"The 2016 Nobel Prize is for soul, not rhetoric and ideas."
At 1:00 pm local time in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 13, when the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced, people on the other side of the Internet were in an uproar. In addition to being shocked, various media with a keen sense of smell turned their cameras on the folk music circle and Dylan himself, concocting an overwhelming interpretation fever. With the recent rumors that I refused to accept the Nobel Prize, the topic continued to ferment, and the temperature did not decrease.
The audience was happy, the literary and art world exploded, and the academic circle was angry. There has been a lot of talk in the community for several days, and the upset result of the Nobel Prize is regarded as a transformation trend of abandoning the tradition of elites and compromising with the public. There is no doubt that Dylan's musical status in the United States and even in the West has long been recorded in the history books, far from a few Grammys and a lifetime achievement award can be calculated. In contrast, it is no exaggeration to describe the treatment that the folk masters had previously enjoyed in China as "tepid". In 2011, he sang at the Beijing Workers Gymnasium, and the venue with 10,000 people could only accommodate less than 4,000 spectators. Today, five years later, he is once again in the center of the stage, and once again put on a halo, which makes people admire the power of twisting fate. Life is inherently impermanent, just as folk songs are separated from niche groups and devote themselves to the embrace of the market. Is the enthusiastic participation of Chinese people in the Nobel Prize just an illusion? No matter how rich the viewpoints and perspectives seem, they cannot hide the essence of the followers. After the interest faded, the crowd dispersed as usual and returned to their peaceful life tracks.
At the end of 2013, the Coen brothers released a work with a very different style. In this film about music and life, the cold winter and the snow, and the sparse nights, together constitute the dark background of the protagonist's experience. Unlike today's folk singers who are often promoted to the altar, fame was only a way out for very few people at that time, and more unknown singers, even if they were talented, could not get contracts from mainstream record companies. Weiss is the representative of this underappreciated talent. He was thrown to the brink by the utilitarian mainstream society, and the road was turbulent. At the same time, he contained real moving power, such as the melody swept down when the strings were plucked, unable to fill the gap between dream and reality, but inadvertently injected tenderness into the thorns , cast light on the long night. As representatives of the independent film industry in the United States, the Coen brothers have long been known for their violent and deep scripts. Compared to its grim crime series, "Drunken Country Ballads" eschews downright pessimistic stances while focusing on the bumpy and unpredictable fate of its fate. The film always maintains a sad but not sad tone, abandons the ups and downs of the narrative, and tells everything that the protagonist Levien Davis has experienced in just a few days on an extended plane. When the life that hits the wall meets the self-deprecating humor, it is not so much that the movie shows the audience the process of the dream gradually becoming disillusioned, but it is the true portrayal of the image of the loser, which provides the cold confrontation between existentialism and fatalism. Another possibility of reconciliation. In New York in the 1960s, villain culture flourished. When it comes to a cultural type that runs counter to mainstream society, it has to mention its clear-cut concentration camp, Greenwich Village. Many wandering poets who love music like Davis have been born here, and they have become the cradle of a large number of radicals and avant-garde artists. Set against the background of a special cultural community, this film is not limited to a biopic written in the first person, but more like a record and memory of the group portraits of the times. The faces of characters with different identities appear randomly in the film, forming a dusty old record with a distinct stamp of the times on the envelope. When the performer's deep and deep voice sounded, the vague memory instantly awakened, pulling people back to the era when poetry and dreams were intertwined. Under the gray sky of New York, a down-and-out folk singer struggled at the bottom of the city, sleeping all over the sofa of his friend's house, and making the belly of his friend's wife bigger. The incompatibility of Le Vern seemed to be the epitome of the rebellious spirit of that era. After successive wars and economic withering, the United States fell into a long winter overnight, and a large number of young people retreated to the highly tolerant art world to vent their dissatisfaction and grievances against reality. In them, freedom and repression, vitality and decadence, and several pairs of contradictory phrases together create a strong tendency of nihilism. They used their innocence to fight against the secular world. Although they died in the end, they became spiritual leaders that later generations looked up to by virtue of their unique pursuit of values. The efforts of dreamers to change the status quo are often moot. From New York to Chicago, from Chicago to New York, and going back and forth between the two places, Le Verne is like walking through a dark labyrinth, living in a sea of fog. The shadow of the suicide of his former music partner has been entrenched in his heart for many years, and it has also had a crucial impact on his choice. He saw the embarrassing situation of folk songs, but he was unwilling to give in to reality; he was furious at the professor's house and refused the proposal to sing at the dinner table; he would rather go back to a deserted coffee shop to perform alone than to be a harmony for others. What is particularly moving is that such a flawed person always stands at the intersection of options and defends the principles of art so firmly, this firmness is enough to withstand attacks from all directions, tempering a tenacious will to survive. On the drive back to New York at night, Davis accidentally hit a cat. When he got out of the car to check, he found some blood stains on the car, and when he looked around, he saw the cat limping into the depths of the jungle, and an indescribable expression solidified on his face. Perhaps, he saw a similar fate in the injured cat, and even though he was covered in bruises, he still had to move forward with difficulty. Countless frustrations have taught us that precious insights must come from pain. As said in "Rejuvenation", you can be like a mad dog and be angry with everything around you, you can curse fate, and curse, but in the end you have to let go. Levine, who had gone bankrupt with plans to go to sea, finally chose to let go and returned to the cafe under the gas lamp, saying goodbye to madness and returning to plainness. From the re-arranged "Five Hundred Miles" to the creative "Please Mr. Kennedy", the sweet ballads connect the romantic scenes of the old times, and also set off against the life passages in the low tide. The end-to-end ring structure, as the consistent manifestation of the Coen brothers, symbolizes the end of life in a dead end and unable to resist, as if the protagonist spends his life in a fruitless wait. Is it pointless to go back and forth like this? The director did not give their answer directly. For ordinary people, failure or success is not the key to identification. No matter how inhuman the fate is, as long as someone stumbles and lives with ideals, life will not be too bad. Speaking of folk songs themselves, when their full vitality has continued to this day, what kind of definition and attention should they receive? When the sesame oil leaves were popular all over the country, the champion trophy of The Voice was twice won by a folk singer, and when Dylan was unexpectedly favored by the Swedish Academy, we felt that the spring of folk songs was finally long overdue. At the same time that prosperity is magnified, there are just a bunch of labels with few rules to follow. People are always looking forward to the symbolized ideal country, and they nailed the folk songs to a hotbed of currency and vocabulary. More and more musicians are bound by the rules of the market, compromised by audiences with less aesthetic tastes, and their personal characteristics are eroded by strict industrial standards. "I don't see a lot of money in it.
So it's fare thee well my own true love We'll meet another day, another time.
Life will inevitably be difficult and disappointing, but eventually there will be a river of notes spilling out from the valley, clear as a mirror, humming freely, another day, another time.
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