It’s a funny moment because while Sylvie has been away, her freakishly gifted man-child of a boyfriend has done more than just learn how to make himself a hot drink. He’s also written a series of songs that will make him a legend and transform our sense of the artistic possibilities of popular music.

Dylan perfected folk music when he was just 20. By the age of 22, he moved on and set about revolutionizing another genre, rock. We have a word for cases where a person’s creative powers are so extraordinary that they seem to defy explanation: genius. A college dropout who knew nothing about poetry’s formal rules, Dylan wrote lyrics of such richness and complexity that literary scholars were soon poring over them. Academia was briefly scandalized when the critic Christopher Ricks argued Dylan deserved to be placed alongside Keats, but by the time the singer won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, the only question in most minds was why it had taken so long.

Suggested reading

How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke

By David Samuels

Today, artistic genius is out of fashion. It’s impossible to imagine today’s music stars facing the particular kind of media storm that enveloped Dylan in the early Sixties, when reporters reverently asked the singer to comment on global affairs and the meaning of life like he was an oracle with a harmonica. The artists we choose to idolize aren’t the most gifted, but the most marketable. Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift are more like the CEOs of international mega-brands than creative originals. Nobody would call even the most talented pop songwriter of the last decade, Lana Del Rey, a genius (and her trademark style of melancholy pastiche jadedly implies that there’s nothing new under the sun). Even in hip hop, the genre where individual talent was once king, the taboo against rapping another person’s words has been decisively broken; everyone knows that Drake relies on a team of ghostwriters.

The notion of artistic genius doesn’t chime with an egalitarian cultural mood that means we’re reluctant to admit some people possess exceptional inborn abilities that set them apart from ordinary mortals. We prefer to believe in the “10,000 hour rule”: the idea, popularized by the author Malcolm Gladwell, that mastery in a given field is achieved as a result of dedicated practice. When Beyoncé sings, in “Formation”, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ‘til I own it”, she articulates the quintessential origin myth of today’s artist. We’re invited to believe that she’s made the best part of a billion dollars not through talent, still less luck, but because she hustled harder than the rest of us.

There’s a cogent case to be made against the “genius myth”. By telling the story of human innovation in terms of a few solo prodigies, we can obscure how it really happens. Newton discovered the laws of motion not in some visionary flash but because he stood on the shoulders of giants like Copernicus and Galileo. The theory of evolution wasn’t created by Charles Darwin out of nothing, but was itself the product of decades of scientific evolution (and anyway, Arthur Russel Wallace nearly got there first). According to Dean Keith Simonton, the author of a book on the subject, scientific genius is extinct; now more than ever, discoveries are made not by lone pioneers but by large teams building on past research.

More from this author

Ozempic could destroy modern civilisation

By Matt Rowland Hill

What’s more, glorifying outstanding individuals can provide a license for them to engage in behavior that’s shitty or worse. Allegations of sexual abuse against fantasy author Neil Gaiman, recently published in New York magazine, are a case study in what happens when a person is so worshipped for their creative work that they begin to believe the rules don’t apply to them. The story of (male) geniuses leaving a trail of (female) trauma in their wake is an old one: just think of Picasso and Lucian Freud, for whom women were as dispensable as sheets of canvas. Even Einstein, it turns out, wasn’t just a science prodigy but a prodigious womanizer.

But we are poorer as a culture if we jettison ideas of artistic genius. For one thing, without it our vocabulary for describing the peaks of human creativity is diminished. Never mind 10,000 hours — almost as soon as Dylan started writing his own songs, he came up with “Blowin’ in the Wind”, a folk song so flawless it immediately sounded like it had existed forever. A Complete Unknown shows a period of Dylan’s life where his productivity beggared belief. In addition to the five epoch-making albums he put out between 1963 and 1965, he could have made another one from the songs he didn’t record. (One day, on hearing Joan Baez singing “Love is Just a Four Letter Word” on the radio, he complimented her on the lyrics; she had to remind him that actually he had written it.)

The desire to venerate remarkable individual talent is a natural human instinct — and a culture that doesn’t revere artists will find other objects of devotion. Nothing makes me despair more for our culture than the fact that, if in 1965 the popular archetype of genius was Bob Dylan, in 2025 it’s Elon Musk. The exaltation of the unfathomably rich is a phenomenon that would have baffled a veritable genius of a previous generation, Orson Welles, who at 26 made a plutocrat the grotesque antihero of his cinematic masterpiece. In a contemporary equivalent of Citizen Kane, Danny Boyle — otherwise a serious filmmaker — portrayed Steve Jobs as something between a tragic hero and a mystic seer.

A culture that holds up tech overlords as avatars of the highest human aspirations is one that has wholly capitulated to the logic of hyper-capitalism. The only way of justifying our societies’ spiraling inequality is by pretending that Musk and co. owe their billions to transcendent brilliance, rather than the fact that they have managed to gain control of vast quasi-monopolies in a golden age of crony capitalism. For anyone who thinks you need to possess stupendous intellectual qualities to end up a billionaire, I have two words: Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s true that our ideas about artistic genius have been unhelpfully tied up with our ideas about masculinity. It’s unjust that the word is applied far more often to Dylan and Leonard Cohen than their contemporary Joni Mitchell, whose astonishing lyrical gifts rivaled theirs — and who, unlike them, was an outstanding musician and singer too. And we should be under no illusions that exceptional artistic gifts come along with superior moral qualities: viewers of A Complete Unknown will tend to agree with Joan Baez’s verdict in the film that the young Dylan was “kind of an asshole”.

