Randall Paul Jenkins, Esq. » Blog Archive » What’s So Great About Bob Dylan?

I honestly don’t get Dylan. He’s supposedly the most heralded songwriter alive, he’s supposedly this iconic standard that has experienced and found success through the entirety of the music industries existence. I have very good friends of mine who think this man is the most amazing singer/songwriter ever. People believe in this guy on an almost cult-like level like only a handful of other artists I can think of. I just don’t get it, they tell me to listen to this record, or that record, or this movement in time, or that. You know what? None of them have moved me.

I know this will not be received well by many.

I’m not trying to say the guy isn’t a talented musician or songwriter, he surely is, and he surely captured a generation with his political stance and his unique mindset, but how did he wind up that way for multiple generations? To me, Dylan is the guy who wrote 4 songs that have a lasting power, the guy whose son wrote an entire album I like better than any of his fathers, the guy who has made continued his career by being the guy the “cool” people like “because he’s Dylan”.

How is this guys career so much more notable than a guy like Tom Petty or James Taylor?

Now let’s clear up a couple of facts here, it’s well known that I like “hits”. I don’t mean Top 40 songs necessarily, I mean songs with an epic hook, songs that as you walk down the street you curse having them stuck in your head (but give it another spin the second you can), HITS. Secondly, I was born in the seventies, raised in the eighties, and am living in the zeroes, Dylan hasn’t had a hit since I’ve been alive.

So why is Dylan so revered? Elvis has the same sort of fanatics, different in lots of ways, but still same kind of experience. Elvis sold records, had hit songs, was in films and was one of the first real celebrities of modern times. So Dylan is the anti-Elvis maybe? Out of the lime-light, political and all about the music and the art? Eh, I don’t think so, it might be his angle, and maybe part of why he appeals to people, but I don’t buy it, he needs to do something, not just not do something. It seems lately he does more of the not doing something, while still just writing/recording away.

Dylan was truly relevent when he wrote “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and it captured an entire aspect of the population who found a voice and mouth for all the things running through their head, but four decades later is he still? I recently “tweeted” in reply about Dylan, that Valens had 4 truly great songs on one record in an 8 month career, doing so not to compare the two, but to bring up this nugget: Is Dylan renowned because he’s simply alive and still cranking out records?

People love to play the card that Dylan isn’t Top 40, or that Top 40 hits don’t make a song or an artist “great”, and it’s all true. We all have those artists who will make 10 albums and never get radio play. I happen to love Sigur Ros and surely they will never be Top 40, but I’ll buy every record ever. Maybe that’s the key to it all, and that Dylan just clicks with some people and doesn’t with me. Maybe, but I have this vague feeling that to many, especially in my generation, liking Dylan is a lot like reading Kerouac; It’s a statement move towards the non-today, the counter culture, aimed at being a part of a generation you missed or trying to stand apart from your current one. Such as with any counter culture movement, it winds up as trendy and actually the majority, and perhaps that’s what I see today.

The truly interesting part of what I mention above is that Dylan wasn’t non-Top 40, he actually formed his career off hit songs, and at various points decided he didn’t want his records promoted certain ways or proper singles released by his label amongst other things, but his career was not consistently that. It was kind of a lot like Radiohead’s “release the music straight to the fans” move, where a band that already built up to a very successful level goes about a shift to be more “artistic”, strictly about the music, and through all of it bucking the system/process that created them. Dylan after being a mainstay “rock” act who was revered for his political and social commentary which brought him to a certain level, went country and stopped talking politics, and then even went Christian (and I have theories about all the hipster Christians I know who love Dylan too, don’t get me started).

I don’t understand how this guy managed to keep such a stable fan base through all of those changes, through very few (if any) recent songs a majority of the population can even name, to put out an album, that in the year 2009, charts at number one.

The only thing I can even come close to an explanation with is that Dylan is still there doing it. Elvis is dead, The Beatles broke up, Zeppelin disbanded, Michael Jackson went pedo, Garth Brooks retired, every other voice of a generation and/or successful career artist has either died or become too controversial or alienated themselves some other way. Dylan got less controversial, stayed alive, and over time had more and more people spreading the Dylan gospel, giving them no reason to dislike them and it being “counter”, then “different”, then “forgotten”, and at many times throughout those popular to like him. It really is quite a remarkable and impressive career.

All that to say, I’m still just waiting for someone to explain what makes Dylan so great. I’m ready for it to hit me, I’m ready to be wowed, I’m willing to listen to a record or three (but no more) with open ears and have my life changed… because after all… so many of you have been telling me, for years, that is who this man is.

P.S. I realise someone is going to tell me that just the fact he has been able to affect so many people over such a long period of time is the simple answer to the question I ask in this title, but that still doesn’t make me want to listen to him… go deeper.

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