To me one of the most relatable moments in A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s new (surprisingly good) Bob Dylan biopic, is a conversion between two characters that would’ve been known then, and are known now, as hipsters. In the tight corner of a cluttered walkup, two twenty-somethings classify musicians as either “folk” or “country.” Presumably, in 1960 Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the folk music revival, these hipsters would’ve held the folkies in higher regard. The movie doesn’t linger on the conversation (hell, the characters aren’t even named), but it sums up so much about being a fan of music, talking about music, and, yes, writing about it. 

 

I’ve had dozens of hours of those conversations over cheap beers in under-furnished apartments, debating whether Green Day is “punk” or “pop punk,” if you can count Metallica’s “Black Album” as thrash, or whether the sounds Kenny G produces can be counted as music. (For the record: I don’t care, I don’t care, and yes, even if I don’t want to listen to them.) To people who play music, these conversations seem a little…well, stupid. 

 

On our rundown of LCD Soundsystem’s debut, we talked about how music fans, in that case Indie Rock Guys, could get territorial about how people describe the music they like, because they saw their fandom as an extension of their personality. It’s as if miscategorizing the genre of music a person listens to means you fundamentally misunderstand the person.

 

Conversely, musicians typically aren’t precious about how people categorize the genre of music they create. After playing shows, I love to hear where people think we get our ideas from, who we would be slotted next to in the Eternal Playlist in the Sky. I’ve never been offended by any comparison, though some have caused me to raise my eyebrows and say, “interesting….”

 

If you play music, and you want people to try to understand you, maybe you should craft revealing lyrics. Or maybe, as an artist, you think being understood is overrated. Maybe you only write from other characters’ perspectives, or you only write about events, or maybe you do like William Burroughs and cut up newspapers and craft your lyrics with the scraps. Maybe you don’t want to be understood at all. Maybe you want to be a mystery. Maybe you find the relatively recent trend of musicians who use their art as their diary gauche. Maybe your primary intention is to create art that’s evocative while working through specific theoretical ideas. Maybe your art has nothing to do with what’s in your heart, and everything to do with working through a tricky musical math equation in your head. 

 

This is the emotional fader for musicians: open-hearted ADHD to full-blown autism. Almost no one hovers around 0 unity. 

 

After he hopped off the bus in New York City in 1961, Bob Dylan spent precisely fifteen minutes as a complete unknown before scoring a record contract with Columbia Records and a spot in bed with the folk scene’s greatest ingenue, Joan Baez. Within the next few years, he would redefine pop songwriting; get called the “voice of a generation;” fight for progressive causes; write a half dozen brilliant protest songs; grow jaded with politics; write at least a dozen funny, surrealistic songs that are actually better than his protest songs; tour the world; wear sunglasses inside; smoke up The Beatles; become friends with Johnny Cash; be a dick to Baez; become disillusioned with the folk scene; and, sin of sins, buy an electric guitar. 

In A Complete Unknown, Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan fiddles with a radio while Edward Norton’s Pete Seeger drives him home. Dylan loves everything he hears, much to the chagrin of the traditionally minded Seeger who believes a good song just needs lyrics and a melody. Seeger has just met Dylan, sees he’s bursting with talent and a love of folk music, but can already tell he’s going to lose him to rock & roll. (It’s a relationship mirrored in the movie between Dylan’s first NYC girlfriend played by Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro’s Baez.) Seeger knew Dylan’s ears and ambitions were too big to be contained to one genre. 

 

The movie (SPOILER on music history from literally 60 years ago) climaxes with Dylan’s contentious performance at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival, where he showed up with an electric guitar, and played three folk rock versions of his songs, before being chased off stage by an unhappy audience. At the urging of Seeger and others, he gives the folk audience what they want, an acoustic encore. But you get the impression that he’s never going to give the audience exactly what they want ever again. 

 

And he doesn’t. To this day, fans complain that Dylan refuses to play the hits, that he buries his most iconic songs with bizarre arrangements, and, as one of my college friends once told me, that he “sounds like DMX.” 

 

While touring Bringing it All Back Home, and Highway 61 Revisited, two of rock’s most iconic albums, and of which I have absolutely nothing original to say, Dylan regularly played to hostile audiences. They loved him as a folk artist, and thought this rock stuff was unserious and noisy. 

 

The officially released Bootleg Vol. 4 finds Dylan and his backing band – who were such hot shit that they would split from him and call themselves THE Band, as if they were the only one – playing at Manchester Free Trade Hall (not the “Royal Albert Hall” as the name the bootleg often traded under) to a crowd who loved Dylan’s first solo set, and loathed his electric set. 

 

Famously, and you can hear all of this on the recording: an audience member heckles Dylan, calling him “Judas.” He replies back, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.” Then he tells The Band, “Play fucking loud.” They tear into “Like a Rolling Stone,” which would become one of the most famous songs of the 20th century. 

 

I wonder if the Judas guy ever changed his mind about Dylan going electric. I wonder if he ever got into another type of music, or if he just listened to Alan Lomax’s archival recordings every day for the rest of his life. When Dylan became the only musician to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 was he like, “Not that fucking hack!”