But societies express their values through the people they adulate. Personally I would rather live in a culture that reveres the man who wrote “Like A Rolling Stone” than the man who paid engineers to invent devices that drive teenagers to depression and self-harm and turn all of us into addicts. While the preening young men of previous decades sang bad poetry over acoustic guitars, I’m told by teacher friends that teenagers today are more likely to have an online business “side hustle” than belong to a band. I can’t see this as an encouraging development.

And the simple fact remains that, however much we democratize and demystify artistic talent, some fluke combination of genetics and circumstances will occasionally throw up a Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell — or a Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf. Instead of being diminished by the achievements of the most gifted men and women, the rest of us are exalted by them. Listening to “Like A Rolling Stone” can expand our sense of what human beings are capable of. Only a few human beings, mind you. You or I couldn’t equal it if we were given 10,000 years.

Where Americans were born and who their parents are has always been much less important than how they greeted the present moment, with one eye fixed on the road ahead and the other on the stars. Walt Whitman’s great “Song of Myself”, written in 1855 and unfolding over 52 stanzas, including accounts of sea battles and slavery, mentions not a single word about the speaker’s parents, or even what their names were.

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which “Song of Myself” is contained, is the fountainhead of American poetics, particularly in the 20th century. Its distinctive echo can be heard everywhere after the Second World War, from the Beats to the novels of Saul Bellow, to the highbrow confessional poems of John Berryman and Frank O’Hara. In Rock and Roll music, Whitman’s greatest late 20th-century heir was undoubtedly Bob Dylan, who eerily reproduced both Whitman’s continent-spanning meter and his love of playful self-contradiction. Try reading nearly anything Whitman wrote in Dylan’s distinctive nasal tone, and the kinship will be plain.

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is merely the latest of a series of films that have attempted to grapple with the sometimes gratifying, often alienating mixture of freedom and vertigo inherent in the American birthright through the character of the man from nowhere. If the bright side of this character can be glimpsed in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, arguably the founding work of American literature, in Whitman’s all-embracing cosmic self, and in the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger, the darkness that can accompany freedom from the past isn’t hard to find either. Natty Bumppo, the frontiersman-killer of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, is the precursor to the ambivalent killer-hero of nearly every Western. Jay Gatsby’s invented self is ultimately more loyal and virtuous than the Long Island snobs who attend his glittering parties; it is also a lie that ends in death.

The character of Bob Dylan, the boy who ostensibly learned to play music from circus performers passing through Hibbing, Minnesota and then re-named himself after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (a fact that Dylan strenuously denied for years before admitting to in his charming autobiography Chronicles) was more or less fully fashioned even before the young performer set off to New York City to find Woody Guthrie and set the often drearily earnest world of American folk music on its ear. America has never really known Robert Zimmerman, the man who invented Bob Dylan. It has only known Bob Dylan.

More from this author

America’s pop-culture armageddon

By David Samuels

So why did the 19-year-old Zimmerman choose to become Dylan? The answer, as he told 60 Minutes interviewer Ed Bradley 20 years ago, was because those are the rules of American selfhood. “You call yourself what you want to call yourself,” Dylan responded. “This is the land of the free.”

Dylan’s self-invented character of a punk Woody Guthrie, or as a rock and roll Walt Whitman, was wildly influential in his moment, for reasons that take a moment to recover. Meanwhile, his best songs have lost none of their immediacy. Working in the genre of “original folk music” that he more or less invented, he set the rules for rock songwriting for the next half century while writing two or three dozen major and minor classics that uniquely merited the awarding of a Nobel Prize for Literature, despite the formal and functional gulf that separates song lyrics from novels and poetry.

The rules of a “Dylan song” have remained remarkably consistent over time, bringing together the worlds of Woody Guthrie, hipster downtown New York, American roots music, the blues, country and western, into a kind of primordial soup that Dylan could dip his brush into at will; he created deceptively offhand-seeming compositions governed by a rueful romanticism and a bulletproof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught.

It is also true that the alchemy by which singer-songwriters (itself an invention of the Sixties) do their thing tends to produce a period of startling peak creativity that lasts perhaps five years, often precluding the possibility of a second act. The Beatles produced all their great records within five years, as did the Rolling Stones. Jimi Hendrix’s entire career lasted four years, as did Kurt Cobain’s.

For artists who survive their creative peak, the reward is often an afterlife with lesser access to the divine. Part of Dylan’s spectacular self-awareness, which has only rarely faltered, is that he recognized the departure of the spirit much sooner than most; he never insisted that his newer songs were actually his best work. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs,” he admitted to Ed Bradley, of the classics he penned at his peak. “It’s a penetrating type of a magic, and I did it at one time.”

What’s left now, apart from the songs, is the distinctive voice, along with a repertoire of feints and dodges mixed with the occasional lip-curling hipster put-down. Onstage these days, the songwriter is often a gnomic shell, appearing to follow an internal logic by which he makes sense of himself to himself. Whatever those dialogues may be about, one suspects that the “real Bob Dylan” — whatever that means — of the singer’s youth was more sharper-edged and predatory than Timothée Chalamet’s cuddly, doe-eyed portrayal.

Suggested reading

Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?

By David Mamet

Still, Chalamet gets the look and the gestures right. He also nicely conveys the capacity for menace that the self-made man inherently contains. After all, if a person invents themselves from scratch, discarding their flesh-and-blood parents and origins in favor of their own self-invented mythos, then how much is that person likely to care about you? Not much. In his portrayal, Chalamet is notably faithful to the first and greatest portrayal of the character of Bob Dylan on film, which was by Bob Dylan himself, in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back — which smartly allowed Dylan to do the work of explaining himself. By contrast, I’m Not There, an annoying film by the supremely surface-oriented director Todd Haynes, a master of a colder type of irony, swallows the Dylan mythology whole, as some kind of sacrament of modern American selfhood — without understanding or explaining why that should be true, apart from the multiplicity and seeming discontinuities in the pop star’s character, which Haynes implies should each be respected individually, like a family of distinguished drag queens.

