Timothée Chalamet playing genius man-child Bob Dylan in 'A Complete Unknown'.
At one point in A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, Dylan’s girlfriend returns from a trip abroad to a lovely surprise. “Oh Bobby!” she says, beaming with pride: “Did you teach yourself how to make coffee?”
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 revolutionising 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 scandalised 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.
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 idolise 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, popularised 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.
What’s more, glorifying outstanding individuals can provide a licence for them to engage in behaviour 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 womaniser.
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’ spiralling 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 rivalled 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 democratise 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.
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SubscribeBob Dylan was a genius. So is Elon Musk. One is a musical genius and one an industrial genius. He made electric cars, resuable rockets, Starlink…if I wasn’t sure he existed I’d think Ayn Rand had made him up in a fantastical fever dream. I agree with the author that we need to acknowledge and celebrate genius, but the sideswipe at Musk is wholly uncalled for. We need industrial geniuses, scientific geniuses and tech geniuses to keep the lights on for goodness sake.
If one is to despair for culture, it’s not because Elon Musk is successful, it’s because a modern Bob Dylan would have been cancelled or ‘called out’ by some disgruntled ex, and been cold-shouldered into obscurity or become, well, Ed Sheeran.
And good luck to those teenagers with their side hustles. I hope one of them, or all of them, is the next Richard Branson or Elon Musk, or Bob Dylan.
I totally agree. In the UK we would never have heard of a Bob Dylan, if it wasn’t for the people who invented radio, recording equipment and record production and planes. Dylan would have been a troubadour travelling from hick town to hick town in the Mid West.
Exactly.
We could all agree if you’d left out your own side swipe and finished with “traveling from town to town”.
To be fair, Jack is just being accurate! To quote his Bobness “oh my name it means nothin’, my age it means less. The country I come from is called the Mid-West”.
As you were….
I once heard Wogan have a massive rant about scientists, basically along the lines of ‘what kind of freak would want to be a scientist?’ I was really taken aback by how vociferous the rant was – it wasn’t what my perception of Wogan was (I didn’t like him, not sure why I was listening, but i didn’thave him down as a ranter).
I dare say he never gave the slightest thought to all the equipment he was using to broadcast his rant to millions of people, or how it came to exist.
The author laments the fact that we don’t give genius its due anymore, then immediately proceeds to… not give genius its due.
Add to this the fact that “Save us, Elon!” has been a popular meme-refrain for years. A more poignant expression of America’s enduring faith in genius, we have not.
Swing and a miss.
“Save us from Elon” might be more apposite.
….if I wasn’t sure he existed I’d think Ayn Rand had made him up in a fantastical fever dream. If she’d created him for a book, she wouldn’t have made him a Japie though. She’s have spared us that at least.
Jesus H Chr*st. Yet another simpering gush-a-thon about Bob f**king Zimmerman. Enough already. It’s just embarrassing now. And as usual it’s barely anything to do with the artist or their work, as such. Dylan, the poor hapless schmuck, is as ever just the gas in the tank of yet another writer’s ego road trip. Really, anyone who needs to invest any individual contemporary artist with this degree of adulation needs to get out a bit more; regain a bit of human perspective.
‘Genius’ is real – fair enough. But no generation gets to identify its own with any surity. Let’s see what 2125 makes of Dylan before wetting our panties any further on his behalf. Same goes for Mitchell, Swift, Musk or anyone else, for that matter.
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads heading south
Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe
Well that would be close to the most unintentionally hilarious misappropriation of Bob Dylan’s work I have ever seen. Well done, Cho – it’s a dauntingly competitive field!
Bad poetry is so much better when obscured by mediocre music.
From his picture, Matt Rowland Hill hardly looks like a contemporary of Dylan. He is not identifying genius within his own generation.
