Bob Dylan, Prophet of Modernity

Bob Dylan became the voice of a generation in the era when time seemed to move forward quickly and society underwent a substantial change. Many of the American veterans who returned from Europe or from the Pacific couldn’t reintegrate into a society which remained mostly unchanged and couldn’t understand their experience. They were the beat generation: homeless hobos, individualist poets, leftist intellectuals, folk musicians. In a society under transition there are always opaque, hardly understandable forces in motion. A protagonist of the change is the trickster, who can’t be categorized, since his main feature is the norm violation. The trickster is the devil, the joker, the creator at once, a disturbing factor, the permanent transition. The role of the trickster was connected from the beginning to the musician, who always reminds us how fragile social norms are. Robert Zimmerman could fulfill this task, place himself out time, space and society only as Bob Dylan.