What Haynes misses, and Pennebaker viscerally understood — and Mangold clearly intimates, without wanting to emphasize it too strongly — is that Dylan, in both his music and his persona, found himself at the center of the great intergenerational battle of the Sixties over the American gospel of individualism. For Dylan, the young man from Hibbing, the self that he invented out of his own materials was at once an entirely personal creation and at the same time represented his connection to a shared vision of America. He was a distinctly American individualist, just as Whitman was, and most great American-born artists are.

The materials he chose to work from were coded in ways that the young Dylan didn’t entirely recognize, though. Woody Guthrie wasn’t just a great American songwriter who spoke and sang in his own half-invented popular. The way that the young Robert Zimmerman might have imagined him. He was also a member of the Communist Party, which had its own uses for Guthrie’s persona and his art. The same was true of the parents of Dylan’s Greenwich Village girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who Dylan credited with educating him about racial discrimination and labor politics and other subjects that the young singer-songwriter professed to “not know much about.” While the great folk archivist Alan Lomax, whose materials became Dylan’s, was not a Communist, he was undoubtedly a preservationist who saw folk music not as raw material to be mined and re-mixed by a future rock and roll Whitman, but the rightful property of the oppressed.

In other words, as Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centered around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.

In doing so, Dylan turned his back on the certainties of Leftist politics in order to more fully become what he wanted to be in the first place, which was himself. Aside from being a singer-songwriter, who that person was was entirely his own business. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he once told a press conference at the height of the mania surrounding his decision to become a rock and roll artist and release “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna”, instead of additional helpings of Leadbelly covers. Neither Dylan nor the gathered reporters seemed able to disguise their glee at the proposition that he could simply make music, free of politics or the demands of being a prophet. “Elvis, I could easily see myself as him,” Dylan mused more than once. “But a prophet? Nah.”

It is only fair to Bob Dylan, the man, however self-made, to acknowledge how much the decision to break free from the heavily politicized aesthetics of the American Left, and the expectations and demands that came with it, must have cost him, both as a human being and as an artist. The assertion of the greater truth of his own art over the demands of the collective must have been, in many dimensions, a never-ending nightmare. Such was the price of the creative freedom that he sought and gained.

Was it worth it? For Dylan and for America, the answer is yes. Dylan’s legendary Basement Tapes with the Band, which surfaced as a lost corpus of songs from somewhere deep in the American imagination, continue to speak to us now, as much as his albums from his creative peak do. The fact that he maintained his place in the national imagination up through his 80s, speaks to a personal strength that is uniquely visible now, and makes it possible for his music to be heard by a new generation. In an era in which cookie-cutter Leftist politics similarly declares its pre-eminence over the aesthetic whims of mere artists, whose job is to bend the knee and crank out Shepherd Fairey-like propaganda in the interests of the Party, Dylan’s struggle again resonates.

Dylan himself would most likely have as little interest in being portrayed as a refusenik against the demands of proto-wokism as he would in continuing to sing worker’s protest songs. He was more interested in being Elvis. Yet, his example feels especially potent now for the obvious reason that we are once again living in an age when the threats to the integrity of the self, and to artistic expression, from both the Left and Right are very obviously real, and it takes real courage to say no.

Dylan’s triumph in that fight was total. No one has ever been cooler than Bob Dylan, and no one since Walt Whitman wrote better lyrics that encompassed more of the American spirit. The folkies who wanted Dylan to continue to play acoustic folk and demonstrate for CORE, and who saw albums like Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks as betrayals of the party line, are plainly ridiculous figures, even as their present-day kin are easy to spot.

For those who knew Dylan, and who in one way or another had reason to see themselves as his peers, Dylan continues to represent the highest mountain in their American songwriting. Jimmy Webb, the great American songwriter, told me once of meeting Dylan at a party, whereupon Dylan pulled out a guitar and played Jimmy his version of “Wichita Lineman”, a Jimmy Webb song that could have also perhaps have been written by Dylan. When he was done, he looked at Webb expectantly. “What, now I’m supposed to play you one of your songs?” Webb shot back.

It’s weird to think that at 83, Bob Dylan is as relevant as ever to the country that gave him the freedom to invent himself. But it’s plainly true. That’s because America remained his greatest inspiration, and the place in the mind where he was always most at home. As he explained it, obliquely, in a long poem he wrote upon the death of his hero:

“You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown”

“He did it in Las Vegas / And he can do it here,” Bob Dylan sang on “Went to See the Gypsy”; Chronicles Volume 1 proved that, having done it on record, he could do it on the page too. Dylan writing about songs is roughly the equivalent of Shakespeare writing about drama, or Tolstoy on the novel, or… That’s about it really. (Beethoven could only write about music in music.) So you’d be well-advised to attend closely to what he has to say in these 60-odd little essays about songs that have caught his ear. And not only that; courtesy of a Spotify playlist you can have them in your ears while reading about them. Plus, with Dylan circumnavigating the globe with his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, the book is a hefty and highly appealing bit of merch.

None of which distracts from — possibly even draws attention to — the foundational problem with the project, a problem inextricably linked with the guarantee afforded by the author’s matchless qualifications, namely the songs. The discrepancy between the quality of Dylan’s own songs and the ones he’s chosen to write about is nothing short of chasmal. I’d estimate that a hundred Dylan songs are better than all but a handful celebrated here. We’d rather be reading Dylan trying to fathom the origins and inner workings of his own songs, so The Philosophy of Modern Song is actually a stand-in for what we really wanted for Christmas: Chronicles Volume 2.

