The critically acclaimed greatest song of all time, according to science
It’s hard to really quantify what makes a song so special. Even though someone might think that they’ve heard the greatest musical creation that anyone has ever come up with, there’s a good chance that someone else might think that it’s a musical turd that should be thrown out with every other piece of pop schlock on the charts. While some critics’ opinions can be taken with a grain of salt by the public, it’s hard to ignore when someone makes a musical pivot as well as this 1965 track.
Because let’s go back a bit to see what the most incredible songs on the charts were back then. Before the mid-1960s, Chuck Berry was still seen as the author of the greatest hymns of rock, but with the British Invasion happening half a world away, there were a lot more people willing to break out their own guitars and form bands that had little more than three chords to work with.
It was still considered mindless fun then, but by 1965, things started to look a lot more serious. By this point, there had been everyone from The Kinks making hard rock, The Byrds adopting folk tendencies, and the greatest names in Motown like Marvin Gaye having prime spots on the charts, so anyone who even thought about reaching the top needed to have something big in their arsenal.
Then again, Bob Dylan wasn’t all that concerned with being considered the greatest of all time. He had the public’s ears in the underground, but he could never really get away with having a protest song like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’ on the charts when acts like Peter, Paul and Mary could sing everything a lot better than he could.
Since most jangle-pop acts made a living out of riding Dylan’s coattails, Bringing It All Back Home was the first warning that something new was coming. While no one knew what that was, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ stormed into the pop charts in 1965 with a full band backing Dylan. Some may have been pissed, but in terms of Dylan’s own mythology, this was one of the greatest moves he could have made.
Because think about where he was for a second. Everyone had considered him the leader of a revolution in the folk scene, but he never wanted to be known as that kind of songwriter. So when he came out boasting a Fender Stratocaster, it was about him rebelling against the very thing he had helped create.
And in recent studies of what constitutes the most acclaimed music of all time, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is still heralded as the greatest turning point in rock history. The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’ may have taken more chances with its arrangement, and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana may have wiped away everything inauthentic, but ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ was the sound of someone trying to shake off the shackles of their star power and pave the way for something no one had even considered.
But if you ask Dylan, that’s probably nowhere near how he thought. He was still interested in writing another good song, and while ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ certainly earns that qualifier, it ended up meaning more for the public at large than Dylan could have ever anticipated.
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