Matt Rowland Hill is like us all trapped in a mass media epistemic prison, one that has overwhelmed much of our individual aesthetic instinct and stranded us in a culture that is relentlessly self-referential. Our ‘great artists’ are ‘great’ because they’re ’famous for and as being great artists’ – at least in large part, or at very least, as far as we can possibly know, to date. Bob Dylan is still alive, and writing and performing. His life’s work is entirely within living memory. Much of his perceived artistic worth is inextricably entwined with historical and cultural factors that bear no intrinsic relation to his (timeless) alleged genius. He’s still making a lucrative living from his work, and more importantly, so are, probably literally, tens of thousands of others with no less a vested interest than him in continuing to advocate for his artistic worth.
Dylan may turn out to have been a genius, capable of capturing and articulating timeless and universal human truths in a new and exhilarating form and way. But humanity just won’t know for sure until after he’s dead, and all his contemporaneous mediocre cultists stop shouting at us that he is.
What’s far more likely to kill creative excellence than the ‘death of our interest in genius’ is our cheapening fetishisation of it. An exemplar of which…is this latest tedious gush of aesthetically incontinent, seat-moistening Dylanmania.
Brilliant reply.
So does Mozart make the cut for you or is it, as Zhou En Lai famously said about the impact of the French Revolution “too early to tell”.
Manifestly, sure. Along with Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and the handful of other long dead composers whose music continues to illuminate the human condition for those alive today, without us needing to be told ‘why’ it does by contemporaneous experts ie cultists. (You do have to make the human effort of learning how to listen to it; ideally you need to be able to play it, even if only rudimentally.) Strip away all the theoretical and cultural/historical commentary from Bach’s Prelude No. 1 from the WTC, and a Martian with a heart and a soul will still be moved to tears by it. Do the same for ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ – which alone had some fat-eared cultist above raving incoherently about ‘genius’ – and you’re left scratching your head over a lifted/derivative three chord musical cliche padded out with rhetorical nursery rhyme platitudes masquerading as Nobel-worthy poetry. Do it for other Dylan stuff, some of the love songs, say? OK, maybe you’ve got the inchoate makings of a case…but you’d have to be making it well clear of all the historical and cultural and epistemic baggage of his/our times.
By the way, Rocky: the profoundly debasing cultural flaw inherent in mass media’s (anti-) epistemology, which has largely (to date at least) created Bob Dylan’s premature status as a ‘great artist’ is, alas, also inadvertently on show in your dog-eared Zhou fake news. He was in fact talking about the ‘68 Paris riots of only a few years prior, not the French Revolution; but the new mass media, in its childish hunger to create ‘instant genius’ for its own generation’s self-gratifying (albeit ersatz) auto-commemoration, decided that advertising by carnival barkers not actual creative substance is what would count in Boomer popular culture. It’s a generation which has grown up assessing everything by the circular process of mass media self-affirmation and echo-chambering, whether in art, politics, history or morality. As I said, an epistemic prison, with ‘riches and fame’ the consolation prize for the lucky few, and the dull Orwellian pleasures of Celebrity Culthood for us lumpen plebs.
Bob Dylan wrote some good songs. He certainly became rich, famous and revered by millions as ‘a genius artist’. Maybe he is. Maybe he’s not. It’s certainly ‘too early to tell’ in his case, and all these arrogantly presumptuous (and seemingly never-ending) cult pieces – which I am sure must irk him more than anyone – achieve is to make him come across increasingly as a try-hard wannabe desperate to secure himself a place in future history. One thing, at least, I am pretty confident he’s not. Chrs.
If ‘genius’ is to mean anything, it’s the act of overturning or transforming something; doing it differently, in a way it’s never been done before and that others find difficult to imagine how it’s happened. For that to occur, the individual has to be able to take on board what’s gone before, then let go of it.
The ‘letting go’ allows an unconscious element to come into play, and it’s possible (as many have said) that they don’t themselves understand how they came up with their theory/poem/song, it just appeared – but it appeared due to being receptive to it.
We absolutely need to keep on doing this; it’s a very human trait and if we no longer find ourselves capable of it – through a diminution of how we look at the world (by looking at a screen instead, for instance) – we’ll have become less human.
Which is why some of the most outstanding artists exist and interesting songs are written when a new musical form is emerging rather than when that form is established and the formula has been written.
