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Millennials of a certain age may recall that Yelawolf’s first notable “industry placement” came in the form of “Mixin’ Up the Medicine,” Juelz Santana’s 2009 single produced by Kane Beatz, which features Yelawolf on the hook. Given its title, as well as the fact that this is a post about Bob Dylan, you will not be surprised to learn that Yelawolf’s contribution to the song finds him singing a few bars from “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” They even let him do the holding-the-cue-cards-to-accompany-the-lyrics thing at the beginning of the music video:

The song is, you equally unsurprised to learn, objectively pretty terrible. It’s kind of a ripoff of the “Six Foot Seven Foot” template, where the artist is supposed to rap their ass off over a well-known sample, and while Juelz holds up his end of the bargain — he doesn’t rhyme his name with the word “bandana” once! — instead of the payoff of hearing Bob Dylan intoning that he’s on the pavement thinking about the government, we get Yelawolf. Usually when something like this happens, it’s either because they couldn’t clear the sample (not a thing Bob is generally down with) and/or industry nepo back-scratching, and instead you get an interpolation of varying quality. Syleena Johnson Yelawolf is not. Even Bob Dylan did a better job rapping “Subterranean Homesick Blues” than Yelawolf did! Here’s him doing an acoustic version of the song in a more talking blues-ish style, probably as a reference track:

I bring “Mixin’ Up the Medicine” for three reasons. 

1. The song is fucking insane, and because it never caught on it is in danger of being lost to history unless someone writes about it every few years in order to refresh the public record. 
2. There is a distinct possibility that, given that Timothee Chalamet grew up in New York City and was really into hip-hop when he was younger, this was the first Bob Dylan-related song that he ever heard. 
3. I hereby decree that Yelawolf’s hook on “Mixin’ Up the Medicine” is the benchmark by which all Bob Dylan impressions attempted by Millennial-and-younger entertainers must be measured. By this standard, Timothee Chalamet’s performance in A Complete Unknown knocked it out of the park.

Bob Dylan is an abstraction, a guy who’s professionally full of shit. I say this as someone who loves Bob Dylan, especially the more inscrutable, non-canon stuff. Though the term “Dylanologist,” much like “Media Theorist,” is an almost wholly self-appointed title, I would never dare proclaim myself to be one. I worry that true Dylanologists would make fun of my choices in B.D. deep cuts and point me to the real psycho shit that lives only on Web 1.5 sites running so much Flash you need a vintage computer to access them, or it’s something you can only hear on hand-dubbed cassettes from a sound check in Germany, and so on and so forth. When it comes to finding the choicest nugs, there’s always another layer to the stash. 

I could have called this “Blog Dylan” but chose not to. Please applaud my restraint.

When I was a junior in high school my dad took me and my friends Lewis and Keith to see Bob Dylan play at Davidson College. This was during his Never-Ending Tour period, specifically some point after Bob’s keyboard player had left the band and Bob decided to take over tickling the ivories. This did not make for the best concert experience, as Bob was off on the side of the stage and didn’t really talk between songs. The sound was mixed real weird too, so we couldn’t make out the words he was singing or even any sort of distinctive tempo or riff or whatever that could have helped us understand what he was actually playing, the only one we were able to make out was “Like a Rolling Stone” and we didn’t even realize he was doing that one until it was almost over. I think Bob was happy to be living out his fantasy of being someone else’s keyboard player, though. The main other thing I remember from the show is that at some point my friends and I smelled weed and thought it was really cool. My friend Keith’s last name was Morris, which made him Keith Morris. None of us had any idea at the time. 

BOB DYLAN’S DIFFERENT ERAS + THE VIBE OF THAT ERA AS EXPRESSED BY A CORRESPONDING DRUG WHICH BOB DYLAN MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ON

• Folk Era — Mids
• “Goes Electric” Era — Speed
• Post-Motorcycle Crash Country Crooner Era — Painkillers (assuming the crash actually happened)
• Basement Tapes Era — Indica, maybe a little coke towards the end (if nothing else, Robbie Robertson’s guitar-playing on this 1974 live cut of “All Along the Watchtower” sounds mad tooted up)
• Rolling Thunder Revue Era — Definitely coke
• Christian Era —  Cigs, Step 2 of 12
• Increasingly Apathetic 80s Era — Booze
• 90s Resurgence into Never-Ending Tour Era — Nicotine patches
• Self-Appointed “Keeper of the American Songbook” Era (Current) — Snuff (conceptually)

