement.
You see, Mr Mozart might be considered a virtuoso akin to the Albert Einstein of the arts, but aside from a microscopic coterie of the European elite between 1761 and 1791 (his first and last concerts), nobody ever heard the little pompous prodigy with the pompadour play. We have his written works to testify to his genius, but aside from what can be contained on paper, we have little else. Of course, this is a question of circumstance—time decreed that Mozart would arrive before Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and the first recorded sounds in the late 1850s.
Dylan arrived afterwards. However, in a break from the bleeding obvious, he might have been a benefactor of auspicious timing, but he has been the orchestrator of his own fate thereafter, and the world has had the pleasure of basking in the munificent harvest of his honest toil and the boon of his singular artistry ever since. And in the words of Joan Baez, he was just a scruffy vagabond from Minnesota.
Beyond his own musical Mona Lisas, what sets him apart is how he seized the zeitgeist like no other. He has not only created masterpieces, but he also crafted them in such a way that he reflected back on the world that he set out to change. Marcel Duchamp may well have done something similar half a century earlier when he hung up a urinal in an art gallery amid the First World War and essentially said, ‘well the world is so crazy, so far beyond reconciliation, how the hell could I encapsulate it with paint and pastels?’
Well Duchamp, in a way, Dylan did just that. And he did it in such a way that didn’t require an explanation or retrospect to celebrate it either. His revolution would not be confined to art school or the bourgeoise. It helped to defy the notion that virtuosity defines the artist and it celebrated individualism and the profound punk proclamation that art is for everyone who has something to express.
Recorded music is now a gift that we can access with the click of a button. It is a miracle of infinite multitudes that we can medicate ourselves with at any moment. And while there were a million precursors and the unfurling reverberations will continue ad infinitum, at the core of the most momentous movement since the Italian Renaissance is a young fellow who took dominion over the arts like only a kid with his head in the clouds and his clogs in the subterranean basements could. Then with cognizance and craft, he ensured the bliss of our age would not be ignorant.
After all, art is important. With beauty and bolshie balls, Dylan made anyone who thought otherwise look stupid. The list of those who have followed in his illuminating wake is testimony to this. Thus, he might not be your favourite artist, he might not even be mine, but here are 81 reasons, in no particular order, why he may very well be the greatest.
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