On May 24, 1941, American Master and the “Voice of a Generation,” Bob Dylan, was born. In addition to spending the last five decades writing and performing record-breaking music, Dylan has emerged as a quintessential American artist who combined different music genres and wrote lyrics that freely expressed his political stance — ultimately inspiring others to do the same.
The first musician to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dylan has reshaped America’s folk movement and, in the words of the Swedish Academy, has “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
In writer and music critic Tom Piazza’s speech for Dylan, who was the 1997 Kennedy Center Honoree, Piazza best described the singer-songwriter’s career: “There is a recognizable stance here, and in all of Dylan’s work: a sense that the individual sensibility – aesthetic, political, spiritual – could claim a role at the heart of the nation’s ongoing drama, in the middle of its ethnic and regional polyphony, locate what was of value there, and sing a new self, even a new country, out of it. As if the very activity of incorporating, coming to terms with, those multitudes of influence and utterance is itself somehow at the heart of the American ideal.”
In honor of The Bard, we picked out some of of our favorite lyrics and quotes.
“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.”
“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.”
“There must be some way out of here, said the Joker to the Thief”
“Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.”
“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet”
“No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”
“Chaos is a friend of mine.”
“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
“Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet”
“Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow”
All GIFs from giphy.com.