![Kanye West, the year after he said he was the Voice of his Generation, at title often given to Bob Dylan (photo: David Shankbone [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons)](https://2paragraphs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Kanye_West_at_the_2009_Tribeca_Film_Festival-620x375.jpg)
Kanye West is reaching out to enigmatic music legend Bob Dylan, calling for a summit on unknown subject matter.
Calling out to Bob Dylan Let’s get together
— ye (@kanyewest) December 12, 2018
[You’ve made it when…]
West has spent his career winning the hearts and minds of millions of fans and followers who forgive him anything and hang on his art like a life raft. You know who else has that? Bob Dylan, the one and only, whose accomplishments in music have been so incalculably large that the genre itself couldn’t contain him: Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Dylan won the Literature prize not for his books, of which there are a few, but for his music. That’s like some crazy accomplishment that Kanye would make up, saying he was going to achieve. Dylan and West have more in common than appears at first glance. In fact Kanye could have borrowed the following description of himself, uttered in 2008, from any of a thousand articles published about Bob Dylan. West, 41, said: “I realize that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade. I will be the loudest voice.”
One big difference? Dylan has always rejected the title of “Voice of His Generation” as being both inaccurate and counterproductive. But he lets the people say what they will and just keeps on working, still touring most nights of the year at age 77. Maybe that’s what Kanye wants to talk about: how the hell do you get to be 77 and still be doing what you want? Dylan is among the very few artists who could tell him.