Having said that, Greil Marcus was among the first to explain how the immense edifice of Dylan’s work was built on what had gone before — something we have become more conscious of as Dylan entered his late phase, dating from 1992’s Good As I Been To You onwards. He’s massively indebted to the stuff he writes about here, songs he heard as a teenager on the radio or jukebox. He couldn’t have become who he is — and we, in turn, couldn’t have become who we are — without it, without Elvis and all the rest (much of it junk). So yes, it’s of interest even when it’s about stuff — songs — of no interest.

Initially, I thought the reading would lag behind the playlist, that two or three pages might take longer to read than a three-minute song would take to hear, but as I skipped track after track the book took the lead. Then it all got jumbled as I found myself reading about songs that were three selections behind or four ahead of what I was hearing until, eventually, the book was being read without any supporting audio evidence, that is to say it was being read as a book. At this point another kind of syncing issue emerged, a disjuncture between words and readerly attentiveness to them. I started skipping not just the songs but the pages about them, so the whole experience of this immersive tandem became a tug-of-war between the impulse to fast-forward and the need for disciplined resistance to this urge. The impatience was mine — I couldn’t wait to get to “London Calling”! — but it was engendered by the meshed quality of what was on the stereo and on the page.

Suggested reading

Leonard Cohen was enslaved by Eros

By Maurice Glasman

This, needless to say, is not a work of critical scrutiny, and the titular philosophy is manifest only in the Nietzschean sense that any philosophy is a form of transferred autobiography. So when Dylan writes about The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion”, he’s chuckling in the mirror about “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness”. Writing songs like this — like “Masters of War”, say, or “Blowin’ in the Wind” — is easy: “First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment. Then there’s the trap of easy rhymes. Revolution/evolution/air pollution.” Ha ha. Johnny Cash was right when, in the liner notes to Nashville Skyline, he wrote that Dylan could “rhyme the tick of time”. He’s a great rhymer who, at any time, can also be a terrible rhymer. I’ve never made it through to the end of “Murder Most Foul” because of the crime of the rhymes. And the first time I listened to “Key West” — his best song of the last however many years? — I burst out laughing on hearing: “Twelve years old and they put me in a suit/ Forced me to marry a prostitute.”

There’s refracted autobiography here — I’m talking about the social-awareness songs, rhymes and so on, not marrying prostitutes — and in some ways the book might be seen as a belated textual equivalent of the derided album of cover versions, Self-Portrait from 1970.  But this is an autobiography that contains multitudes. The stories are his, everybody else’s and nobody’s in particular, though they end up sounding like (cover versions of) Denis Johnson’s. Hence the tendency to deploy the second person, a “You” who is simultaneously a given song’s protagonist — the one doing the driving, dancing, drinking or whatever — and the “you” listening to it. But this “you” is identifiably Dylan in the sense that his DNA is imprinted in the syntax, in its waywardness and the ideas hatching within it.

What this means, in practice, is that he’s riffing on things. You — by which I mean everyone — love guitar riffs. At a gig in Rome in the Nineties, Patti Smith introduced her teenage son Jackson, on guitar, who proceeded to chop his way into “Smoke on the Water”, a beginner’s riff that is also an enduringly great one. But riffing on the page can become wearisome because it lacks exactly the propulsive quality that makes the riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” irresistible. There’s a drift or aimlessness to verbal riffing that is absent in a musical one. A riff in music is narrative in primal form. It could be said, I suppose, that Hamlet riffs on various topics but these are integral to the play’s dramatic scheme of actively suspended volition.

Suggested reading

In conversation with Philip Roth

By Joyce Carol Oates

There are fun bits and scattered off-the-cuff insights in The Philosophy — “The thing about being misunderstood is that it diminishes your enjoyment of life”; “Complex relationships come with a high price” — but Dylan is neither a Hamlet nor a thinker. Don’t let me be misunderstood: his trade does not require him to think things through so that’s not an issue. It does matter, however, that these pages don’t feel written. They feel talked through, like his Theme Time Radio Hour from a dozen or more years back. Or talked over, both in the sense of on top of (as in talking over the music) and warmed-over.

A pleasant quirk of radio is that you can listen to it while doing other things — “lots of other things,” to quote Cash from Nashville Skyline again — which makes it compatible with drift. Now, a tendency to drift helped make Chronicles absorbing. We hoped it might unlock the mystery of Dylan’s working, the process of how he became what he is (to go back to Nietzsche again); and it did, sort of: by straying into further increments of mystery, by adding extra layers of myth, by leaving stuff out. Even if it wasn’t a work of genius it was clearly the work of a genius. With the new book we tune — drift — in and out as we might while listening to the radio and doing chores, some taking us into rooms where the radio is out of earshot. Or on a road trip when the signal comes, fades and disappears, but we never feel like we’re getting anywhere, even by dint of accumulation.

Suggested reading

Bob Dylan doesn't like you

By Dorian Lynskey

With the route through the songs unclear the navigating voice grows slovenly, weary, even, when approaching the outskirts of superlatives, surprisingly bland. “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes is “beautifully arranged and performed to perfection”, as if it were an item on the menu of a road-side diner you only stopped at because there was nowhere else for hundreds of miles in either direction. Tonally, some patches are weirdly out of kilter, as when Clint Eastwood and Travis Bickle in Dirty Harry or Taxi Driver are said to have “thumbed their noses” at earlier standards of morality. What on earth is that phrase doing here (or anywhere for that matter)? The same question could, in fairness, be asked of lines in even his greatest songs.

