Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize cheapens true greatness even as it insults his actual achievements.

Where can you go to hear the truths no one else will tell you? The Church of Splendor.

This week we take up the biggest scam of the twentieth century: Bob Dylan’s massive success at convincing the post-modern world of the literary merit of obsessive larceny and putatively-profound word salad.

For which he has now scammed himself a Nobel Prize.

For literature…

I wish I were making this up, but at least I can tell you how it all happened:

On Facebook, Luke Williams observes: “I couldn’t understand the word(s) at 4:16 ‘…it was nothing but ________'”

In response to him, I append these notes:

“…it was nothing but phoning it in.”

I don’t explicitly say so, but a lot of this analysis turns on knowing how writers on deadline work. By the time of the motorcycle accident, Dylan was so overcommitted that almost everything he did was phoning it in. The word salad would have started as a Loki joke, just to see if he could get away with it, but by then he was dependent on his verbal BS blender to get done everything he was contracted to do.

Hey, sad-eyed minstrel, why is it an Arabian drum? Because Scandinavian drum didn’t fit the scansion, that’s why. Any other reason anyone gives, inlcluding Dylan, is bullshit. I’m betting there have been PhDs awarded for pretending to understand that atrocious nonsense.

I thought about illustrating phoning it in with another artist – John Prine – but in the end I avoided mentioning anyone else, so as not to do a who’s whom of songwriters, none of whom produce literature.

The funniest part of that video, for me? Trump didn’t vet Trump, and the Nobel Prize committee didn’t vet Dylan. I just did a gloss on the few parts of the man’s career that might claim to be aspirational, but in the end, to the extent that there is anything of art in Bob Dylan’s writing, it emerges from the unhappy secondary consequences of a hellacious but relatively brief amphetamine addiction.