Bob Dylan

Dylan turned up in New York at the start of the 1960s as a folk singer with a borrowed voice, and left the decade having rewritten what a popular song was allowed to contain. The first album is mostly other people's material. By the second and third he was writing the protest songs that made his name, and by 1965 he had abandoned them, plugged in, and produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde across barely more than a year, three records that took the apparatus of literature and packed it inside singles.

What he does that nobody has matched is compression. A Dylan line carries an entire situation and declines to explain it, and the delivery, sneering, cracked, deliberately unbeautiful, does as much work as the words. He is a far better singer than his detractors allow and a much less reliable one than his defenders pretend, and both facts usually show up on the same album.

Then a long, unruly middle. A retreat into quiet country records at the end of the 1960s, a run of erratic albums nobody defends, the 1975 album that remains his best-loved work, a religious turn that cost him half his audience, and a stretch of the 1980s when the songs simply stopped arriving. The revival began at the end of that decade and he has been in credit ever since. He has an estimated 125 million records sold, an Academy Award, a Pulitzer citation, a shelf of Grammys, and the Nobel Prize in Literature, which people are still arguing about.