The best thing ever written about Bob Dylan remains Ellen Willis’s essay “The Sound of Bob Dylan,” published in the November 1967 issue of Commentary. (Commentary was okay back in the day; things went downhill pretty quickly after its editor, the apparently personally unpalatable Norman Podhoretz, turned Neocon, potentially out of spite after his lefty peers panned his novel Making It.) Willis writes:

The tenacity of the modern publicity apparatus often makes artists' personalities more familiar than their work, while its pervasiveness obscures the work of those who cannot or will not be personalities. If there is an audience for images, artists will inevitably use the image as a medium—and some images are more original, more compelling, more relevant than others. Dylan has self-consciously explored the possibilities of mass communication just as the pop artists explored the possibilities of mass production. In the same sense that pop art is about commodities, Dylan's art is about celebrity.

[...]

In retrospect, Dylan's break with the topical song movement seemed inevitable. He had modeled himself on Woody Guthrie, whose incessant traveling was an emotional as well as an economic necessity, whose commitment to radical politics was rooted in an individualism as compulsive as Dylan's own. But Guthrie had had to organize or submit; Dylan had other choices. For Guthrie, the road was habitat; for Dylan, metaphor. The closing of the iron mines had done to Hibbing what drought had done to Guthrie's Oklahoma, but while Guthrie had been a victim, Dylan was a bystander. A voluntary refugee from middle-class life, more aesthete than activist, he had less in common with the Left than with literary rebels — Blake, Whitman, Rimbaud, Crane, Ginsberg.

Similarly, A Complete Unknown never fully articulates the degree to which the folk scene was full of Pinkos: while its film version is clearly left-leaning in some sanded-down way, it’s always ambiguous as to whether Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax et al are upset that Dylan’s transgressions for political or aesthetic reasons. But even if the film doesn’t quite say the quiet part out loud, it’s pretty clear that, whatever the underlying issue, Bob Dylan is wholeheartedly choosing individual expression over mass solidarity.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if Bob Dylan didn’t exist, the CIA would have had to invent him. I’m not necessarily docking points here: I dig the Paris Review, y’know?

This is not the only part of the Bob Dylan Cinematic Universe that A Complete Unknown leaves out. The film is pure Bob Dylan hagiography, produced with his blessing, and it positions him on a Hero's Journey rather than being some sort of cautionary tale about becoming a deeply unpleasant person because you've been getting too high on your own supply of drugs and also ego (that archetype is outsourced to Johnny Cash). As a result, Timothee Chalamet is forced to spend the second half of the movie acting like he’s on a shitload of drugs without being shown doing them, or even someone being like “Hey Bob Dylan you’re acting crazy because you’re out of your mind on speed, maybe don’t do as much speed” or whatever. In a sense this is also the vibe of IRL Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, but at least we can assume Bob Dylan snuck off camera to pop some pep pills. 

All of this makes Dylan’s behavior and social context feel too airy for the verisimilitude it’s so clearly going for, which when contrasted with Chalamet’s pitch-perfect performance as Dylan creates a dissonance that renders the film very unintentionally funny. 

There’s one thing the movie does get right, at least tonally, which is the difference between Bob Dylan’s relationships with his male peers vs. his female ones. A recurring motif throughout A Complete Unknown is that Dylan seems to enchant other dudes, seducing them into being his friends, collaborators, caretakers, champions, or whatever else he might need at any given moment. That Chalamet’s Dylan often retreats into himself around them doesn’t seem to bother them: they’re happy to bask in his residual aura. 

His interactions with the women in the film, meanwhile, involve him initially charming them, extracting resources (emotional/financial/physical/philosophical) from them, then acting in wildly selfish ways that exasperating and ultimately alienating them.

