Music essay

You know a song is great when then first time you listen to it the world stops and for those couple minutes the beat overtakes your body and from deep inside your bones you feel alive. You know an artist is great when he changes the face of music forever and in the process creates a counterculture movement that alters history. Bob Dylan epitomizes this greatness.
Although influenced by blues artist Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and Jesse Fuller, responsible for inspiring Dylan’s famous harmonica rack and guitar, Bob Dylan is most known for the many artists he himself has inspired. From John Lennon, Patti Smith, and Bruce Springsteen all the way to Bono and David Bowie Dylan’s influence can be seen across the music spectrum. Which leads to the question: what is Bob Dylan’s music genre? I do not believe this question can be answered, I believe if someone does categorize him in one specific genre it would go against everything Dylan stands for. On Dylan’s never ending recreation artist Bono says it best, “Dylan has tried out so many personas in his singing because it is the way he inhabits his subject matter. His closet won't close for all the shoes of the characters that walk through his stories.”
I, along with the rest of the nation and world, have been deeply effected by Dylan’s song Blowin’ in the Wind. The song has a very spiritual rhythm to it, Dylan even sung it at a Catholic Church Congress in 1997.The rhythm comes from an African American spiritual song called “ No More Auction Block”, because of this, the song became one with the pulse of the civil rights movement of the sixties. Throughout the song Dylan ask many questions such as, “how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? And how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?.” These deep meaningful questions all receive the same response, “ The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind; the answer is blowing in the wind.” The entire pace of the song mimics the wind blowing, causing us to feel the wind and words of the song and know the answer without knowing. In these lyrics, Dylan is letting us know, that much like how we cannot see the wind we also cannot see the answer to our problems. However, if we reach out and feel the wind we will feel the answer within our hearts, but this will not be easy, just like the impossibility of grasping the wind.
No one can deny Dylan’s greatness when he wrote the worlds best protest song in just ten minutes. Blowin’ in the Wind conjures questions of humanity, freedom, love, peace and war. The song became a very powerful instrument at many anti-war protests during the Vietnam War, and even today has been sung at protest against the war in Iraq. Countless artist including Elvis Presley, Stevie Wonder, and Dolly Parton have covered the song. The song has also been covered in many different languages and referenced numerous times in pop culture. This song left such a mark on society that the Rolling Stones is not only naming this song the greatest of all time and Dylan himself the greatest singer of all time. Bob Dylan has changed music, as we know it, and all for the better.

This piece of hypnopaedic media is based on the phrase: You’ve got to have better than the best; you’ve got to have better than the rest. This phrase epitomizes our society, which thinks that in order to be successful you must be best and that means having the best, having more than the rest. The phrase pushes societies message of consumerism and the need to have more than what is necessary. I utilized pictures of large fancy objects to show the best of things; then I came back and showed the same objects just extraordinarily excessive. Also, the pictures and words flash and move quickly in order to hold the viewers attention, mesmerize, and convince them that they need the best and even better than that. The phrase rhymes making it catchy and uses parallelism to make it easy to remember. Finally, the video is set to a fast passed song in which the singer continually screams, using the most out of his voice, “I’ve got to find a better way.”