Bob Dylan wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. But do I think that there will be cultural figures that will come along and change things? Sure. In terms of the way he affected songwriting and the course of the American culture at large, that’s only become clear over time. No one could have predicted Bob Dylan’s cultural impact in the 1960s or even in the 1970s. We’re gonna have to see, won’t we? I think it’s too early to tell. He’s certainly aware of and respects enormously what those guys are up to.ĭo you think any artist of today’s generation can have the same cultural impact that he had? Although it’s interesting when you listen to Theme Time Radio Hour and listen to Dylan talk about rap. Rap, not so much because it comes out of a different place. A lot of punk people like Patti Smith and The Ramones, when they started out, they were trying to recapture some of the rebelliousness that they had seen in Dylan ten years earlier, and that they thought rock and roll had lost. Dylan helped inspire some of his greater poems, including “Whichita Vortex Sutra.” Ginsberg helped legitimize Dylan’s lyric writing as serious poetry, and Dylan helped render Ginsberg into a kind of pop figure which he had not been before. The two of them had a profound impact on each other in terms of cultural imagery. There’s a great chapter about his relationship with poet Allen Ginsberg. Which has to do in part with the way he mediates between the past and the present, in particularly sophisticated ways. I saw continuity, as well as sharp differences, in what he’s been doing in the last 15 years or so. I wanted to find a way to connect his body of work with larger currents of American culture, historically as well as aesthetically, and to see how he has both distilled and then made his own sorts of currents in American history. Mine talks about everything from his trials as a harmonica player to people considering him a Zen master and all the rest of it. Many of them are biographies, which this book is not.

Sean wilentz bob dylan