section_path: Legacy
section_name: Legacy
paragraph_text: Legacy
  
  Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, musically and culturally. He was included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, where he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation". Paul Simon suggested that Dylan's early compositions virtually took over the folk genre: " early songs were very rich... with strong melodies. 'Blowin' in the Wind' has a really strong melody. He so enlarged himself through the folk background that he incorporated it for a while. He defined the genre for a while."
  
  For many critics, Dylan's greatest achievement was the cultural synthesis exemplified by his mid-1960s trilogy of albums— Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In Mike Marqusee 's words:
  
  Between late 1964 and the middle of 1966, Dylan created a body of work that remains unique. Drawing on folk, blues, country, R&B, rock'n'roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary, Fellini and Mad magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision. The beauty of these albums retains the power to shock and console.
  
  Michael Gray initiated serious critical scrutiny when he published Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan in 1972, situating Dylan's work in the context of the English literary tradition, Donne, Browning and T. S. Eliot. Also in 1972, Craig McGregor published Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, an anthology containing critical essays about Dylan by Robert Shelton, Nat Hentoff, Ellen Willis and other contemporary cultural critics. In 1998, Stanford University sponsored the first international academic conference on Bob Dylan held in the United States. In 2004, Richard F. Thomas, Classics professor at Harvard University, created a freshman seminar titled "Dylan", which aimed "to put the artist in context of not just popular culture of the last half-century, but the tradition of classical poets like Virgil and Homer." Thomas went on to publish Why Bob Dylan Matters, exploring Dylan's connections with Greco-Roman literature.
  
  Literary critic Christopher Ricks published Dylan's Visions of Sin, an appreciation of Dylan's work. Following Dylan's Nobel win, Ricks reflected: "I'd not have written a book about Dylan, to stand alongside my books on Milton and Keats, Tennyson and T.S. Eliot, if I didn't think Dylan a genius of and with language." The critical consensus that Dylan's songwriting was his outstanding creative achievement was articulated by Encyclopædia Britannica: "Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation, Dylan... set the standard for lyric writing." Former British poet laureate Andrew Motion said Dylan's lyrics should be studied in schools. His lyrics have entered the vernacular; Edna Gundersen notes that
  
  Lines that branded Dylan a poet and counterculture valedictorian in the '60s are imprinted on the culture: "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"; "a hard rain's a-gonna fall"; "to live outside the law you must be honest." Some lyrics — "you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" and "the times they are a-changin' " — appear in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
  
  Rolling Stone ranked Dylan first on its 2015 list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, fifteenth on its 2023 list of the Greatest Singers of All Time, and placed " Like A Rolling Stone " first on their list of greatest songs in 2004 and 2011. He was listed second on the magazine's list of the hundred greatest artists. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll writes that "His lyrics—the first in rock to be seriously regarded as literature—became so well known that politicians from Jimmy Carter to Václav Havel have cited them as an influence."
  
  Dylan's voice also received critical attention. Robert Shelton described his early vocal style as "a rusty voice suggesting Guthrie's old performances, etched in gravel like Dave Van Ronk 's". His voice continued to develop as he began to work with rock'n'roll backing bands; Michael Gray described the sound of Dylan's vocal work on " Like a Rolling Stone " as "at once young and jeeringly cynical". As Dylan's voice aged during the 1980s, for some critics, it became more expressive. Christophe Lebold writes in the journal Oral Tradition:
  
  Dylan's more recent broken voice enables him to present a world view at the sonic surface of the songs—this voice carries us across the landscape of a broken, fallen world. The anatomy of a broken world in " Everything is Broken " (on the album Oh Mercy) is but an example of how the thematic concern with all things broken is grounded in a concrete sonic reality.
  
  Among musicians who have acknowledged his influence are John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend, Syd Barrett, Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Patti Smith, Joe Strummer, Bono, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Ole Paus and Chuck D. Dylan significantly contributed to the initial success of both the Byrds and the Band: the Byrds achieved chart success with their version of " Mr. Tambourine Man " and the subsequent album, while the Band were Dylan's backing band on his 1966 tour, recorded The Basement Tapes with him in 1967 and featured three previously unreleased Dylan songs on their debut album. Johnny Cash, introducing "Wanted Man", said "I don't have to tell you who Bob Dylan is—the greatest writer of our time."
  
  Some critics have dissented from the view of Dylan as a visionary figure in popular music. In his book Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, Nik Cohn objected: "I can't take the vision of Dylan as seer, as teenage messiah, as everything else he's been worshipped as. The way I see him, he's a minor talent with a major gift for self-hype". Australian critic Jack Marx credited Dylan with changing the persona of the rock star: "What cannot be disputed is that Dylan invented the arrogant, faux-cerebral posturing that has been the dominant style in rock since, with everyone from Mick Jagger to Eminem educating themselves from the Dylan handbook".
  