Yeh, one of the reasons artistic/poetic ‘genius’ seems to be neglected these days is the general neglect of tradition in the arts. In order for something special to emerge, there has to be a strong cultural foundation in the first place. In order for art to be meaningful it has to be mediated through a rooted and defined art form.
In today’s culture there’s a paradox of over-emphasis on individualism and rule-breaking for the sake of rule-breaking diluting any context for individual distinction. In order to break the rules, there have to be some rules to begin with.
Dylan was deeply immersed in Anglo folk/ lyric traditions going back centuries, as well as being under the spell of black American roots music and the burgeoning popular culture.
This article seems to conflate at least two different phenomena.
The first is recognition that some people are much more talented than others. The predominant ideology of recent years, especially among the young, is progressivism, aka wokeism. This is a world view based on envy, self-pity and victimhood. It’s the religion of losers. To admit that some people are substantially more talented than others is to admit most of us cannot aspire to a certain level of attainment, simply as a matter of biological inheritance, aka genetics. Consequently, there is no principled basis for self-pity; you cannot blame a failure to flourish in life as a form of “oppression”; it’s simply an inevitable corollary of the distribution of innate talent and intelligence.
The second, and different, phenomenon identified in this article is reverence for materially successful people. Young people today don’t admire Musk et al as a substitute for admiring artistic genius. They admire them because it is increasingly difficult to make a decent living and Musk et al are exemplars of successful entrepreneurship. The ability to make a decent living has become so difficult those who succeed are automatically ensconced on a pedestal. The creative, spiritual part of young people’s lives are separate (probably defensively so) from what they must do to just survive.
The immense tragedy of the modern era is that we’re all taught that ambition is bad, hope is bad, achievement is bad, even procreation is bad (they will all drive up greenhouse gases and destroy the planet). But these are the essential attributes of youth. We are, in effect, being taught that life is bad. So young people will venerate those who succeed, in a material sense, in this increasingly limited world, and they’ll hope another Dylan comes along to break the psychic log jam and allow them once again to be young, optimistic and hopeful.
Very keen observations sir, and there are those of us who recognise Musks achievement but find him abhorrent in a fair few ways none the less.
Also, I look back much further than just the 60s for inspiration, though they do hold a place in my heart. Fortunately for me I indulge in the classics of all forms and am continually renewed by them for progressing on my musical journey, and just as you say I carry on regardless of my day job as an engineer.
It’s a brutal grind of day work and then night work, but I’m steadily achieving new heights in my musical creation and it’s only through persistence and dedication that it occurred, not due to any inbuilt genius or inevitability. And even if the world knows nothing of it now, I find it infinitely rewarding.
Really? So far as I can tell it seems to be the religion of the most privileged people in the world. So losers relative to whom? To the struggling people in the fly over states? People in left behind towns in the U.K.?
Go anywhere that the young, privileged and successful gather and you will find they are woke to a greater or lesser degree.
“To admit that some people are substantially more talented than others is to admit most of us cannot aspire to a certain level of attainment, simply as a matter of biological inheritance, aka genetics.”
For some reason there’s huge resistance to accepting intelligence is, at least partly, heritable.
However, there is always a large slice of luck, or perhaps just an avoidance of bad luck, in success, alongside talent and hard work.
I’d love to contribute something stunning and original to this discussion but I am still worn out and in a bad mood from the terrible networking event I was at last night so I’m going to plump for the following:
The article is right in that we are too comfortable, too lazy, too worshipping of money to appreciate genius anymore. A genius is generally someone who thinks well outside the lines of “normal” or accepted thought and the majority just don’t want to do that.
But it was ever thus: you might call the architect who designed Vienna’s magnificent opera house, Eduard Van der Nüll, a genius. But the Viennese hated his creation so much when it was completed that the guy ended up committing suicide. Today, the opera is world famous – and not just for what goes on inside it. It’s an architectural treasure too. The Viennese have had their share of genii but were sure to give them a hard time first before allowing them the label. See also: the painters Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele. People flock to see their artwork these days but during their lifetimes they were seen as pariahs and deviants disturbing the accepted order of things. The West has become a bit Viennese.
