At the ripe age of 22 years old, only a year into his recording career, Robert Zimmerman would have a label tacked onto him that he would never quite shake. For now, Zimmerman, who was in the midst of changing himself into the character he still plays, would become known as the voice of his generation, every word of his mouth or pen to be an absolute truth unleashed onto the public that was new and exciting. Adopting the name of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as his surname, Bob Dylan would be born. Dylan has since become one of the most chameleonic characters in rock and roll history, each album a new person seems to be helming and no real key into who he is or what his motives are.
At 25, he sits before a board of interviewers who dehumanize him. They ask him impossible questions, playing him like a fiddle as he plays them even faster. Ask about his career before music, he’ll tell you he was a gay-for-pay prostitute, and his childhood? He ran away from home to join the circus, and didn't go calling him a poet as he prefers the term trapeze artist. Now to many he’s lost his mind, lies spewing from a mouth that was once the source of so many of the greatest lines the public had ever heard. To others, many in retrospect, it’s clear he was breaking from the name displayed upon him, how he never asked for the cross he was now bearing, nor the pressure and attention it drew. To be 25 and the most trusted person in so many eyes is not where one would want to be, and it certainly wasn’t what Bob Dylan wanted to be. In a few months of 1965, he would come back with Bringing it All Back Home, introducing his proto-rap songs to the world and also his “friend” Mr. Tambourine Man. Highway 61 Revisited winds in ways Dylan hadn’t yet: 11 minutes of Desolation Row and it’s references or the suicidal Mr. Jones on Ballad of a Thin Man. While never concise, Dylan had begun his step into complex, allusion ridden songwriting, where songs had no answers and barely meaning until rested upon the listeners ears. It would also give the man his biggest hit, Like A Rolling Stone, a song that put him on the radios of thousands who had once never thought twice about the rambling man deemed a God. Suddenly, there was When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose / You're invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal in a soon to be anthem of freedom that happened to come out right as freedom was a hot topic. He lost a few people, but gained more for the superb writing he showcased on the album. He went electric, to the most pushback he had ever received. Folk purists, once the only people who expected anything normal of him, had turned on him, seeing him connect with the rock music he was supposed to be away from. Judas would be screamed at him for his act of rebellion, the first act of pushback he received since his first brush with the word God. Heat was off him and pivoted toward The Beatles for protesting Vietnam, toward Mick Jagger for defending the right of self. For the first time, Dylan wasn’t the voice of his generation, others were stepping up to the plate and feeling the flames they forced upon Dylan to christen him in the name they chose. Don McLean wrote of Dylan and his role in culture: The Jester sang for the king and queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean and a voice that came from you and me / When the king was looking down the Jester stole his thorny crown. There’s a humanization to Dylan’s character, the role he was playing, in the same breath the divine and almost biblical expectations placed upon his shoulders still rest heavy. The image of the thorn wrapped crown atop Dylan’s head is an accurate description of what the title ‘voice of a generation’ did to him. Removing it caused pain, the blood seeping into the vision - no matter what direction he chose to go with his work. Descartes, the ancient philosopher, once shared his idea that the human mind is limited, meaning that we cannot obtain all the knowledge that may be around us. It would be impossible to gain that much knowledge in one lifetime, some things may just simply be out of our reach, destined only to be seen by whatever higher powers one may believe in. In the same vein, Descartes also said that the thinking mind exists perfectly in between nothing and God , meaning that us and our thinking exists in a perfect sweet spot where we aren't clueless, yet do not exist as all knowing beings. It's an important thing to acknowledge, admission to this idea that there is no way to know or understand everything there is, that under only one thing, that being a higher power.
Many times people are branded as prophets because they seemingly know more than others. On David Bowie´s 1971 album Hunky Dory, the writer penned a song for Bob Dylan [fittingly called Song for Bob Dylan] in which there is one line that will never cease to pull it’s punch, the line in question is ¨you sat behind a million pairs of eyes, and told them how they saw¨, in reference to Dylan´s status as ¨The Voice of a Generation¨. Dylan and this titles' tumultuous relationship is well documented - so many people saw him as the only sane voice in a sea of others that just found themselves talking nonsense. Bowie introduced the idea that Dylan was never of a higher level of thinking, never a God, he just simply informed the public with knowledge he had. He explained their feelings, in his own way, and got labeled as a God for this. His knowledge has always existed in between nothing and God, he is the same mortal everyone else is, but he was seen as more due to his ability to communicate. Dylan gained knowledge of his generation, of the world around him, the changes that were plaguing the world, and simply wrote them out, made music, and was listened to too.
Dylan’s power has always come from his words, no matter how many other wordsmiths in the world he will always stand near the top. In the way language changes, writers often see their work become ancient before long, but Dylan has yet to see this happen to his words. His writing still speaks to people, his messages universal and wording understood by most of the people who look at it. While Dylan never looked to be the voice of a generation, this title has stuck because of its truth. He may not know more than others, he may have tried to shake the idea he was anything more than songwriter, but he is a cultural figure like few others. He transcends music, he transcends literature, he transcends Dylan. Bob Dylan is a character, one who happens to have become human in all his years. Going back to Bowie’s song, the second verse begs Dylan to come back, ignoring everything he would want in a selfish plea for his words to describe the state of the world in front of them. Bowie was satirizing the experience, but how many really spoke like that? Treated Dylan as God, his word the gospel, without thinking of how it felt to make a man suffer?
Bob Dylan performing one of his most enduring lyrics, The Times They Are a-Changin', in 1965
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