  Fellow musicians have also expressed critical views. Joni Mitchell described Dylan as a "plagiarist" and his voice as "fake" in a 2010 interview in the Los Angeles Times. Mitchell's comments led to discussions on Dylan's use of other people's material, both supporting and criticizing him. Talking to Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone in 2012, Dylan responded to the allegation of plagiarism, including his use of Henry Timrod's verse in his album Modern Times, by saying that it was "part of the tradition".
  
  Dylan's music has inspired artists in other fields. Dave Gibbons recalls how he and Alan Moore were inspired by the lines of " Desolation Row " beginning "At midnight, all the agents/ And the superhuman crew...":
  
  It was a glimpse, a mere fragment of something; something ominous, paranoid and threatening. But something that showed that comics, like poetry or rock and roll or Bob Dylan himself, might feasibly become part of the greater cultural continuum. The lines must have also lodged in Alan's consciousness for, nearly twenty years later, Dylan's words eventually provided the title of the first issue of our comic book series Watchmen.
  
  In 2007, Todd Haynes released I'm Not There, "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan". The movie used six actors, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, to explore different facets of Dylan's life. Dylan's previously unreleased 1967 song from which the film takes its name was included on the original soundtrack along with covers of Dylan songs by such diverse artists as Sonic Youth, Calexico and Yo La Tengo. Irish playwright Conor McPherson wrote and directed the musical Girl from the North Country, which used Dylan's songs to tell the stories of characters during the Depression years, set in Dylan's birthplace, Duluth, Minnesota. The play premiered in London in 2017.
  
  If Dylan's work in the 1960s was seen as bringing intellectual ambition to popular music, critics in the 21st century described him as a figure who had greatly expanded the folk culture from which he initially emerged. In his review of I'm Not There, J. Hoberman wrote:
  
  Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then—having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning—vanish into a folk tradition of his own making.
  
  Dylan's rise to stardom, from his arrival in New York in 1961 to his controversial performance at Newport in 1965, was portrayed by the feature film A Complete Unknown, which opened in the U.S. on December 25, 2024. The film garnered generally favorable reviews, with praise for actor Timothée Chalamet as Dylan.
  
  Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, musically and culturally. He was included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, where he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation". Paul Simon suggested that Dylan's early compositions virtually took over the folk genre: " early songs were very rich... with strong melodies. 'Blowin' in the Wind' has a really strong melody. He so enlarged himself through the folk background that he incorporated it for a while. He defined the genre for a while."
  
  For many critics, Dylan's greatest achievement was the cultural synthesis exemplified by his mid-1960s trilogy of albums— Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. In Mike Marqusee 's words:
  
  Between late 1964 and the middle of 1966, Dylan created a body of work that remains unique. Drawing on folk, blues, country, R&B, rock'n'roll, gospel, British beat, symbolist, modernist and Beat poetry, surrealism and Dada, advertising jargon and social commentary, Fellini and Mad magazine, he forged a coherent and original artistic voice and vision. The beauty of these albums retains the power to shock and console.
  
  Michael Gray initiated serious critical scrutiny when he published Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan in 1972, situating Dylan's work in the context of the English literary tradition, Donne, Browning and T. S. Eliot. Also in 1972, Craig McGregor published Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, an anthology containing critical essays about Dylan by Robert Shelton, Nat Hentoff, Ellen Willis and other contemporary cultural critics. In 1998, Stanford University sponsored the first international academic conference on Bob Dylan held in the United States. In 2004, Richard F. Thomas, Classics professor at Harvard University, created a freshman seminar titled "Dylan", which aimed "to put the artist in context of not just popular culture of the last half-century, but the tradition of classical poets like Virgil and Homer." Thomas went on to publish Why Bob Dylan Matters, exploring Dylan's connections with Greco-Roman literature.
  
  Literary critic Christopher Ricks published Dylan's Visions of Sin, an appreciation of Dylan's work. Following Dylan's Nobel win, Ricks reflected: "I'd not have written a book about Dylan, to stand alongside my books on Milton and Keats, Tennyson and T.S. Eliot, if I didn't think Dylan a genius of and with language." The critical consensus that Dylan's songwriting was his outstanding creative achievement was articulated by Encyclopædia Britannica: "Hailed as the Shakespeare of his generation, Dylan... set the standard for lyric writing." Former British poet laureate Andrew Motion said Dylan's lyrics should be studied in schools. His lyrics have entered the vernacular; Edna Gundersen notes that
  
  Lines that branded Dylan a poet and counterculture valedictorian in the '60s are imprinted on the culture: "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose"; "a hard rain's a-gonna fall"; "to live outside the law you must be honest." Some lyrics — "you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" and "the times they are a-changin' " — appear in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
  
  Rolling Stone ranked Dylan first on its 2015 list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, fifteenth on its 2023 list of the Greatest Singers of All Time, and placed " Like A Rolling Stone " first on their list of greatest songs in 2004 and 2011. He was listed second on the magazine's list of the hundred greatest artists. The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll writes that "His lyrics—the first in rock to be seriously regarded as literature—became so well known that politicians from Jimmy Carter to Václav Havel have cited them as an influence."
  
