Countercultural currents in Bob Dylan’s songs

Abstract

This research endeavors to study Bob Dylan’s song lyrics as an expression of rage and rebellion of the common Americans against the bitter realities of the contemporary American war politics of 1960s and 1970s and of the prevalent justice system infected by injustice. By projecting the painful experiences of the victims during the time of war and by upholding the rampant issues of race, it engages with the extraction of themes like terror of the nuclear arms race and poverty, racism and prison, jingoism and war, buried in Bob Dylan’s compositions. The research illumines a reality that underground cultures like drugs, alcohol, homosexuality and mystic vision, which were perceived as immoral by the contemporary mainstream culture, were manufactured out of the harsh American political context led by violence, thereby revealing Dylan’s association to such subcultures to counter and subvert the cold rationality, atrocity and material hunger of the mainstream culture in America of the time.