Talking of being “outside the lines”…sometimes the only difference between a genius and a lunatic is luck and being around at a certain time. I’m thinking here of David Stirling, founder of the SAS: if WW2 hadn’t started or if he lived today he’d be seen as a reckless lunatic. His genius came from his personal qualities and ideas – but also the luck that the circumstances he existed in called for (and mapped well onto) those qualities.
I’m going to take the liberty of posting a piece I’ve written about Egon Schiele’s painting “Portrait of Trude Engel”. Not only is it a stunningly beautiful piece of work, the story behind it encapsulates so well how Viennese society rejected Schiele for upsetting their sensibilities – in the case of this painting, physically: https://katharinewrites.com/language/portrait-trude-engel-egon-schiele/
It would be interesting to know how public opinion in Vienna concerning the opera house was shaped. Whether vested architectural interests opposed its design. The bitterest critics of genius are often people who can recognise it well enough to know that they themselves do not have it.
Apparently locals were disturbed that a) the opera house seemed to be sitting in a hole (the Ringstraße on which it located was raised significantly around the time it was built) and b) that it did not compare in beauty to the palace opposite, which ended up being destroyed in WW2 and was replaced by the ugliest brutalist office block you can imagine. Which is ironic, really.
A similar example of initially detested architecture is the Eiffel Tower, which was seen as an eyesore by Parisians when it was built for the Great Exhibition and was fortunate to escape demolition after the exhibition ended.
“The only difference between a genius and a lunatic is luck and being around at a certain time”. I’m sure Vincent van Gogh would echo that sentiment.
It is unfair to call people ‘womanizers’, every successful male will be endlessly pursued by nubile young women, even Adolf, a hard sell, had his groupies. Only a deluded few confuse that with sexual allure, though the temptation must be great.
I agree. Men who like female company and because of that are liked by women in return are often smeared as ‘womanisers’ by men who prefer all male company. There is a world of difference between being able to mix with women and subjecting them to BDSM tinged sexual assault.
I’ve only met a few genuine womanisers, and what connects them is the gift of the gab, the ability to flatter women without it being too obvious, and secretly complete contempt for those same women. They treat them as disposable items to be used and cast away.
And grown ups prefer mixed company. Gravitating exclusively to your own sex is a sign you haven’t mentally left school yet.
I think the lack of interest in genius comes from our obsession with ‘team’ and ‘process’.
Everyone seemingly loves to share. To integrate. Team work is dream work right?! I’ve run teams in a creative capacity. It is not what it’s cracked up to be it. Very often you’re working to the level of the least talented in a misguided attempt to be inclusive.
Creative vision does not come from a team. It comes from an individual.
And don’t get me started on ‘process’ obsessed people. The analytical types have been trying to distill creativity into a process for decades. For some creative people it’s a drug fuelled bender. For others it’s found in mundane repetitive activity and letting the mind wander. But it’s not a bl%ody science.
And finally, truly creative people often develop controversial opinions. Thinking outside the norm will do that to people. In our censorious age that quickly becomes problematic.
Creative vision does not come from a team. It comes from an individual.
Well said, DB. I’ve spent the past couple of days creating a webpage making this very point, and contrasting synthetic imagination (mechanical, laboured, derivative) with organic imagination (natural, spontaneous, inspired). In the workplace it’s nothing but synthetic ideas ‘generated’ in soulless, mechanical brainstorming sessions. I propose that we leave the ‘generation’ to right hemisphere dominant (I’m talking McGilchrist, not Sperry) specialists, with the left dominant majority putting flesh on the bare bones ideas and bringing them to fruition. The left hem ideas conceiver doesn’t need to be a genius, just someone with a particular talent. These people do exist.
Sometimes people act as a catalyst for one another though. How good would the individual Beatles have been had they never met, and been in bands with less talented individuals?
A more interesting question would be what role Dylan (and others) played in this process. Culturally pop music has replaced both serious music and poetry in our culture. To a lesser degree, and along with film, it has replaced literature altogether.
If it had just been an enhancement of ordinary life by putting better pop music on the radio that would have been great. But it does seem that pop music has usurped the place once held by other art forms. We have simply lost cultural interest in anything more than a 3 minute song, however good.
