Bob Dylan's Evolving Identity
What "A Complete Unknown" Teaches Us About Finding Our Identity
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Introduction
In the summer of 1965, Bob Dylan stood in front of a large crowd in Newport, RI with an electric guitar in hand. While there is much confusion around the actual sequence of events that evening, it was a moment in time that has been embedded into 20th century history. The mysterious folk singer who had emerged in New York City in 1961 out of thin air had morphed into something entirely different that night in Newport. With his curly hair rising upwards out of his scalp into a mountain of dark hair and a leather jacket over his small frame, Dylan played the electric guitar in public for the first time. The crowd, die-hard folk groupies who despised the wider, commercialized music culture, jeered and booed while Dylan continued his three-song set. At some point during the performance, Pete Seeger, the anti-war activist and folk singer, threatened to pull the plug on the event. According to Seeger, he was upset with the sound quality. Others have accused Seeger of trying to ambush Dylan’s new sound.
The story of Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame in the 1960’s has come back into focus recently. On Christmas Day 2024, the movie, “A Complete Unknown” , hit theaters across America with Timothee Chalamat playing a convoluted version of Dylan. Chalamat’s Dylan is convoluted in the best of ways, however. Obsessed with his craft, politically impossible to define, relationally distant. In many ways, Chalamet captures the Dylan that so many have been unable to define over the decades. The movie highlights something important to understand about Dylan: he is an enigma who is able to write songs that captivate the imagination and the human experience, while simultaneously caring very little about reaction of the public to those very songs. Throughout his career, nailing Dylan down has been virtually impossible. At the beginning of his fame on the eclectic streets of Greenwich Village, fans assumed that he was a left-wing ideologue like his hero Woody Guthrie. As the Vietnam War dragged on throughout the sixties, however, those on the left became progressively incensed with Dylan’s refusal to oppose the war in Vietnam. Later on, Dylan morphed into several version of himself. In the late seventies, he was the evangelical Christian, releasing religious themed albums. In the early part of that decade he was a rock star of sorts. Later on, he has become something of a small-town blues musician. This past year, Dylan took to X and began tweeting - he keeps his fans on their toes.
The new film, directed by James Mangold, captures the inability of anyone but Dylan to define him. In many ways, the title of the film explains the sixty-four year career Dylan has enjoyed (or has he?) by showing the confusing personality of the legend. Despite the many accolades over the years, including numerous Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Nobel Prize in Literature, most of Dylan’s fans still feel unsure of who the man is. Even those who do know him well, are unable to publicly describe him. In fact, one of his childhood friends has said that a rule of knowing Bob is that you cannot talk about him publicly. Other friends, like artist John Mellencamp, have lost touch over the years due to Dylan’s strange habits and uncommon way of life. According to Mellencamp, Dylan would call him continuosly in the middle of the night during one period to read lyrics to him, hoping for some feedback. Like many things about the man, his working hours are different than the rest of us. Financially, Dylan is extremely wealthy. In 2020, the aging Dylan sold his vast catalogue of music to Sony for an estimated three hundred million dollars. Although he owns homes throughout the world, he has continued touring almost nonstop into his 80’s, spending much of his life on a tour bus.
Fitting Nicely in The Cultural Boxes
While the film does a great job of capturing Dylan’s hard-to-pin-down personality, it says something about our wider culture. Americans like to put people into boxes that are easy to define. Throughout his life, Dylan has been the subject of innumerable segments of culture trying to claim him as one of their own. The best thing about Dylan is that he refuses to play this game. At one point in the film, Chalamet as Dylan is asked who he really is? The response from Dylan is an important part of the film: we create who we are he yells to his girlfriend at the time. Dylan, long before the era of influencers and social media, realized something important about human beings. What Dylan understood is that there are many versions of who we can be as people.
While Dylan is an unlikely person for evangelicals to learn from, it is his constant evolution and stripping off of labels that point towards a correction in evangelical Christianity. While it doesn’t appear that Dylan has retained his evangelical Christian identity of the late 70’s, one thing is clear about him: he is pursuing something that goes far beyond the flimsy identity that his fans have expected. Dylan has spent his life bringing poetry into the mass cultural psyche and that means taking unexpected twists and turns as he pursues that lofty goal. In a world that is fixated on the negative aspects of identity, namely what someone is against, Dylan took another path. Was he against the Vietnam War? What type of musician is he? To Dylan, that doesn’t matter - what matters is the mission he is on: changing the landscape of music.
The Problem With “Identity” Language
This brings us to the Christian idea of identity that has been focus of Christian living books for the past few decades. To be clear, Dylan is not an example for evangelicals to follow. He has been married multiple times and many others aspects of his life are complicated. What Dylan is an example of, however, is of someone who has embraced a much more robust identity than our culture assumes. While he is a brilliant musician, he has spent his life out of the spotlight pursuing many different types of interests. He is a formidable painter and iron-work artist, he restores old cars, and once was a chess master who played Bobby Fischer. In addition, Dylan rides horses and loves sailing. In 1963, Dylan was awarded a social justice prize from the ACLU. Later on, in 2001, Dylan told a reporter trying to pin down his political beliefs, “you are wasting your time.” If anything, Dylan has pursued complexity beyond any simple label.
