Bob Dylan
Born May 24, 1941Duluth, Minnesota
Singer, songwriter
Bob Dylan. AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced by permission.
One of the most influential songwriters of the twentieth century, Bob ...
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Dylan, Bob (1941—)
The most influential musician to emerge out of the social unrest of the early 1960s, Bob Dylan dramatically expanded the aesthetic and political boundaries of popular song. R...
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Throughout a career that has seen the better part of three decades, Bob Dylan (born 1941) has been pop music's master poet and an ever-changing performer.In the early 1960s Bob Dylan was heralded as t...
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There are a number of important relationships between Bob Dylan and writers of the Beat Generation. Throughout his career Dylan has shared with the Beats the aesthetic assumption that true artistic ex...
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In the following essay, Monaghan asserts that the songs of Bob Dylan, while remaining at the center of popular culture, also belong within the tradition of twentieth-century literature. Monaghan analy...
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In the following essay, Johnson analyzes several of Dylan's mid-career songs in an attempt to understand his motivations for moving away from the folk-protest idiom and into rock music.
What wa...
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In the following essay, Wells examines Dylan's song lyrics from a sociological perspective, viewing the recurring imagery of the grotesque in many of Dylan's songs as expressive of the i...
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In the following essay, Sumner discusses the recurring imagery and themes found in Bob Dylan’s songs as they relate to his own personal experiences.
A striking feature of Bob Dylan's art...
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In the following excerpted chapter, Scobie discusses the ways in which the meaning of Bob Dylan's songs can change, depending on the style and context in which they are presented.
The Text of B...
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In the following essay, Klier describes Bob Dylan as the most recent in a line of popular American poets, from Walt Whitman to Woody Guthrie, who are “singers of democracy.”
Hank Lazer h...
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Critical Essay by Robert Shelton
A bright new face in folk music is appearing at Gerde's Folk City. Although only 20 years old, Bob Dylan is one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Ma...
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Critical Essay by O. B. Brummell
Bob Dylan and his peers exist on the fringes of music, on the fringes of entertainment and, above all, on the fringes of political potency. And somehow they all partic...
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Critical Essay by Jack Newfield
Dylan, the Brecht of the juke box, has already won this generation of rebels, just as Kerouac and Camus have won earlier generations. Dylan's words, values, imag...
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Critical Essay by Ellen Willis
Dylan's refusal to be known is not simply a celebrity's ploy, but a passion that has shaped his work. As his songs have become more introspective, the intr...
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Critical Essay by Michael Rogers
Once in a while, you can cross a street, walking down the backward abysm of time, and hear the sounds of early Byrds, Meet the Beatles, Bringing It All Back Home. Toda...
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Critical Essay by Wilfrid Mellers
While Dylan's originality is his strength, his art has roots, and these are a strength also. Primarily, one looks to the words, since the significance of early...
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Critical Essay by Gene Bluestein
Dylan became a major innovator by immersing himself in Whitman's "swimmy waters." That is, he initiated the movement toward an Emersonian esthetic...
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Critical Essay by Gil Turner
[Dylan's] vocal style is rough and unpolished, reflecting a conscious effort to recapture the earthy realism of the rural country blues. It is a distinctive, highly...
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Critical Essay by Peter Knobler
Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan … contains all of the works, except Tarantula, which individually have comprised the whole of the public Dylan, and through it...
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Critical Essay by Jon Landau
Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock & roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were proclaimed revolutionaries for their early w...
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Critical Essay by Naomi Lindstrom
Certainly it is not possible that a mutation in the human brain caused people to be able to take in poetry just as fast as it could be sung. Yet by the sixties it was...
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Critical Essay by Dave Marsh
Desire is a very special album, although Bob Dylan's adamantly antimusical approach keeps it from greatness. Somehow, though, Dylan's antimusic winds up bein...
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Critical Essay by Timothy Leary
The post-Hiroshima generation was the first completely electroid generation. At exactly the time when this enormous genetic wave opened to receive a post-Einsteinian re...
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Critical Essay by Thomas S. Johnson
What was Bob Dylan doing when he moved into rock music in mid-career? His first albums were in a folk-protest idiom. His later albums tended to return to a folk-cou...
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Critical Essay by Tony Palmer
Without question, the most important figure in the protest renaissance of the 1960s was Bob Dylan. Like his idol Woody Guthrie, Dylan believed he was "trying to be...
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Critical Essay by Joseph Haas
There are few healthier signs of our times than that many of our young people heed and respect the grim pessimism of Bob Dylan. This drawn and weary balladeer writes song...
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Critical Essay by Jon Pareles
When Bob Dylan writes from his wounded heart, he can be eloquent. When he writes from the head, he can be clairvoyant. And when Dylan the man teams with Dylan the yarn-sp...
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Critical Essay by Nat Hentoff
It is Dylan's work as a composer … that has won him a wider audience than his singing alone might have. Whether concerned with cosmic spectres or personal c...
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Critical Essay by Israel G. Young
Bob Dylan has become a pawn in his own game. He has ceased his Quest for a Universal Sound and had settled for a liaison with the music trade's Top Forty Hit P...
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Critical Essay by Thomas Meehan
Most of Dylan's reputation rests on his talents as a performer and a writer of lyrics rather than as a composer, for his melodies are fairly ordinary and decided...
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Critical Essay by Ralph J. Gleason
With hit recordings blaring forth from every radio, with his songs being sung by individual vocalists and played by rock 'n' roll groups everywhere, Dy...
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In the following essay, Lindstrom calls for a reevaluation of conventional thinking about the differences between the language of poetry and the language of popular songs, crediting Bob Dylan with ini...
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Role of Music during the 60s and 70s
Throughout history music has been a method of escape from reality. It has been one of the most popular ones, because it is readily available to almost everyone...
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The Voice Of A Generation
As one gradually makes their way through the exclusive pantheon of Rock & Roll, they will cross paths with such deities as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, be exposed to th...
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Dylan, Bob
Dylan, Bob (1941—)
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
