Go On Bob, Give Us Nothing!
Written by: Amani Rizwan
Cover Photo by: Barry Feinstein
"All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie."
Bob Dylan said that. And then he spent the next six decades proving it.
The man has spent over six decades dodging definitions, shapeshifting through personas, and answering questions with riddles. He was born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota, but discarded that identity early on. Even then he was ahead of the curve. Some say he took “Dylan” from the poet Dylan Thomas, though he’s denied it just as often as he’s confirmed it. Whatever the origin, Bob Dylan isn’t a name so much as it is an idea. A rolling stone. A folk prophet. A rock poet. A carnival barker. A trickster. A wandering outlaw. It all depends on the day, the decade, or his mood. He’s reinvented his art form, using fame not just to make music but to build the myth of Bob Dylan himself—constantly shifting, rewriting, and outpacing anyone who tries to pin him down. “All I can do is be me, whoever that is,” he once said, which feels like both a confession and a joke.
People have spent years trying to crack the Dylan code. Hollywood has made entire movies about it. I'm Not There (2007) took the boldest swing—casting six actors (including Cate Blanchett) to play different versions of him, as if he were some kind of fragmented myth rather than a man. Well, maybe that’s because he is. Todd Haynes, the director, understood that Dylan isn’t a person you can pin down with a straightforward cookie-cutter biopic. Instead, he’s a shifting reflection of America’s contradictions: a working-class poet who made millions, a counterculture hero who disappeared into domestic life, and a man who sang about injustice while refusing to be anyone’s spokesperson.
Dylan’s ability to reinvent himself has been, by far, the most defining characteristic of his career. Over the span of his music journey, he’s inhabited a variety of roles: the Folk Singer/Protest Singer, the Poet/Writer, the Rock Star, the Cultural Icon, the Family Man, the Country and Western Singer, the Born-Again Christian, the Media Trickster, and the Outlaw/Rebel. These personas often overlap, existing simultaneously in his music and public life, but one has remained constant—his role as the wandering outsider. Whether singing in first person as an exiled drifter or narrating the plight of real-life figures like Rubin “Hurricane” Carter or Lenny Bruce, Dylan has always gravitated toward society’s outcasts. His characters—whether mythical, historical, or wholly his own invention—often find themselves at odds with the world, unjustly persecuted or cast aside. It’s this deep connection to the downtrodden that has not only shaped his music but cemented his status as a counterculture icon.
No persona ever quite captures him. He remains, as always, something else entirely. Sam Shepard, who toured with Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue, once wrote, “Dylan has invented himself. He’s made himself up from scratch.” That’s what folk music is, in a way—taking pieces of the past and shaping them into something new. Moreover, Dylan didn’t just write songs; he rewrote his own mythology. He borrowed from Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, old bluesmen, outlaw ballads, and even the Bible—remixing it all into something that felt ancient and brand new at the same time.
Bob Dylan in New York City, 1961. (Photo by: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
In the early 60s, Dylan was the ultimate folk hero—a solo artist with no history, armed only with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. His songs like The Times They Are A-Changin’, Masters of War, and Blowin’ In the Wind were all about civil rights and injustice. They helped define a generation, and for a time, he was seen as the voice of the counterculture. However, that didn’t last long. In 1965, Dylan shocked the world by going electric. The folk prophet became a rock star, or rather, a rock poet with his sunglasses, his all-black outfits, his cryptic lyrics, and his defiant, alienating presence. By today’s standards, it doesn’t seem that radical of a shift (i.e. Taylor Swift), but musical genres were far more segregated in those days. His albums Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde captured this transformation, abandoning political protest for a more personal and surreal exploration of love (even with folk icon Joan Baez), identity, and the human experience. In particular, the songs on the iconic album Highway 61 Revisited such as Like a Rolling Stone and Desolation Row, were drenched in a new, chaotic kind of wisdom, drawing from rock ‘n’ roll, literature, and blues. It was also during this time that he skyrocketed to fame, achieving a near Christ-like status.
