Bob Dylan is one of the most important figures in music history, particularly in folk rock. He has enjoyed a career that has spanned decades and showcased Dylan in multiple interesting, unique, controversial, and incredible evolutions. Let’s look at just a few reasons why Bob Dylan is such a historically important figure in music!
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1. Going Electric
This reason has to be at the top of the list. Bob Dylan didn’t let the haters get him down. In fact, he embraced that a lot of people hated him for going electric in the mid-1960s. By choosing to incorporate electric instruments into his music, he lost a lot of fans.
However, he also proved that you could align with the folk mindset and heart through the use of instrumentation typically reserved for rock and roll. He produced some of his very best music that way. Few artists have remained authentic despite controversy quite like Dylan.
2. Expanding Pop Music
Bob Dylan is important for a lot of reasons, but we don’t focus enough on the fact that he completely changed the future of pop music. Fellow folk icon Joni Mitchell even said that after listening to Dylan’s vulnerable “Positively Fourth Street”, she realized that the boundaries of pop could be pushed even further.
“I thought ‘Oh my God, you can write about anything in songs’,” said Mitchell. “It was like a revelation to me.”
3. Penning The Greatest Counterculture Anthem Ever
“Like A Rolling Stone” is considered one of the greatest anthems of counterculture ever written. And many consider this 1965 folk rock track to be one of the greatest songs of all time, too.
4. All of Those Comebacks
Bob Dylan has staged more comebacks throughout his career than we can count on our fingers. Some of those comebacks were successful, and others were a bit of a letdown. Either way, Dylan proved that he could endlessly reinvent himself and produce music that was uniquely his own. The Blood On The Tracks era was one of our favorites.
5. Setting The Standard For Album Trilogies
Bob Dylan is such an important figure in music history, and we can attribute that honor to him through three specific albums: Bring It All Back Home from 1965, Highway 61 Revisited from 1965, and Blonde On Blonde from 1966. Few album trilogies are as incredible as this one, and each of them could be considered the best albums of all time.
Photo by Alice Ochs/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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