A couple of random things to point out.
3-minute songs started started seriously in the jazz era and became very important with people like Benny Goodman in the 1930s. They are not new. Of course, the songs were three minutes long because of recording technology – but this very technology took music to millions of people who could never have afforded to go to classical concerts. The ability of people like Ellington, who had musical ideas and managed to squeeze those ideas into three minutes is undeniable. Compare this perhaps to Mahler, who might take 40 minutes in one movement to get his ideas together – and for most people would be an unbearable drone.
Literature is different because people don’t need modern technology to read long screeds. Books have been around for a long time and today people have more time to read than ever before. They work much shorter hours and even work from home, which means no time is wasted in commuting. On the others hand, women are probably the biggest readers, as they always were, but women now go out to work. Today people prefer to have quick fixes, not to devote the time to a book. They don’t read books because they fill leisure time by being artificially busy, by messaging each other ad nauseam and by contributing to sites….like this one.
Not disagreeing. And pop music provides a background to busy lives via headphones.
I don’t think It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), by Dylan, is anything resembling a ‘pop song’, or has any real relationship to today’s disposable pop.
“Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”
Some pop is better than other it’s true.
Interestingly the gradations of pop have largely replaced the high art/ low art distinction as a marker of status and social class.
ABBA is a good example of a purely pop band that has some staying power.
Dylan received the Nobel Prize for literature, not pop music. Do music and poetry have to be ‘serious’ to be appreciated? Would you say his lyrics are not serious?
By the way, his longest work clocks in at just under 17 minutes, so about half the length of an average symphony.
Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. Beyonce has won 14 more Grammys than Aretha Franklin. If you need an award committee to tell you what literature is then you’ll never know what literature is.
I was merely commenting on the assertion that ‘pop’ music has replaced literature. I have my own opinions on what literature is, as I’m sure you do.
I was merely pointing out that Dylan’s Nobel Prize had about as much to do with literature as Obama’s had to do with peace.
Yeah, but Obama got that Peace Prize for bringing about World Peace….
The Diddy trial may give us an idea of how hard Mr and Mrs Carter hustled to get their money. As Ice T said, ‘pimpin ain’t easy’.
It’s unfair to describe Elon Musk, probably history’s greatest enterprise manager, in the same terms as Zuckerberg, who stole someone else’s idea and got lucky.
In terms of pop and rock, Lana Del Rey is the only genius that the US (or UK) has thrown up in the last 10-15 years. Yes, Taylor Swift is successful but she owes much of her formula to LDR.
Rap/hip hop has declined while metal and indie rock have become niche. This decline set in rapidly as the 00s progressed after the immense success of all the above genres in the 1990s.
Perhaps, structurally, download culture has much to blame for this as well as the decline of musical education in the conventional school system.
The idea that both Mozart and Lana Del Ray will still be talked about as geniuses in five hundred years is close to the nuttiest notion I’ve encountered in this era of never-ending nutty notions. The thing I love about internet comments sections is that no opinion is so far-fetched that it hasn’t been outdone. Probably in the same thread.
I like Lana del Rey, and Mozart is not my favourite composer – but of course you are absolutely right. I’m also not sure, once we have left the post 60s era, that Dylan or the Beatles will be of much other than historical interest. And I enjoy both.
Agreed. Dylan and the Beatles were at the start of the musical culture most of us on here lived through. If that musical culture is replaced by something else (for a lot of people I expect it already has been replaced), the pioneers of that will be the geniuses and Dylan and The Beatles will be forgotten.
Virgil, Chaucer and Milton are not of much other than historical interest for the majority of people.
I’m not sure about posterity as the sole judge of artistic contribution and worth.
Fashions come and go, old artists are rediscovered, then forgotten, then rediscovered again.
The people of the future won’t be any less biased or any more objective than we are.
As a session musician, recording engineer, producer, and songwriter, I appreciate Lana del Ray as an exemplary artist in the creatively moribund post-song post-chorus era of popular muzak in which we are presently mired. The popular music of this era will be remember by no one in ten years not to mention 100 (sing a Lana del Ray chorus in your head right now. That’s what I thought.) Mozart (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin) on the other hand will still be admired in 1000 years.