Dylan is someone who makes categorizing almost impossible. To ask what Dylan’s identity is would be futile. A better question to ask would be what he has spent his life becoming. While identity is language that is static, Dylan is growing well into his eighties. This idea of growth and change over time is something Christians should also pursue. The language the New Testament uses to describe who we are points to growth rather than a fixed place. Words like “child,” and “saint” point to important aspects of who Christians are and our nature. We are like children in that we grow up and mature. We are called saints because even though we are positionally there in Christ, we are called to pursue a life of growing into that identity. In addition, we are “servants” who follow the lifestyle and marching orders of Christ. Even more fixed language like “chosen” and “elect” are words that point to actual behaviors. As Ephesians 2:10 says, we were “chosen” by God to do good works. Like Dylan’s musical career, we inhabit our given identity by living it out through what we do. In contrast, evangelicals over the years have missed this nuance.
The evangelical view of identity, in my experience, has been somewhat truncated. While it is not unbiblical, it is certainly a biblical command to find our identities in the work of Jesus, it is a concept that has always felt too spiritualized and difficult to define for me. Instead of providing a robust framework for life, the “identity in Christ” conversation that I have heard is often used as a way to simplify ourselves, rather than enrich our identities. Under the identity umbrella that is taught in many Christian circles, our identity in Christ is divorced from our work, relationships, and other areas of interest. The “goal,” as it would seem, is to find so much fulfillment in our eternal identity that these other areas diminish in importance. A loss of a job or family member, while painful, does not change our identity in Christ and that is meant to give us comfort.
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with the identity language used in evangelicalism, but I have just never found it helpful. In practice, my marriage, work, and interests are tied up in my identity in Christ in important ways. They are used to provide ways to glorify him in this life and to also bring challenges that conform me to his image. While my eternal destiny is secure, a change in these areas would bring a seismic shift to the way I see myself. Thankfully, others have noticed the paucity in depth in this language. Matthew Lee Anderson, a Christian writer at Mere Orthodoxy, among other places, put language to the often surface-level framework for identity in his article “The Trouble with Talking about our Identity in Christ.” Anderson’s concern is that the language of identity in Christ largely divorces our position in the Kingdom from the many roles and duties we have been entrusted with in this life. In other words, our “doing” is actually part of our “being.” For Anderson, a better way of getting to the necessary biblical identity used in the Scriptures is through the concept of being a child. Instead of identity language, that often is hard to define, the concept of being a child brings certain responsibilities and joys to life. Likewise, the Christian life imposes on us commands and the benefits of being united with Christ.
Dylan and the Evangelical Identity
So what does an aging rocker like Dylan have to do with this theological hair splitting? Much of Dylan’s help in my understanding of identity is by offering a broader view of formation. If one was to scan American culture for someone that has embraced “becoming” something over time, they would be hard-pressed to find a better option than Dylan. While his voice has turned gravely and off-pitch in more recent years, his creativity has continued to evolve. Perhaps more importantly for purposes of this discussion, Dylan has been moving in a purposeful direction his entire life. As he has grown older and become a father, grandfather, and pursued various hobbies, his identity as a musician has changed. Dylan is still a musician today, but a much different one than he was in the mid-1960’s. If Dylan had stopped in his folk era of his early years, American music would have a less rich history. As Christians, this type of long-term perspective would be useful in becoming what we desire - mature disciples of Christ.
As Anderson notes in his article on Christian identity, the “identity in Christ” language is often more about negation than formation. If the 20th century evangelical focus on things like mission needed some theological balance, the past few decades of identity language needs a more robust way to describe who we are. In reality, Christians will always be a people in process. As the New Testament makes clear, the way to know if someone is a Christian is whether or not they continue in the faith. My problem with the identity language is that it misses this process of becoming with an overly psychological identity. Our place in the Kingdom becomes all about how we feel. In the process, the symbiotic nature of our beliefs and our actions is sometimes missed.
Dylan, and the film about his early life, gives us an example (imperfectly) of what this type of positive formation can look like with a secular example. Dylan’s life is not about negation, it is about moving forward towards what he understands himself to be - a revolutionary poet and songwriter. Dylan doesn’t pursue the trendy things of the day and he doesn’t let other people’s hopes and ambitions for his career define him. Additionally, he doesn’t let himself ever stop pushing forward. When the people wanted acoustic, he gave them electric. When the fans were dying for another tour, he assembled an eclectic mix of singers and artist and took off on his 1975 tour in gymnasiums and auditoriums. While some understand Dylan as a contrarian, he is more like a man on a mission.
My hope for Christians is that they would embrace an identity that is constantly expanding rather than one that is static. Is our identity in the finished work of Christ? Of course it is! But that identity becomes more robust and fleshed out as we walk the path of life. Because of this, Christians must adopt a more robust view of self than the one that the past few decades of identity talk has given us. While there is much to retain in this concept, the way Christ thinks about us and our inability to earn our way into love for example, there is also tremendous beauty in the way our lives unfold.
I do not imagine that Dylan will ever see himself as helping Christian enlarge their view of identity, but I believe it is the case. For those who are inclined to listen to his music, it is impossible to walk away without an understanding of a growing identity formulated over time. For Christians, our work is not ultimately rooted in changing the musical landscape or providing a new set of poetic lyrics for culture. Like most secular examples, Dylan’s lifelong search is actually misplaced. Dylan has never fully grasped why he has the talent or the drive that made him famous. Changing music is far too limited of a goal. For the Christian, we dream bigger: our work is to change the world through the Spirit given to us as believers. This, however, takes an integrated view of ourselves that understands that growth and experiences are essential to understanding who we are over time.