I was pretty excited when The Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature, but apparently Bob isn’t. As you may know, he’s acting like the whole thing never happened. In case you wonder why, I have a few theories.
It could be Bob forgot. He is 75 after all, which is even older than Mick Jagger, and Mick has started to forget his own songs.
Or maybe Bob is feeling unworthy of the honor. If so, he’s certainly got a lot of Nancy Naysayers agreeing with him. But after all of Bob’s hard work, I think he deserves to win some awards, and the Nobel Prize isn’t a bad start. When it was first announced I even posted a few quotes from his better known songs to prove the great brilliantness of his brilliance. That was necessary, because even Bob’s greatest fans may not actually know how brilliant his lyrics are, due to Bob’s longstanding policy of translating them into an unknown language whenever he pronounces them out loud.
As Bob himself explained in this recent interview…
Another possibility: even though Bob stands up in front of thousands of adoring fans and “sings” a lot, he’s kind of shy. The interview above was very rare. He only gives two or three like that per decade. So maybe he doesn’t like winning prizes because he’s uncomfortable meeting new people.
Or it could be Bob simply doesn’t care about the prize, but he doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings by saying so. We all know how awkward winning stuff can be. When I won a garden gnome at a Save The Rodents! raffle I had to act all gushy about what a wonderful garden gnome it was, even though I really don’t care for garden gnomes. That was awkward. But when you stop and think about it, the Nobel Prize is not a garden gnome. It’s a medal made of 18 carat gold. Bob could melt it down and make it into something useful, like a universal translator.
Of course, it could also be that Bob simply doesn’t know he won the prize. People have been trying to tell him, but Bob hasn’t been answering the phone. So if you see Bob, please tell him the news, okay?
