Originally published in Hot Press in July 2024:

On February 10th 1964, Bob Dylan released The Times They Are A-Changin’, his third album. Time hasn’t dimmed its urgency or power.

Declamatory and prophetic, it speaks as eloquently to today’s fractured, violent times as it did to the 1960s.

There are shoegazer songs like ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’, still a busker favourite, and ‘One Too Many Mornings’, but the thrust of the album is deeply political.

‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ address class and racial violence and assassination in the US, issues that are, hard to credit as it might seem, even more toxic than ever today.

‘The Ballad Of Hollis Brown’ is a Gothic blues about poverty, despair and a mass killing in Dakota.

‘North Country Blues’ is a mother’s lament at a mining company’s decision to outsource its operations to countries where labour costs are lower than in the U.S.A.

Almost everything has changed since the album was made – but if Dylan played these songs tomorrow they would sound freshly minted.

Despite his telling “mothers and fathers throughout the land” that their sons and daughters were beyond their command, the title song wasn’t a clarion call to inter-generational conflict. Rather, it was a call to action as the old order crumbled in the face of myriad challenges.

The first verse could be a climate change rallying call:

“Come gather ‘round, people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone…”

Sixty years later we, the most technologically developed humans ever, are confronted yet again by torrents of change at all levels. Different, and yet very like.

In the third verse of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ Dylan tells senators and congressmen that “He that gets hurt will be he who has stalled“ and exhorts them to action: “The battle outside ragin’/ Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls”…

Well, our windows and walls are rattling now. The question is what do we do? And how?

Dylan’s abiding message from sixty years ago is that it’s important to take a stand, to try to make this world a better place rather than worse – to be, in the end, a person who does more good than harm.

Let us not die wondering.