At one point in A Complete Unknown, the new Bob Dylan biopic, Dylan’s girlfriend returns from a trip abroad to a lovely surprise. “Oh Bobby!” she says, beaming with pride: “Did you teach yourself how to make coffee?”
It’s a funny moment because while Sylvie has been away, her freakishly gifted man-child of a boyfriend has done more than just learn how to make himself a hot drink. He’s also written a series of songs that will make him a legend and transform our sense of the artistic possibilities of popular music.
Dylan perfected folk music when he was just 20. By the age of 22, he moved on and set about revolutionising another genre, rock. We have a word for cases where a person’s creative powers are so extraordinary that they seem to defy explanation: genius. A college dropout who knew nothing about poetry’s formal rules, Dylan wrote lyrics of such richness and complexity that literary scholars were soon poring over them. Academia was briefly scandalised when the critic Christopher Ricks argued Dylan deserved to be placed alongside Keats, but by the time the singer won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, the only question in most minds was why it had taken so long.
Today, artistic genius is out of fashion. It’s impossible to imagine today’s music stars facing the particular kind of media storm that enveloped Dylan in the early Sixties, when reporters reverently asked the singer to comment on global affairs and the meaning of life like he was an oracle with a harmonica. The artists we choose to idolise aren’t the most gifted, but the most marketable. Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift are more like the CEOs of international mega-brands than creative originals. Nobody would call even the most talented pop songwriter of the last decade, Lana Del Rey, a genius (and her trademark style of melancholy pastiche jadedly implies that there’s nothing new under the sun). Even in hip hop, the genre where individual talent was once king, the taboo against rapping another person’s words has been decisively broken; everyone knows that Drake relies on a team of ghostwriters.
The notion of artistic genius doesn’t chime with an egalitarian cultural mood that means we’re reluctant to admit some people possess exceptional inborn abilities that set them apart from ordinary mortals. We prefer to believe in the “10,000 hour rule”: the idea, popularised by the author Malcolm Gladwell, that mastery in a given field is achieved as a result of dedicated practice. When Beyoncé sings, in “Formation”, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ‘til I own it”, she articulates the quintessential origin myth of today’s artist. We’re invited to believe that she’s made the best part of a billion dollars not through talent, still less luck, but because she hustled harder than the rest of us.
There’s a cogent case to be made against the “genius myth”. By telling the story of human innovation in terms of a few solo prodigies, we can obscure how it really happens. Newton discovered the laws of motion not in some visionary flash but because he stood on the shoulders of giants like Copernicus and Galileo. The theory of evolution wasn’t created by Charles Darwin out of nothing, but was itself the product of decades of scientific evolution (and anyway, Arthur Russel Wallace nearly got there first). According to Dean Keith Simonton, the author of a book on the subject, scientific genius is extinct; now more than ever, discoveries are made not by lone pioneers but by large teams building on past research.
What’s more, glorifying outstanding individuals can provide a licence for them to engage in behaviour that’s shitty or worse. Allegations of sexual abuse against fantasy author Neil Gaiman, recently published in New York magazine, are a case study in what happens when a person is so worshipped for their creative work that they begin to believe the rules don’t apply to them. The story of (male) geniuses leaving a trail of (female) trauma in their wake is an old one: just think of Picasso and Lucian Freud, for whom women were as dispensable as sheets of canvas. Even Einstein, it turns out, wasn’t just a science prodigy but a prodigious womaniser.
But we are poorer as a culture if we jettison ideas of artistic genius. For one thing, without it our vocabulary for describing the peaks of human creativity is diminished. Never mind 10,000 hours — almost as soon as Dylan started writing his own songs, he came up with “Blowin’ in the Wind”, a folk song so flawless it immediately sounded like it had existed forever. A Complete Unknown shows a period of Dylan’s life where his productivity beggared belief. In addition to the five epoch-making albums he put out between 1963 and 1965, he could have made another one from the songs he didn’t record. (One day, on hearing Joan Baez singing “Love is Just a Four Letter Word” on the radio, he complimented her on the lyrics; she had to remind him that actually he had written it.)
The desire to venerate remarkable individual talent is a natural human instinct — and a culture that doesn’t revere artists will find other objects of devotion. Nothing makes me despair more for our culture than the fact that, if in 1965 the popular archetype of genius was Bob Dylan, in 2025 it’s Elon Musk. The exaltation of the unfathomably rich is a phenomenon that would have baffled a veritable genius of a previous generation, Orson Welles, who at 26 made a plutocrat the grotesque antihero of his cinematic masterpiece. In a contemporary equivalent of Citizen Kane, Danny Boyle — otherwise a serious filmmaker — portrayed Steve Jobs as something between a tragic hero and a mystic seer.
A culture that holds up tech overlords as avatars of the highest human aspirations is one that has wholly capitulated to the logic of hyper-capitalism. The only way of justifying our societies’ spiralling inequality is by pretending that Musk and co. owe their billions to transcendent brilliance, rather than the fact that they have managed to gain control of vast quasi-monopolies in a golden age of crony capitalism. For anyone who thinks you need to possess stupendous intellectual qualities to end up a billionaire, I have two words: Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s true that our ideas about artistic genius have been unhelpfully tied up with our ideas about masculinity. It’s unjust that the word is applied far more often to Dylan and Leonard Cohen than their contemporary Joni Mitchell, whose astonishing lyrical gifts rivalled theirs — and who, unlike them, was an outstanding musician and singer too. And we should be under no illusions that exceptional artistic gifts come along with superior moral qualities: viewers of A Complete Unknown will tend to agree with Joan Baez’s verdict in the film that the young Dylan was “kind of an asshole”.
But societies express their values through the people they adulate. Personally I would rather live in a culture that reveres the man who wrote “Like A Rolling Stone” than the man who paid engineers to invent devices that drive teenagers to depression and self-harm and turn all of us into addicts. While the preening young men of previous decades sang bad poetry over acoustic guitars, I’m told by teacher friends that teenagers today are more likely to have an online business “side hustle” than belong to a band. I can’t see this as an encouraging development.
And the simple fact remains that, however much we democratise and demystify artistic talent, some fluke combination of genetics and circumstances will occasionally throw up a Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell — or a Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf. Instead of being diminished by the achievements of the most gifted men and women, the rest of us are exalted by them. Listening to “Like A Rolling Stone” can expand our sense of what human beings are capable of. Only a few human beings, mind you. You or I couldn’t equal it if we were given 10,000 years.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/