Why did Bob Dylan hate being a “prophet” of the 1960s?
Fame did a number on Bob Dylan. Though he’d long dreamt of being a successful musician, he failed to take into account how that fame might affect his sense of self. “You feel like an imposter,” he told Ed Bradley in 2004, “When someone thinks you’re something and you’re not”.
Dylan’s rise to prominence coincided with a period of societal soul-searching. Half a century of war had left the West in tatters, severing the young from a long-held belief system that had defined the individual’s place in society. In times of ideological crisis, societies find comfort in the language of prophets. “The image of me was certainly not a songwriter or a singer,” Dylan said of the 1960s. “It was more like a threat to society in some kind of way.”
Bob Dylan’s music sparked a movement. Following the release of his 1962 single ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, the folk singer was adopted as a modern-day oracle whose lyrics told of a brighter, greener world. Dylan was, by all accounts, bewildered by such an insane level of responsibility.
That disconnect between expectation and reality became one of the defining pressures of his early career. As audiences projected their own ideals onto his work, Dylan found himself navigating a version of fame that felt increasingly detached from his intentions. The more people searched his lyrics for answers, the further he seemed to retreat from offering them, creating a quiet resistance that would shape much of his public persona.
It also forced him to reconsider what it meant to be an artist in such a climate. Rather than embracing the role that had been assigned to him, Dylan leaned into ambiguity, allowing contradictions to exist within both his music and his image. In doing so, he carved out a space where he could continue creating without being entirely defined by the narratives surrounding him.
“It was like being in an Edgar Allen Poe story,” he said, remembering the height of his fame. “You’re just not the person everyone thinks you are, even though they call you that all the time – that you’re the prophet, that you’re a saviour. I never wanted to be a prophet or saviour. Elvis, maybe – I could easily see myself becoming him. But a prophet, no.”
Dylan’s opinion of himself didn’t matter to his fans, who by that time had come to regard him as the voice of dissent despite the ideological ambiguity of songs like ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’. “They weren’t sermons,” Dylan said. “If you examine the songs, I don’t believe you’ll find anything in there that says I’m a spokesman for anybody or anything really.” And yet people still couldn’t help but view Dylan as a radical. “Yeah,” he told Bradley, “they must have not heard the songs.”
It’s not like Dylan didn’t try to undermine his reputation. At the Newport Folk Festival, he deliberately upset folk revival purists by going electric, and in the ’70s, made what he would later describe as “intentionally bad records”.
At one point, he even travelled to Israel to have his photo taken next to the Wailing Wall with a skullcap on his head. Practically overnight, the newspapers turned him from a prophet into a zionist, which was exactly what he’d hoped for. “If the common perception of me out there in there public was that I was either a drunk or I was a sicko or a zionist or a Buddhist or a Catholic or a Mormon – all of this was better than the archbishop of anarchy,” he said.
Dylan was smart enough to recognise that the American media engineered his prophetic status, which he resented. When asked if he considered himself more of a singer or a songwriter during a 1965 press junket, he famously replied: “I see myself as more of a song and dance man.” Time and time again, we see similar examples of Dylan lying to the media as a way of fighting against it. “I realised at the time that the press, the media, they’re not the judge – God’s the judge. The only person you have to think twice about lying to is either yourself or God.”
To regard himself as a modern-day prophet would have meant lying to both.
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