CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS ¨C 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. (He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, and he sang, ¡°You may call me Zimmy.¡°)
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.¡±
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