Dylan at 80 : It Used to Go Like That, and Now It Goes Like This

2021 marks Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and none.

The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate's masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age. They are written by wonderful and diverse set of contributors, all here for his 80th birthday bash: celebrated Dylanologists like Michael Gray and Laura Tenschert; recording artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Barb Jungr, Amy Rigby, and Emma Swift; and 'the professors' who all like his looks: David Boucher, Anne Margaret Daniel, Ray Monk, Galen Strawson, and more. Read it on your toaster!

Gary Browning is a Professor of Political Thought at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of many books, including Why Iris Murdoch Matters (Bloomsbury, 2018) and A History of Modern Political Thought: The Question of Interpretation (OUP, 2016), and is co-editor of The Political Art of Bob Dylan. His interest in Bob Dylan goes back to the release of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, when he realised that popular music was a serious business.

Constantine Sandis thought of Dylan as a hippy you couldn't trust until - when he was about 16 years old - his friend Mahmoud Kassem showed him the cover of Highway 61 Revisited and convinced him that Zimmy was a punk at heart. Four years later, Joan Baez kissed him at a concert in Rome. Constantine is now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. When not tweeting as @csandis he writes books such as The Things We Do and Why We Do Them (2012) and Character and Causation (2018).