Interestingly, Rick Beato (who knows about such things) has a YouTube clip that says there are four bands that haven’t put out any music in 30 years who still have huge amounts of streams: Nirvana, The Police, Queen and the Beatles.
If Bob Dylan is a genius, I’m Eleanor Roosevelt. Dylan is what we in the industry like to call a mediocre musician and a great songwriter. What’s amazing about Dylan is that he wrote songs without really knowing any but basic guitar chords and progressions. I wouldn’t even call him brilliant. Just great. John Prine was, in my opinion, brilliant, prolific and infinitely more clever than Dylan yet still most definitely not a genius. “Genius” is just a word people use to describe artists they like a lot. Dylan is not a genius. Lennon was not a genius. Kurt Cobain was not a genius. Miles Davis was not a Genius. An artist is not a genius because you and 50 million other people call him a genius. In fact, all of those artists demonstrate the amazing thing about popular music: maybe we love all of those songs because they were written by people who were not geniuses.
Hi Eleanor.
There should be a word for people who describe a person with a slightly-above-average IQ (I’m referring to Dylan, and that’s a “maybe”) as a genius. I’m leaning towards “Rocky”.
What a strange correlation. You can have an extremely high IQ without having an original thought in your head.
No doubt. And IQ is probably the wrong metric for someone like Mozart, whose bandwidth – though undoubtedly immense – was probably used almost exclusively for things musical and not at all for, say, mathematics. In other words, outside of the music room he may have appeared (and been) an idiot. Dylan, on the other hand, poured his modest bandwidth into the very few chords he could master and clever lyrics. He was prodigious in his economy of skill.
Just as a matter of interest, how many chords does one have to master before one can be considered to be a genius.
It doesn’t matter how many chords you master, it won’t make you a genius.
It reminds me of the old joke: Q. What is the difference between a rock guitarist and a jazz guitarist? A. A rock guitarist plays three chords to thousands of people….
What’s amazing about Dylan is that he wrote songs without really knowing any but basic guitar chords and progressions. Yeah, because songs aren’t good unless they use lots of really obscure chords.
Can I tell you a secret? I’m sure no one has told you this before and it’s an injustice that you’ve suffered long enough. Never (and I mean NEVER) start a rebuttal with “Yeah, because…” and then proceed to mutilate the statement you’re presuming to paraphrase. Monkeys don’t even do that.
Sorry, I didn’t realize that you were a Grandmaster of Rhetoric. I do however see that you are a “session musician, recording engineer, producer, and songwriter”, which frankly explains a lot.
I gave you the opportunity to allow your penultimate comment to be the low point and you wouldn’t take it.
It’s ok. I have worked out where the “low point” of this particular exchange is, as I’ve met the occasional “session musician, recording engineer, producer, and songwriter”.
Stop.Diggin.
I agree with all that, except the assertion that John Prine was not a genius!
The fact that Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize says more about the age of those on the committee than anything else.
For (certain) boomers he is a genius; for most of those that came after his god-like status remains a source of bewilderment.
I have never ever understood what all the fuss is about. ‘Blowing in the Wind’ is a mediocre song by any standard – it doesn’t even really get anywhere as poetry for heaven’s sake.
Bod Dylan is a fantastic singer/song writer, thogh in my opinion, a much better writer then a singer. It’s a shame Joni Mitchell doesn’t receive the treatment from the music establishment. If Blue, Court and Spark, The hissing of the summer lawns and Hejira are nothing by the pure work of a genius, than I don’t know what it is.
The reason why Joni Mitchell is not placed in the same league as Bob Dylan is that she basically has just one act .The same is true of 99 %of other singer songwriters.The great Dylan biopic film ‘I’m Not There ‘ has 6 different Bob Dylans and the film ends in the mid 1970’s.Since then there has been several new Bob Dylan’s such as the Born Again one .Dylan has kept his mystique and unpredictability going over the decades in a way that very few other artists in any genre can claim.And he was the first singer songwriter in pop culture to create a huge audience.Does not mean his best work is the best in pop culture.In fact he once said America’s greatest lyricist was Smokey Robinson And he was not joking but again Smokey also basically has just one act
His singing was brilliant in his prime, and his phrasing has never been bettered. For reference (a) Moonshiner, (b) Not Dark Yet..