Long ago Clive James wrote that one of the defining features of Dylan’s work was the way that wonderful turns of phrase existed in the tightest proximity to woeful ones. The combination of apparent carelessness and incessant revision — both pre and post-release of a given number — is a key part of his restlessness and of our endless fascination with what emerged from it. You’d listen closely, on the stoned edge of your seat, because there was no telling what was going to come next, even when what came next ended up sounding retrospectively inevitable (another aspect of rhyme). I never approached, let alone sustained, that state of tranced and fulfilled expectation while reading — scanning, skipping, scuttling back and forth among — these decorative pages. I wanted to, but the words wouldn’t let me.

I knew his voice, I’d heard his sermons over many years, but I didn’t know him. A bit like Jonathan Sacks. And I thought that death had brought comfort to him, that the proximity of death had elevated him, and when it came, he was blessed.

There were five Jewish singer-songwriters who clouded my consciousness when I was growing up. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. (Marc Bolan didn’t really count.) Dylan was like an itinerant Protestant preacher from Minnesota, searching for a home he could never find. Tangled up in blue. Leonard, from Montreal, was the Catholic Priest burdened by original sin, and then adding a few more of his own. Ain’t no cure for love. Paul Simon ran the gospel choir, like a bridge over troubled water. Neil Diamond ran the summer camp. Sweet Caroline raised spirits round the fire. Barry Manilow was the only one who actually showed up at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs and I can tell you, Copa Cabana and Could it be Magic were the only songs by this crew that my Mum really liked.

I thought that the five of them should get together and form a band called the Sanhedrin, but then again the only song that Cohen and Dylan recorded together, with Allen Ginsberg, was called ‘Don’t go home with your hard on’. Phil Spector was the producer. I let the idea go.

Suggested reading

Roger Scruton still gives me strength

By Maurice Glasman

It was Dylan who towered over them all but then Cohen made a late bid for glory. The closer to death, the greater the work. The Future, released in 1992, bore the hallmark of prophesy and foreboding.

“It’s coming from the sorrow on the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin
that goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.”

His voice, his songs, and even his music became stronger in his sixties and seventies, full of wisdom and compassion. ‘Anyhow’, ‘Come Healing’ and ‘Amen’ are unique and profound songs and ‘Lullaby’ is the only song I know that directly speaks to insomnia. “If your heart is torn, I don’t wonder why, if the night is long, here’s my lullaby.” It is beautiful.

They are all from the album Old Ideas that was released when he was 78. Bob Dylan could barely talk, Neil Diamond could barely walk but Leonard Cohen, the firstborn, was still throwing lightning bolts of prayer and repentance until his death. In ‘Steer your Way’ from his final album the perfect diction of his prophetic heart was still beating:

“Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women that you bought
Year by year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.  
They whisper still the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make us holy
Let us die to make things cheap
And say the Mea Culpa, which you probably forgot
Year by Year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.”

And yet we didn’t. The greatness of his work is his ease with the ancient stones, the dry bones and the mountain tops of the Bible. Abraham and King David live again. The Psalms frame and animate his writing; Hallelujah. Jesus is a constant presence from first to last. Whether he was a sailor, who walked upon the water, or the spirit who will re-animate love, the holy spirit hovers over his work:

“It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence on the dock of the bay
From the brave the bold the battered heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

No wonder the election of Donald Trump was the final nail in his coffin.

Suggested reading

Bob Dylan doesn't like you

By Dorian Lynskey

His decades-long devotion to Zen Buddhism was also part of the story. He spent years in a Buddhist monastery in California, learning from Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who, it turned out, molested and abused hundreds of women in his role as head of the order. He claimed that sexual contact with a Zen Master would help women attain “new levels of non-attachment”. Who’d have thought?

And for all the drawing on the Kabbalah, in which sexual union is the most sublime expression of divine love, there is no mention of faithfulness, of marriage, of the fidelity to a woman and to God that is the basis of that teaching. Throughout his work, eros is disconnected from devotion. It is an escape, a healing, a triumph; but it is not bound by covenant or love. 

“And like a blessing come from heaven
for something like a second
I was healed and my heart was at ease”.

The Sixties, when Leonard Cohen abandoned the idea of being a novelist and a poet and moved to New York to be a singer-songwriter, was a cauldron of sexual liberation and enslavement. The over-the-counter-culture intensified the commodification of sex, the dissolution of its relational essence accompanied by celebrity endorsement. The idea that sex was sacred was profaned. It was a time full of sex cults, and the emergence of Kabbalah as part of an occult sexology was part of that story. And Leonard Cohen, who initially saw himself as a prophet of a new religion, was one of the high priests of that movement.

“It’s coming from the women and the men
Ah baby we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
that rivers gonna weep
And the mountains gonna shout Amen.
It’s coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious, in amorous array
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

It’s hard to load the dishwasher after that. It is the lack of relationality in regard to sex that is remarkable. He would have benefited from a conversation with Mary Harrington. Love and eros were divorced and it is notable that in his final recording, having elevated sex to the sublime life force of creation throughout his work, he writes: “I don’t want a lover, no, no, the wretched beast is tame.” The body and the soul could not find reconciliation.

Suggested reading

The Velvet Underground had to die

By Ann Manov

There was more than a dose of the biblical prophet in Leonard, and more than a dose of the new age cultist. His defrauding by his manager and ex-lover make sense within this story. The ‘wretched beast’, ‘my crazy’, and his adventures on ‘Boogie Street’ could not be constrained by his merger of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. They could not be bound; they could not be consecrated and so ‘love itself, love itself was gone’.

