>There's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature?

They should. Literature and poetry started from rhapsodies, sagas, and other forms of song-based storytelling, and it's not very good that it diverted so much to some kind of literary ivory tower.

I'm curious. Should screenplays also be eligible for the nobel in literature?

Several dramatists have won the Nobel in Literature. Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Elfriede Jelinek, and probably some I'm not remembering.

EDIT: Eugene O'Neil, Jacinto Benavente, Dario Fo

Sadly Fo has passed away today.

Playwrights have won several times. The problem with screenplays, as they exist today, is that they basically never really have 'an author' in the traditional sense.

And should novels be eligible for songwriting awards?

Most early poetry was sung, and we're fine with calling that literature. Calling Dylan's work poetry does step over some normative lines, but they're fairly arbitrary lines.

I know you were being sarcastic, but your comparison isn't really apt. Novels are not a lyric medium: they're prose. Song lyrics are lyrics set to music. Some poetry is "lyrics" without the music (although lyric poetry is not quite the same thing).

I think the contention is that lyrics and novels are non-overlapping subsets of literature.

Songwriting clearly doesn't include novels. Literature includes both, and more.

If they have a tune and you can dance to them.

Spoken word does exist. You're just drawing up arbitrary lines when in real life boundaries between media and genre aren't so distinct.

>the lyrics by themselves don't have anything like the impact (on me at least) of top-notch poetry

To you they don't, to me and others they do. To the current Nobel committee they did this year.

At the end, Nobel prizes are highly subjective and people dependent recognitions - so arguments of the form of X deserves and Y does not are not too meaningful.

> To you they don't, to me and others they do

Really? I've spent pretty much all my spare time and money on music for the last 30 years, but no lyrics by themselves have ever had the effect on me that, for example "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" has had

... but then maybe I'm looking at this wrong, and the prize is being awarded for the songs rather than just the lyrics. If that's the case then I guess the prize is well-deserved

Tambourine Man definitely struck me in a similar way to Prufrock. In fact, I don't think songwriting gets the credit it really deserves. Dylan is verbose, but most great songwriting is better equated to a sonnet than Prufrock. And an album to a sonnet sequence.

One example I might offer on the same line as Prufrock is Bookends by Simon and Garfunkel. From "Save the Life of My Child" all the way to "At the Zoo" we follow a life (or many lives) and its roller coaster. "America" and "Hazy Shade of Winter" are particular favorites.

(as an aside, one of my favorite lyrics of all time is by Gordon Lightfoot in his excellent "Black Day in July" -

"And then the tanks go rolling in

To patch things up as best they can"

Talk about summing up so much in a few words.)

If it's because of music, Bob Dylan is not the best musician.

If it's solely because of lyrics, Bob Dylan is not the best lyricist.

It's a weird comfort-food-like pick either way.

> Nobel prizes are highly subjective

Literature and Peace, yes.

Science? No. People will disagree on whether some person who didn't get the price really should have gotten it, but no scientist disputes the value and importance of the work of the people who did get the prize.

In science, perhaps there are people who should have gotten the Nobel prize but they didn't. However, few people would say that the people who did get the prize didn't deserve it.

With Peace and Literature, people do this all the time.

Even in science there is a fair amount of subjectivity to the prizes. It was fairly questionable to give a Nobel to Kary Mullis for PCR, for example (the technique is certainly useful, but maybe not that deep scientifically and Mullis is kind of a nutjob who has used his fame to promote pseudoscience), not to mention prizes to work that hasn't held up well -- frontal lobotomies are not considered a great solution to mental illness anymore despite Egas Moniz's 1949 prize for it.

Songs are poetry, poetry is literature.

But then again, remember that Sinatra vs. Bieber meme... http://weknowmemes.com/2012/02/music-what-happened/

They put coffee in their coffee in Brazil.

It suppose it goes without saying, but that meme is some selective criticism.

Of course. Current youth generation's pop songs are always bad (mostly).

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. "

- Socrates, circa 470 BC

I believe this quote is apocryphal. AFAIK it's actually quoting a play by Aristophanes that poked fun at Socrates -- a play that put these words in his mouth.

Very possible. The point is merely that lamenting the ways of the youth is a very old phenomenon.

It is worth adding that though I agree that songs can be literature, songs also have non-literary elements, which means that songs that are not literature can still be good songs. Here I'm thinking of artists like DJ Shadow or the Beastie Boys, where some other element such as the soundscape or even just the beat carries the music.

I'm not a Bieber fan, but I think it's unfair to judge him strictly by his lyrics. Or Sinatra for that matter.

Socrates would have been less than 1 year old in 470 BC, so I guess he was speaking about himself and his pals.

Yes right, my error, should have said this is attributed to Socrates, born circa 470 BC. So if he said it, it was likely somewhere around 400 BC.

Remember the Song of Songs in the Bible.

Or the Nibelungenlied ("Lied" is German for song).

Song and story are very much related, especially since back when the people couldn't read, singing stories was more popular than today.

The psalter is a much better example than the Song of Songs, IMO, given that there's no particular reason to think the latter was set to music.

And telling the stories in poetic form and then singing them was a way to memorize them and teach them to next generation at the time when people had no skill to write and read.

> do songs count as literature?

Stephen Sondheim wrote that you can't fit as much complexity into sung lyrics as into read poetry. I wish I had the book in front of me to provide more details, but he reveals a lot about his craft here:

Hat Box

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215415/hat-box-by-st...

(For those not familiar with the genre, many think Sondheim is the great composer of musicals of all time; you might have seen some of his on film, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, recently. His lyrics (and stories) are not of the fun, clever, vapid variety often associated with musicals, but brilliant, creative, and multi-dimensional. - For those interested, Company and Sweeney Todd are probably good places to start.)

My understanding is that Homer's poems were recited or sung along with musical accompaniment. I'd agree it's an open issue as to whether this is analogous to Dylan's singing.

I feel ambivalent about this nobel prize. I absolutely feel Dylan is deserving of an award on this scale, and I have no problem viewing his work as literature. So in that sense, I have no real objection.

Still... novelists, playwrights, poets, there were a lot of people practicing more pure literary forms who were passed over here... and they certainly aren't going to be considered for any music awards. I'm just not convinced this was the right way to go. I do feel a kind of unease about it. I'm not really the best one to make the case against it, because I'm not convinced it's the wrong decision either.

literature (n) — written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.

...don't see why lyrics shouldn't count. Radio plays, films etc. also count.

There was a Spanish band which used to take poems by various authors such as García Lorca and make songs from them. Did this mean the poems suddenly became worse?

Now, I do agree that you can have a great song with lyrics that wouldn't be that great by themselves. But that doesn't mean genuinely good poems can't be written as lyrics.

They could. The psalms were originally set to music and are still quite popular works despite the music they were set to being long lost. But whether Dylan's lyrics really work on that level, well, that's a different question.

> There's no doubt he did this, but ... do songs count as literature?

Anything with text is potentially literature. The rest is up to the snobbery of the judges.

In general, I'd have to say no, but artists like Dylan operate on a totally separate level. This is well deserved.

"Here comes the story of the Hurricane"[1] sure seems closer to a story than modern song writing.

[1] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/hurricane.html

C'mon, look at 'Hard Rains Gonna Fall'? Writing something with such wisdom and poetic deft at 22 years old? This award is massively overdue - not undue.

Considering that countless poems are turned into songs I can't see why it can't work the other way around.

Yes, songs are counted as literature (poetry), as well as code (computer programs).