Recently, I spoke to a woman who remembered vividly a concert she had once attended. It was 1965, she was fourteen years old and her father had taken her to see Bob Dylan and Joan Baez play at the Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh on March 19. She didn’t remember the exact date or even the year, but she remembered his performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a song that had not yet been released, and how she ran up to the stage at the end of the show and snatched the coffee mugs Dylan and Baez had been drinking from.
This kind of fanaticism toward these legends of the folk movement is recognizable to many young people my age, who have witnessed a revival of the music and messages of Bob Dylan in the last few years that amounts to idol worship. And why wouldn’t it? The world young people are coming into now bears a great resemblance to the violent and riotous one of the '60s, and it’s a great comfort to look back to those who once charted a path through similar disaster.
The decade that my friend had been thrust into as an adolescent was a chaotic one: by the time she saw Dylan and Baez play in Raleigh, President John F. Kennedy had been both elected and subsequently assassinated, bombing campaigns had begun in Vietnam, the Cold War and Space Race were in full swing and widespread civil rights movements had roiled the country for over a decade. Only eleven days before the show, the first major deployment of American troops landed in South Vietnam, initiating the ground war that would result in over a million deaths over the next ten years.
No wonder the blossoming folk movement appealed to the youth of America — what else was there to reach for? The music of Dylan, Baez and others like them pointed to a different world, a better one, motivated by equality, solidarity and class awareness. In his earliest albums, Dylan raged at “masters of war,” the scions and war hawks and weapons manufacturers that sat back and watched the young people of America fight wars they could never win.
When he wrote these lyrics he was almost certainly thinking of the Vietnam War, but my generation hears these lyrics, with their universal poignancy, and thinks of a year of genocide in Gaza and the fragile ceasefire that has done little to stymie those who would see all of the Palestinian territories seized and razed. The many students arrested in the thousands of pro-Palestinian protests across college campuses last spring should take comfort in knowing that more than a generation before, young people were arrested for protesting another unjust and racist war. And they did so with the music of the folk movement alongside them. Baez herself expressed support for the college movements in a May 2024 interview, praising them for their similarity to '60s anti-war movements.
It’s no surprise that a Bob Dylan biopic starring Gen Z heartthrob Timothée Chalamet made over $100 million in the U.S. alone, despite its 2.5 hour length, nor should it come as a shock that two of Dylan’s earliest albums — "Like a Rolling Stone"and "Highway 61 Revisited" — reentered the U.K. album charts early this year, almost certainly boosted by streams from young people. It’s easy to ascribe this popularity to the release of the film alone and disregard political factors, but there has been perhaps no time since the '60s where a revival of such an explicitly political movement would resonate quite so powerfully.
In a time where the power of the war machine feels all-consuming, what could be more magnetic than a cultural movement that believed in radical peace?