He was like Noah, a great man of his time, but unlike Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Imam Hussein, he could not make the sacrifice required for redemption. He was enslaved by sex. There was no liberation there. And unlike King David, the Kingdom was merely his own.

In 1992, Cohen promised: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” The crack in the wall that creates a space for democracy and a cold and very broken hallelujah. In the end, however, the birth was betrayed and the marriage spent. He refused to be bound by his understanding, that the forgiveness of others is far more important that forgiving yourself. He had a messianic vocation but he could not fulfil it. He wanted it darker. And he blew out the flame.

This is far from uncommon, for it’s increasingly common for critics to adopt the brace position before daring to dislike something that many people enjoy. Back in May, the Guardian’s Scott Tobias became Twitter’s baddie of the day for battering Shrek on the occasion of its 20^thanniversary: “Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful.” I found the reaction extraordinary. Tobias was called, at best, a cynical, click-hungry contrarian; at worst a twisted, misanthropic snob. “Shrek Fans Diss ‘Joyless Chud’ Guardian Critic Who Called Film ‘Unfunny and Overrated,’” reported The Wrap. His crime, let’s say it again, was hating an old, animated movie about an implausibly Scottish ogre and his donkey friend.

Critics have never been the world’s most beloved people. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Czech author and sometime critic Karel Čapek wrote about the consequences of a harsh review: “I’m reconciled in advance to the fact that [the author] considers me unfair, cliquey and incompetent. It’s definitely his right. I, too, use this right when an unfair, cliquey and incompetent critic, who gives my book a bad press, hurts me. To cut a long story short, there’s an eternal conflict between artist and critic. ‘Praise me, or I’ll hate you.’”

Nonetheless, there used to be an understanding among readers that any worthwhile critic, whether it be William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael, would need to hate as well as to love. As the late Clive James (who was skilled on both counts) wrote in a 2013 defence of hatchet jobs: “You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.”

Now critics are often up against readers who resist the very notion of criticism. A few popular lines of attack pop up regularly. There’s faux-objectivity: You said this movie wasn’t funny but I laughed, ergo it is you are factually wrong and unprofessional. Taking offence: How dare you imply that everyone who likes this movie is a tasteless dolt? Assumption of bad faith: You’re only saying this for clicks and notoriety.

Character assassination: You’re a vindictive killjoy who’s no fun at parties. Moral disapproval: Why would you waste your precious time being mean about something when you could be praising something else? Some people mix and match these accusations into strange hybrids like the schoolmarm-turned-troll: Why can’t you be more positive, you dumb piece of shit?

What these responses all have in common is not so much disagreement with the critique but fury that it was written at all. Thumper the rabbit’s famous maxim, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” might have been good advice for Bambi but it’s fatal for the appreciation of art. “Criticism is not nice,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times in Better Living Through Criticism. “To criticise is to find fault, to accentuate the negative, to spoil the fun and refuse to spare delicate feelings.”

For an entertaining reminder of a more knockabout era of criticism, I recommend the Ringer’s current podcast series Gene and Roger, presented by Brian Raftery. Between 1986 and 1999, when they hosted the half-hour TV show At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most (and perhaps only) famous film critics in America, appearing on David Letterman and Saturday Night Live as celebrities in their own right and introducing many viewers to the concept of film criticism itself.

Central to their appeal was the intensity of their opinions, which often clashed. The show turned disagreement into entertainment. While they were both important champions of overlooked or misunderstood movies, one of my favourite comfort reads is Ebert’s 2000 anthology of pans, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It is an unfortunate truth that it is much easier to be funny when you’re being mean, but Ebert wasn’t just going for cheap laughs; he knew how wonderful cinema could be and was indignant when millions of dollars were squandered on crud.

Why has negative criticism become so contentious? One factor is the growing vulnerability of both journalists and the artists they cover. When there is less space for book coverage, it makes sense to foreground good work than cackle over the bad, except when a real stinker from a big name hoves into view and critics can take the gloves off with a sigh of relief. Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfeld’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.

In the world of music, when most albums don’t make money, it is understandable for critics to pull their punches. The world of album reviewing now is so much more collegiate than the knives-out music-press culture that I grew up on. I’m glad that young critics no longer have to make their names with an act of ritual cruelty towards a soft target, but the really thoughtful takedown is an endangered species without which music journalism is merely PR. Older critics tend to lose their taste for blood while, as Clive James wrote, “among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners.”

More from this author

Nirvana's teen spirit will never get old

By Dorian Lynskey

I would suggest, though, that it’s as much a question of self-preservation as good manners, due to social media’s abolition of context. When Siskel and Ebert panned a movie, regular viewers knew that that was not all they did. In fact, the duo might well rave about another film in the same episode. But when a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso. Scott Tobias, for example, has written dozens of anniversary pieces for the Guardian, the vast majority of which are celebratory. I suspect he would have been delighted if his ode to, say, Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute had gone viral and Klute had become a trending topic, but of course it didn’t, because nothing fuels virality like outrage. Thus a negative piece is damned as “clickbait” by the angry people who are clicking on it while ignoring all the positive pieces. Whose fault is that?

Social media has also given us the militarisation of fandom. Major artists and franchises attract armies of fans who demonstrate their fealty by mobbing naysayers. There are DC fans who genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that critics are secretly paid to praise Marvel movies and denigrate their DC rivals, but then Marvel fans are no more reasonable. No movie that Martin Scorsese has made in recent years has generated as much attention as his mild dismissal of the MCU two years ago. Fortunately, the world’s most profitable movie franchise has survived his lack of interest.

