“The world is ending, everything central to my being seems completely intangible at any given moment, and Bob Dylan just released a 17-minute song on the assassination of JFK.”
I still remember the first time I saw Inside Llewyn Davis: I was a sophomore, it was December, and I went with some of the cool upper classmen I befriended in theatre. Llewyn, a folk singer from Greenwich Village at the peak of the folk scene, really resonated with me. He had a knack for crashing on his friends’ couches, he adopted a cat, and was overall just a lot to be around. I didn’t really care much for the music, though. Too much yodeling.
I didn’t think much of folk music until much later. Flash forward to 2020. The world is ending, everything central to my being seems completely intangible at any given moment, and Bob Dylan just released a 17-minute song on the assassination of JFK. Rub a dub dub, it’s a murder most foul baby. This song opened my third eye in a way that hadn’t been accessed since I first listened to “The Less I Know the Better” by Tame Impala. So much for holding hands with Trevor.
Ever since then, I fell hopelessly into the eternal hellscape of cringe that is becoming a Bob Dylan fan. When you’re in uni, you have the insatiable urge to be “cool” and “hip” and “on the edge of all current pop culture trends.” Some light in my brain flicked on at the end of undergrad that permanently changed my thinking. I am an old man now. I fight with Bob Dylan boomers on Facebook. If a naive fan tells me that “Fourth Time Around” is Bob’s response to “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, I laugh at them. I have watched both Rolling Thunder Revue and No Direction Home in single sittings.
This is all about my journey of self-discovery. I love cooking and eating shakshuka, I LOVE Bob Dylan, and, while I can’t say I pray, I like to think of myself as believing in some type of higher power in a way that any spiritually confused ex-Catholic can probably attest to. We should all embrace the cringe within ourselves—we contain multitudes, of course.
Fourth Time Around is his response to Norwegian Wood, though. But I get it. Being a fan is personal. However, remember: Bob turns 80 one of these days.