From what I’ve read, this is just how Bob Dylan acted around women for a very long time: In addition to simultaneously dating Joan Baez and Suze Rotolo as depicted in the film, he had a third gf, Sara Lowlands, who he ultimately married. Their relationship ultimately imploded, but not before he wrote “Sara,” one of his best and most plainspoken songs, and, as the story goes, mounted a last-ditch effort to win her back by forcing her to watch him record his vocals for the song live. To be clear, the song is about all the good times they had together and ends in a direct plea for her not to leave him. It is perhaps the ultimate act of hubris to think you can write a song so good that it will prevent your wife from leaving you. Assuming the story is true, it’s really some astonishing, Drake-level shit. 

Conversation between Bob Dylan and Joan Baez during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour (Footage from Martin Scorsese’s 2019 documentary Rolling Thunder Revue)

Bob Dylan: It really displeases me that you went off and got married, and uh…

Joan Baez: You went off and got married first and didn’t tell me.

Bob Dylan: Yeah but I, but uhmm... 

THE FIVE-STEP PLAN FOR ACHIEVING SUREFIRE SUCCESS AND FAME, PER BOB DYLAN’S CAREER 

1. Be preternaturally talented.
2. Seek out powerful mentors who will open doors for you.
3. Ingratiate yourself with a scene of likeminded peers.
4. Differentiate yourself from your scene by shamelessly auramaxing.
5. When the opportunity to sell out the people you’ve met in Steps 2 and 3 in exchange for career advancement arises, jump at it with both feet.

There’s actually a case to be made that Drake, at least in terms of his career arc rather than quality or content of his music, followed the Bob Dylan formula whether he realized it or not. He came up in the Blog Era mixtape circuit, doing tracks with the likes of Tanya Morgan and Little Brother, then performing a hard stylistic pivot once he got in with J. Prince of Rap-a-Lot and then Lil Wayne. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, though, hip-hop was under no illusions that for many artists, the underground represented a pathway to success rather than an end unto itself, though, so nobody was really mad when Drake started doing songs with the likes of Wayne and Jeezy. That was just the way things went sometimes. 

Other parallels:

• Substitutes virtuosity for depth in ways that feel representative of their respective generations.
• Musical shapeshifters.
• Elastic relationship with truth/authenticity.
• Seem to have lots of guy friends who are content to just chill around him while strip-mining their relationships with women for material. 
• During early career, were both romantically linked to a higher-profile woman within their scenes.
• Not afraid of fake patois.
• Have both collaborated with Post Malone.

I get kind of annoyed that the idea of “the press tour” becoming an art, or at least media narrative, unto itself. I don’t know when it started — maybe that “he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” thing and its ensuing fallout? — but I think it was codified into a definitive form with the Wicked PR blitz. In the past few weeks, Timothee Chalamet has taken it onto himself to single-handedly push A Complete Unknown by revealing every single element of his personality in a Zelig-esque whirlwind of media appearances, proving he knew ball on College Gameday, proving he could hang with guys who are dudes by showing up on Theo Von, and establishing that he is a true music head by doing a Nardwuar interview with such verve that it kind of freaked Nardwuar out. 

What’s funny about the Nardwuar clip is that when Narwuar asks Chalamet about his personal history or random movies he was in he has absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on, but whenever the subject of Bob Dylan comes up he’s a human serviette in his own right, dropping knowledge about basically everybody who shared a room with Dylan even once. He apparently had five years to prep for the role and was so single-minded about recreating the vibe that in addition to learning to play the guitar and harmonica he insisted that all his covers of Dylan’s songs were recorded live, sans overdubs. His performance is unambiguously impressive, the PR blitz around him pushing the same the proof-of-work ethos you can find on TikTok trickshot videos where we see the dozens of times the kid failed to throw a pingpong ball into a shot glass from their roof before they finally nail it. 

It’s the inverse of the Magician’s Code — revealing the trick is the entire point. And while Timmy’s probably gonna get an Oscar for this thing, and probably deservedly so, it’s this stuff, along with his pitch-perfect imitation of Dylan, his eagerness to metaphorically point to his framed Ph.D in Dylanology on the wall the second you enter his office, his general reverence for the guy, that might also miss the point.

Shit I almost forgot the most important thing about Bob Dylan, which is that his son Jesse Dylan directed the 2001 stoner comedy How High, in which Method Man and Redman smoke so much weed they get into Harvard and, among other things, proceed to exhume the corpse of John Quincy Adams and smoke his finger as if it were a blunt. Ok I can end this now.