And a hundred others.
Unnecessary swipe at tech visionaries….upon whose devices we are all reading this. There are many kinds of genius. Whinging about capitalism takes you to Hugo Chavez, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer. Note that all these success stories – whether you like them or not – thrive in the US. UK geniuses (Branson, Dyson…) flee to places where they can succeed without being consumed by the British piranha pool of envy and class war.
Maybe the geneii are still around but denied expression through the arts or the political public square they concentrate on their own businesses, families etc. Also don’t be fooled by the regime artists like beyonce or lana del rey, or lucky operators like gates or zuckerberg. There’s a lot of talent in engineering and construction, as well as country, folk n trad, rock and metal music – though its hidden by the regime media. Some of these people are brilliant – others are at genuis level.
Artistic genius isn’t the only kind.
Engineering genius combined with entrepreneurial spirit is what got us here. (As noted by others in the comments, now that I’ve read them)
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.
Why? Is the fertile mind of an engineer less noteworthy than that of a songwriter? And the idea that society holds tech overlords in awe is a straw man and not a well-built one. Musk became “unfathomably wealthy” over the ideas he keeps generating and the application of those ideas. Same with Jeff Bezos, who revolutionized the pedestrian concept of retail shopping.
While the article notices that Mark Zuckerberg is no genius, it misses the reasons why. Zuck’s success is mostly being in the right place at the right time, which just as easily applies to Dylan. In today’s climate, Dylan’s voice would mean he was no more than a songwriter known to industry insiders.
Finally, there is something hilariously ironic about a writer whose current-day existence is made possible largely by technology and the reach that it allows him to complain about the people behind the tools.
I assume this author is a struggling writer of no great talent as opposed to a billionaire. Envy everywhere in this. What I do agree with is that geniuses are often a-holes. They should be remembered for their greatness as opposed to their personality.
Not quite. A lot of angst, but no substance. Genius is always recognized but the problem with the arts, all of them, are they are controlled by folks who don’t even know what genius is and all about profits, control, and the next marketing ploy to get their dude or dudette more clicks. That is why the internet is so valuable and although the corporate minions have done a decent job of suppressing genius, it will change, and I believe relatively fast.
“The exaltation of the unfathomably rich”. That’s an a*** about face argument if ever I heard one. Musk is not a genius because he’s unfathomably rich. He’s a genius because he’s a pioneer who built, not one, but four incredible businesses in different sectors of ground-breaking technology.
That those businesses made him rich enough to buy (some would say save) a failing social media outlet does not disqualify him from being a genius; au contraire. The comparison with Zuckerberg is like comparing Beethoven to Ed Sheeran.
…or, one might say, comparing Beethoven to Dylan.
Dylan might have had his faults on a personal level, but he’s not a creepy weirdo like Musk. come to think of it, Jobs was a weirdo too (although not “creepy” in the same way Musk is).
I think the writer is confusing the idea of ‘genius’ with ‘hero’. Bob ‘Dylan’ (borrowed name) was a very successful songwriter, but he was no Keats, nor another Dylan Thomas, from whose poetic style he learned, but never really matched. Dylan’s songs may be musically and lyrically ‘catchy’, but they are superficial by comparison, making him a lazy man’s artistic giant. There may be much to like and enjoy in Bob Dylan’s work, but can it honestly be called ‘genius’ outside of the realm of commercial success? Not a chance.
Stopped reading at Lana Delray is a genius.
In 1000 years, Beethoven will be Notre Dame and Dylan will be cave art.
Also, the culture is suspicious of not just the exceptional, but the eccentric, the lone wolf, the ‘not-a-team-player’ usually bloke and yes, blokes in general particularly middle class white blokes. So the cultural antipathy is toward both the normal erstwhile dominent core and the authentic fringe (not the blue haired phoney narcisistic variety)