All of this makes criticism an increasingly hairy business. Woe betide the outlier who costs a film its 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When the critic Ann Powers published an ambivalent essay about Lana Del Rey in 2019, it was denounced by Del Rey herself to her 9.5 million Twitter followers, thus sending an avalanche of abuse in Powers’ direction. Complaints to employers are common, as are death threats. It’s hard to imagine a review of a major artist as famously scathing as Greil Marcus’ take on Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait (first line: “What is this shit?”) in the age of Twitter. You want to take an axe to Korean boy band BTS and their ride-or-die followers? Lock your account first.

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. They may have influence en masse, via review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (there is safety in numbers), but the days when one critic could make or break a movie, album or anything else are long gone. Yet fans still see them as dream-crushing monsters from which million-selling musicians and billion-dollar movies must be defended at all costs.

More from this author

Why we love to hate Imagine

By Dorian Lynskey

Perhaps there is so much ambient hostility online that critics are too easily lumped in with the trolls and “haters” who plague your timeline. There are of course some contrarians, bullies and attention-seekers who have built a brand on performative contempt but they are not typical. The author Matt Haig is nonetheless adept at painting his detractors as bitter, shrunken souls whose arguments are therefore invalid. Last weekend, the Thumper of British publishing crystallised the Haigist theory of criticism in a tweet that was ostensibly about Sally Rooney’s sceptics but implicitly about his own: “There is so much jealousy of Sally Rooney. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. The great thing about books is there are lots. There have literally never been more books. Why spend your time dissing authors other people like when you could be championing ones you do?” It’s all there: the unfounded assumption of jealousy; the nonsensical idea that you can know you don’t like a book before you’ve read it; the suggestion that negative criticism is simply a waste of time. To voice disappointment or antipathy, in Haig’s world, is a moral failing.

Similarly, anyone who resists the gentle charms of Ted Lasso, which received a Peabody Award for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness”, risks being accused of hating kindness itself. The success of the show, so unlike caustic 2000s sitcoms such as Extras or Curb Your Enthusiasm, is itself symptomatic of a general desire for more warmth and less cynicism.

But the Peabody citation acknowledges that the premise “has all the markings of a formulaic cornball dud,” so it is inconceivable that some people, not all of them unfeeling bastards, wouldn’t indeed find it a formulaic cornball dud. It’s particularly tricky right now for black critics who dislike politically well-intentioned work by black creators. After Angelica Jade Bastién caught flak for shredding the generally well-received new Candyman movie, another writer responded: “one of the frustrating things about this era of didactic capitol b Black art is the idea that serious criticism amounts to some kind of disloyalty.”

I suspect that this hypersensitivity to critical voices has been compounded first by the ugly intensity of politics and then by the pandemic. If you think Candyman was made by good people with timely things to say about racism in gentrification, then you might be inclined to forgive its didacticism. And if Ted Lasso or Shrek made your lockdown a little more cheerful, then you might overreact to someone stomping all over them. But I worry that enthusiasm is being mistaken for a moral virtue, and negative criticism for a character flaw: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just like things?

Suggested reading

Quentin Tarantino's mummy issues

By Tanya Gold

We all know, in our own lives, that everything isn’t for everybody. Any night of the year there are heated disagreements in living rooms and cinema lobbies, and negative reactions are no less worthy of representation in public discourse than positive ones. Disliking certain things is not just normal but essential. Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing.”

Personally, I find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, that’s fine by me, especially when it’s something that has been almost universally acclaimed. I was wowed by Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror but I got a kick out of Lauren Oyler’s brilliant demolition job in the London Review of Books last year, as did Tolentino, who gamely retweeted it. “I’ve been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful,” she wrote. “It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!”

Tolentino’s suggestion that negative criticism is not just valid but useful would have surprised Karel Čapek. In the current climate, it verges on the saintly. It’s not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.

He finally sent the committee a pre-recorded lecture just before the deadline, perhaps only because otherwise he would have had to forfeit the prize money. “I think it’s fair to say that his reaction so far has been rude and arrogant,” grumbled one academy member that October. “He is who he is.”

He is who he is. Bob will be Bob. For Dylan’s admirers, his freewheeling attitude to social niceties is not just part of the package but positive proof of his brilliance. The New York Times described his cold-shouldering of the Nobel as “a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like”, which would be news to the likes of Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney. All simpering sell-outs, presumably.

As Dylan turns 80 today, other writers will tell you how he single-handedly redrew the parameters of song-writing by giving rock’n’roll the lyrical ambition of poetry, etcetera, and they will be right. As an artist he is untouchable. But I don’t want to add to the mountain of praise that he finds such an awful burden. While I’m a great admirer of Dylan, I could never call myself a fan because I know what he thinks of fans and I’m not into unrequited love.

I saw him headline Hyde Park in 2019, which one Dylan veteran assured me was an unusually convivial affair because the great man was seen to smile occasionally and didn’t turn his back on the audience. Joan Baez has said that he looks on stage “as though he’d rather be in a dark parlour, playing chess; perhaps in a sense he is”.

Dylan’s fans are practised in lowering the bar. A crowd-pleasing set of beloved hits? Grow up. A hello, goodbye or thanks-for-coming? Dream on. He is the only artist I know of who routinely disfigures the melodies of his classic songs, often beyond recognition. At Hyde Park, my friend said that he was hoping to hear Make You Feel My Love and I had to inform him that Dylan had already played it. During the chorus of Like a Rolling Stone, the crowd staged a joyful mutiny by singing the standard tune regardless of what Dylan was doing on stage, but I sensed no resentment in it.

We all knew what we were signing up for and I had a good time. But I do marvel at his motivations. He must know that on any given night he could trigger an explosion of love with just a few words and a familiar melody, but he never does. He leaves it all on the table.