Rock ‘n’ roll Bob Dylan, 1966 (photo by: Bent Rej)
To many fans, this change felt like a betrayal. Still, Dylan never cared about their expectations because he was already onto the next thing. In the 1970s, he delved into country music with The Basement Tapes and Nashville Skyline, showing that his reinventions could be as diverse as they were unpredictable. This man who once championed social change was now in a cowboy hat, crooning soft, sentimental country ballads with Johnny Cash (see Girl from the North Country (1969 version) and Lay Lady Lay).
In the years that followed, Dylan continued to elude categorization. He moved from the folk scene to rock to country, then embraced Christianity in the late 1970s. The born-again phase saw themes of Christianity and spiritual yearning on Slow Train Coming and Saved. This phase baffled some and alienated others, but Dylan wasn’t interested in playing to expectations. To him, it was just another reinvention.
Bob Dylan, the Family Man, 1968 (photo by: Elliot Landy)
The 1980s and ‘90s found Dylan as some sort of elder statesman of rock. However, he still performed with the fire of someone who was never quite satisfied with the status quo. Time Out of Mind brought him back into the public eye with a record of poetic, introspective lyrics, capturing his reflections on decades of life, love, and loss. Tracks like Love Sick (which was used when Dylan bizarrely appeared in an ad for the lingerie company Victoria’s Secret—perhaps a long-delayed fulfillment of his offhand 1965 remark about selling out to “women’s undergarments”) and Not Dark Yet were somber and vulnerable, while still maintaining that elusive Bob Dylan mystique. He had, by the 90s, retreated from the spotlight even more, taking on the role of a rock ‘n’ roll hermit. His refusal to engage with the media or answer any questions about his past only added to his myth. The man who once seemed to stand for the voice of the people had retreated into a kind of enigmatic silence, letting his songs do the talking——except for the occasional cryptic stunt, like showing up at a Masked and Anonymous premiere in a blonde wig and tuque, leaving everyone to wonder why.
Bob Dylan, 1997 (Photo by: Mark Seliger)
Now, James Mangold is taking a turn with A Complete Unknown (2024), starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan in his early years. This one, at least, follows a more traditional structure—Dylan arriving in New York, reinventing himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, and then shocking everyone by going electric. But even in a linear narrative, Dylan remains slippery. He lied constantly in early interviews, spinning tall tales about running off with the circus or traveling with drifters. He once declared Motown singer Smokey Robinson his favorite poet, only to later claim he’d actually meant Arthur Rimbaud, which is quite fitting, given Rimbaud’s own belief in the need to become someone else in order to create. His shape-shifting, however, wasn’t limited to music—he played a knife-throwing outlaw named “Alias” in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), then directed the near four-hour Renaldo and Clara (1978), where other actors played him whilst he played Renaldo. By the time Masked and Anonymous (2003) rolled around, he was starring as a washed-up rock legend in a dystopian world that felt, in my opinion, just as cryptic as his own. He let people believe whatever they wanted—bohemian prophet, folk messiah, sellout, genius, fraud, outsider, insider—while quietly moving on to the next thing.
In the end, Dylan’s myth is rooted in contradiction. One minute he was a man of the working class, and the next, he was counting his millions. Throughout his evolution as an artist, a pattern has emerged. Dylan’s apparent attempts to debunk his own self-mythology, to strip away the iconography, only to replace it with something new. Each reinvention, each rejection of his past persona, has paradoxically cemented his legendary status. Even now, at 83, he’s still rewriting the script—performing songs differently each night, shifting his persona with every live show. His famously dubbed Never Ending Tour has stretched for decades, each performance more unpredictable than the last, as if he’s constantly trying to outrun the weight of his own legend.
A real person can disappoint you. A myth, on the other hand, can last forever. Dylan, more than anyone, knows how to blur the line between the two. Maybe he’s still figuring it out himself. Maybe he already knows, or maybe it doesn’t matter.