Bob Dylan (1965)
A turning point. With this song, marking the opening of the album Highway 61 Revisited, Robert Zimmerman abandons his folk bard outfits to enter the costume of a rock star. Many of his future colleagues, from Bruce Springsteen to Frank Zappa, will recount the impact of the title on their personal lives when they heard it for the first time. This sort of muffled lament, lasting more than six minutes, has given rise to countless theses on its meaning. Taken from a text of more than ten (or even twenty, opinions vary) pages written in freestyle by a Dylan then at the end of his rope, the song, at first glance about a young dumped bourgeois woman, expresses above all the cry anger of those left behind in this America of the time where youth was on fire. Electric.
Timothée Chalamet (2024)
This stone which never stops rolling has generated countless repetitions. From Jimi Hendrix to Cat Power via U2 or even The Wailers, it would be simpler to list those who have not sacrificed during the exercise. And now the actors are getting involved! Except that the Paul Atreides of the film Dune has a real excuse: his version is taken from the soundtrack of the biopic A Complete Unknown dedicated to Dylan, released in the USA on Christmas Day, where he embodies the future Nobel Prize in Literature. Pretty damn bloated though. Especially since, completely smoothing out the chaotic rough edges of the original, this Like a Rolling Stone mutates into soft-knee folk rock, intoned in a ridiculously nasal manner. The biggest surprise of this weak imitation is that it was validated by Bobby himself. Old age is…
