Onetime Village Voice regular Ron Rosenbaum is well aware that his book on Bob Dylan joins … not a sagging shelf on the subject but an entire wing of a library. Every word Dylan ever wrote or spoke in public has been scrutinized with Talmudic diligence, especially by that crew of fanatics called “Dylanologists,” a term Rosenbaum dislikes (he prefers “Dylanists”). What’s more to say, except to track his latest releases, his never-ending tours?
With Things Have Changed, Rosenbaum hasn’t produced another chronicle or song-by-song exegesis but a “biography of his impact”—on Rosenbaum to be sure (he’s part of the story he tells) and a broad swath of the public receptive to Dylan’s songs. He cites the proliferation of GenX boys named Dylan. Were their parents moved by Bob Dylan’s emotionally sophisticated relationship songs? Rosenbaum argues that those songs “changed the mode of romance” by describing “mutual recognition rather than manipulation.” Poets and novelists had already been there (yes, Dylan’s lyrics were sometimes poetry and often poetic), yet the medium of music made those words more immediate, circulated them more widely, perhaps cutting deeper than reading through repeated hearings.
In the first chapters, Rosenbaum is circular and repetitive, even as he scores a few bright points—“Like a Rolling Stone” wasn’t a wall of sound but (for listeners in 1965) a “wall of astound.” He has his hobby horses, including a demand for re-releasing Dylan’s (overly?) ambitious, four-hour 1978 film Renaldo and Clara and dismissal of Dylan’s descent into Protestant fundamentalism as an utter black hole. But Things Have Changed gradually gains momentum as Rosenbaum explores ideas bizarre yet interesting. Was there something in the ore buried near Dylan’s Minnesota hometown—a magnetism?—that set Dylan’s sensibility on its freewheeling course? Do those emissions explain Planet Waves?
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Rosenbaum is on more empirical ground when investigating Dylan’s contempt for “inauthenticity” as the impulse behind his ongoing reinvention of himself and his songs. The Dylan of 2025 singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” is not the same person who sang it in 1963 or 2003. Dylan is not a tribute act to himself, which is what most performers (from The Rolling Stones on down) eventually become. He hates mimicking sincerity.
The 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature? “The argument that Dylan had demonstrated the power of words worldwide was a strong one for those concerned with the waning authority of literature,” Rosenbaum writes. None of the contenders in recent years had a comparable impact. And yet, as Rosenbaum points out, Dylan remained conflicted about his role (or not) in literature, so much so that he accepted the prize with an eloquent letter instead of a personal appearance.
Rosenbaum is also keen to reveal the strength of post-fundamentalist, “late Dylan,” not as a mere coda to past glories but as a significant body of songs that deserve greater appreciation. “Here I must throw up my hands and concede that I have no clue how to approach this song,” Rosenbaum concedes regarding “Mississippi” from the 2008 compilation Tell Tale Signs. He isn’t stumped for long. Rosenbaum has plenty to say about other songs, the man who created them and the people whose lives were shaped by them.