In interviews, too, Dylan is a master of not giving people what they want. Paul McCartney and Bono will melt the ice and pretend they’re having a friendly chat between equals. But Dylan, by all accounts, is very happy to impress on you that he is Bob Dylan and you are not.

David Hepworth wrote about a typically frosty 1985 encounter: “One of his great strengths is that he gives the impression of genuinely not caring what you or anybody else thinks of him. This must be a natural reaction to having spent most of your life surrounded by people who are desperate to please you.”

But I think that’s too kind. If it were natural, then every superstar would behave like that. Leonard Cohen — no less complex, no less great — was the perfect gentlemen in old age. Bruce Springsteen’s charm is legendary. One can always be decent.

It’s said that Dylan is extremely shy and awkward around strangers but he can be a cold fish with his peers, too. I once heard an anecdote about a rock star who met Dylan for dinner in an English pub with their respective girlfriends and spent almost the entire evening eating in silence. Driving home, the rock star’s girlfriend assumed it had been a mortifying disaster until he said cheerfully, “Well, I thought Bob was on great form.”

I’ve never heard anyone say he was surprisingly nice and down-to-earth, nor envied anyone who has met him. Digging around for evidence of kindness, I found Cerys Matthews once said that a thoughtful call from Dylan had helped rescue her from drug addiction, but I wasn’t exactly spoilt for choice.

More from this author

Here comes 1984: The Musical

By Dorian Lynskey

Dylan’s personal unpleasantness has been remarkably consistent. As a hungry up-and-comer in the New York folk scene, he was a manipulative schemer who sought out people who could help him, only to discard them once they had fulfilled their purpose. According to folksinger Ian Tyson, who met him in 1961, “Dylan was a little obnoxious jerk in many ways.”

Once he became the scene’s unrivalled star, he had licence to be a bully. “He started using bayonets on people,” said the sister of his girlfriend Suze Rotolo. “He’d find their vulnerable spots, and just demolish them.” According to Baez, another mistreated girlfriend, “he was rarely tender, and seldom reached out to anticipate another’s needs.”

It’s hard, therefore, to put his rudeness down to the intolerable pressure of being worshipped as the voice of his generation. He was cruellest to those who were nice to him. In Don’t Look Back, DA Pennebaker’s classic documentary of his 1965 UK tour, Dylan’s murderous disdain cuts down Baez, Donovan and any journalist who crosses his path. “What a jerk Bob Dylan was in 1965,” wrote Roger Ebert when the film was reissued in 1998. “What an immature, self-important, inflated, cruel, shallow little creature, lacking in empathy and contemptuous of anyone who was not himself or his lackey.”

Of course, there are plenty of people who watch Don’t Look Back and see the ultimate incorruptible renegade sticking it to the phonies who would waste his time and dilute his art. Around this time, Dylan’s personal unpleasantness became intertwined with his artistic integrity. Brilliant artists were expected to be jerks, or at least their jerkishness was not held against them. Sarcastic John was cooler than genial Paul. The Rolling Stones were positively demonic.

Dylan came of age in a period coloured by existentialism, when an untameable, solitary outlaw was the thing to be. Being difficult meant that you refused to conform to the norms of a corrupt society — and a sense of humour, even when it’s weaponised, goes a long way. (Peter Grant, 1973: “Hi Bob, I manage Led Zeppelin.” Dylan: “Hey man, I don’t come to you with my problems.”)

Perhaps, while songwriting is the core of Dylan’s genius, rudeness is his superpower. A more people-pleasing character would not have been able to break the hearts of the folk community that had nurtured him by going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and turning his back on protest songs, nor write songs as groundbreakingly ruthless as “Masters of War” and “Positively 4^th Street”.

More from this author

Plagiarism laws are killing music

By Dorian Lynskey

His musical contemporaries, like his wives and girlfriends, discovered that his obsession with personal freedom outweighed any sense of commitment or loyalty, and the rest of us, safely outside his blast radius, got some phenomenal music out of it. To thine ownself be true — and fuck everyone else.

I find it impossible to imagine a new artist getting away with behaving like this. It may seem paradoxical now that public discourse feels so much nastier, but celebrity culture is far nicer than it used to be. Today’s stars are expected to join James Corden in Carpool Karaoke, cheerfully read out abusive tweets on Jimmy Kimmel, play well with others on Graham Norton’s sofa and generally impress on the public that they are gracious, collegiate souls who owe everything to their fans.

After a celebrity dies, the anecdotes that go viral are usually tales of selfless generosity and self-deprecating good humour, while the classic “troubled genius” gets increasingly short shrift. Consider the recent canonisation of Dolly Parton, once a figure of fun, now an avatar of decency who funds literacy programmes and vaccine research. Kanye West is perhaps pop’s last jerk-genius and he doesn’t get half as much leeway as Dylan.

Suggested reading

The death of the music industry

By Ian Birrell

I hope I don’t sound moralistic. In this current period of reckoning with the bad behaviour of artists, being simply rude feels like a minor offence. But nor do I understand the masochistic compulsion to make excuses for the man and interpret his failings as an index of ethical purity.

I am trying to state what seems to me to be an obvious fact, which is that we will never again see a star on this scale who gives so little and is so widely admired for it. By making it abundantly clear that he doesn’t need any of us — not journalists, not fans, not peers — Dylan remains unknowable and unbound in a way that I suspect some modern celebrities secretly envy. That is a unique kind of power, albeit faintly inhuman.

So happy birthday Bob, you magnificent jerk. I’m sorry I called you a genius back there but, in my defence, I don’t want to make you like me. You are who you are.