  Dylan's voice also received critical attention. Robert Shelton described his early vocal style as "a rusty voice suggesting Guthrie's old performances, etched in gravel like Dave Van Ronk 's". His voice continued to develop as he began to work with rock'n'roll backing bands; Michael Gray described the sound of Dylan's vocal work on " Like a Rolling Stone " as "at once young and jeeringly cynical". As Dylan's voice aged during the 1980s, for some critics, it became more expressive. Christophe Lebold writes in the journal Oral Tradition:
  
  Dylan's more recent broken voice enables him to present a world view at the sonic surface of the songs—this voice carries us across the landscape of a broken, fallen world. The anatomy of a broken world in " Everything is Broken " (on the album Oh Mercy) is but an example of how the thematic concern with all things broken is grounded in a concrete sonic reality.
  
  Among musicians who have acknowledged his influence are John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend, Syd Barrett, Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Patti Smith, Joe Strummer, Bono, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Ole Paus and Chuck D. Dylan significantly contributed to the initial success of both the Byrds and the Band: the Byrds achieved chart success with their version of " Mr. Tambourine Man " and the subsequent album, while the Band were Dylan's backing band on his 1966 tour, recorded The Basement Tapes with him in 1967 and featured three previously unreleased Dylan songs on their debut album. Johnny Cash, introducing "Wanted Man", said "I don't have to tell you who Bob Dylan is—the greatest writer of our time."
  
  Some critics have dissented from the view of Dylan as a visionary figure in popular music. In his book Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, Nik Cohn objected: "I can't take the vision of Dylan as seer, as teenage messiah, as everything else he's been worshipped as. The way I see him, he's a minor talent with a major gift for self-hype". Australian critic Jack Marx credited Dylan with changing the persona of the rock star: "What cannot be disputed is that Dylan invented the arrogant, faux-cerebral posturing that has been the dominant style in rock since, with everyone from Mick Jagger to Eminem educating themselves from the Dylan handbook".
  
  Fellow musicians have also expressed critical views. Joni Mitchell described Dylan as a "plagiarist" and his voice as "fake" in a 2010 interview in the Los Angeles Times. Mitchell's comments led to discussions on Dylan's use of other people's material, both supporting and criticizing him. Talking to Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone in 2012, Dylan responded to the allegation of plagiarism, including his use of Henry Timrod's verse in his album Modern Times, by saying that it was "part of the tradition".
  
  Dylan's music has inspired artists in other fields. Dave Gibbons recalls how he and Alan Moore were inspired by the lines of " Desolation Row " beginning "At midnight, all the agents/ And the superhuman crew...":
  
  It was a glimpse, a mere fragment of something; something ominous, paranoid and threatening. But something that showed that comics, like poetry or rock and roll or Bob Dylan himself, might feasibly become part of the greater cultural continuum. The lines must have also lodged in Alan's consciousness for, nearly twenty years later, Dylan's words eventually provided the title of the first issue of our comic book series Watchmen.
  
  In 2007, Todd Haynes released I'm Not There, "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan". The movie used six actors, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw, to explore different facets of Dylan's life. Dylan's previously unreleased 1967 song from which the film takes its name was included on the original soundtrack along with covers of Dylan songs by such diverse artists as Sonic Youth, Calexico and Yo La Tengo. Irish playwright Conor McPherson wrote and directed the musical Girl from the North Country, which used Dylan's songs to tell the stories of characters during the Depression years, set in Dylan's birthplace, Duluth, Minnesota. The play premiered in London in 2017.
  
  If Dylan's work in the 1960s was seen as bringing intellectual ambition to popular music, critics in the 21st century described him as a figure who had greatly expanded the folk culture from which he initially emerged. In his review of I'm Not There, J. Hoberman wrote:
  
  Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then—having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning—vanish into a folk tradition of his own making.
  
  Dylan's rise to stardom, from his arrival in New York in 1961 to his controversial performance at Newport in 1965, was portrayed by the feature film A Complete Unknown, which opened in the U.S. on December 25, 2024. The film garnered generally favorable reviews, with praise for actor Timothée Chalamet as Dylan.