Tonight I am entertaining Kim’s family for the second night. They are here to honor the death a few days ago of her and their sibling. Unfortunately, since everyone grieves differently, some in the family are simply not ready to convene, so its all a bit of a broken play. Kim is at her final dress rehearsal for her show, which plays tomorrow and Saturday. She is going through a lot this week, so I can do this one thing for her. The group today consists of Kim’s sister and her husband and their two grown sons. They all live in California, but they are spread out across two hundred miles from Camarillo to Pasadena to Pacific Beach. They want and need to spend time together, especially at a time like this, so I don’t mind accommodating that. After dinner, but before the boys headed back down to Pacific Beach for whatever they had planned for the evening, they cajoled their parents into watching the Timothee Chalmet bioflick on Bob Dylan, called A Complete Unknown. The movie focuses on Dylan’s early years in New York City and his rise in the folk music scene, particularly the period leading up to his controversial “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. The film also features Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and had been generating Oscar buzz, but after 8 nominations, including the “Big 4” (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress), it came away with no wins. Nevertheless, the boys insisted that the parents watch the movie, so I put it on (I have seen it a few times).
This was not the first movie about Bob Dylan, who is touted as the most impactful singer of his age. Dylan’s case for most impactful is that he fundamentally transformed what popular music could be about, bringing literary depth and social commentary to rock and folk music. His shift from acoustic folk to electric rock at Newport in 1965 was genuinely revolutionary and influenced countless artists. He showed that songwriters could be artists in their own right, not just craftsmen writing for performers. His lyrics elevated pop music to something intellectually and artistically serious. And, of course, he also won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 – the first musician to ever receive it. The other movies about him are I’m Not There (2007), Don’t Look Back (1967), and Scorsese’s No Direction Home (2005). But besides finding Chalamet a near perfect Bob Dylan, I liked the emphasis on the 1964 and 1965 Newport Jazz Festivals, which demarcated the big transition in our American culture from folk to rock. In 1964, Dylan debuted his The Times They Are a-Changin, which is considered a generational anthem. “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 if your time to you is worth savin’. And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’…The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast, the slow one now will later be fast as the present now will later be past. The order is rapidly fadin’ and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin’.”
The song, released in 1964, is structured as a series of verses that call out to different groups – writers and critics, senators and congressmen, mothers and fathers, and people everywhere. Each verse uses the central metaphor of rising waters and warns that those who don’t adapt to coming changes risk being left behind or swept away. The refrain repeatedly emphasizes the inevitability of change, urging listeners to accept and move with the transformation rather than resist it. Dylan’s message was particularly aimed at the generational and social upheaval of the 1960s – civil rights, youth movements, and challenges to traditional authority. The song became an anthem for the era and remains resonant because its core message about inevitable change is timeless.
It was Johnny Cash who told Dylan how to handle the change when he went to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival wanting to shift from folk to rock. He told him to “Make some noise…track some mud on the carpet…”, which is what Dylan did. Of course, it was at that performance that he debuted Like a Rolling Stone, which was his biggest hit and is often called the greatest rock song ever written. So, the way I see it, Bob Dylan called the change in 1964 and then forced the change in 1965, and in so doing, had his greatest impact on our times and the culture of our generation.
It’s hard for me to watch a movie like A Complete Unknown and not think about change in our current times and context. To say the least, there’s quite a lot shifting right now across multiple domains. Geopolitics has altered the global order that’s been relatively stable since the Cold War. It’s all being challenged now. We’re seeing rising tensions between major powers, particularly the US and China. The war in Ukraine has reshaped European security calculations. There’s also a broader trend toward nationalism and away from the post-Cold War era of globalization. Climate & energy have been transitioning away from fossil fuels for a long time, but that is now accelerating (at least everywhere except the U.S.), with renewable energy becoming increasingly cost-competitive. At the same time, we’re seeing more frequent extreme weather events and growing urgency around climate adaptation. The infrastructure and economic changes this requires are massive. Demographics are on everyone’s mind all the time. Many developed nations are aging rapidly, with profound implications for healthcare, social programs, and economic growth. Meanwhile, migration patterns are shifting, partly driven by climate change, conflict, and economic opportunity. That is impossible to ignore in an 8.4 billion person world. Political polarization abounds. Many democracies are experiencing heightened political division with multiple challenges to democratic institutions and norms. Trust in traditional institutions – media, government, academia – has declined significantly in many places. Even something as fundamental as work is in flux. Remote and hybrid work have fundamentally changed where and how people work. There’s also growing questioning of traditional career paths, educational preparation and work-life balance expectations, particularly among younger generations. And more than anything else…technology & AI are rocking our world like never before. We’re in the midst of a rapid AI transformation that’s affecting how people work, create, and interact with information and none of us understand fully where it will all lead. Generative AI tools have gone mainstream in just the past couple of years, and this is reshaping everything from creative industries to coding to education. The implications for jobs, productivity, and even how we think about intelligence itself are still unfolding.
But the times they are a-changin’ yet again. That’s happening for sure on the political front just this week. The first signs are unmistakably visible. The elections were a clear indicator. Now a few Republican members of Congress — some of them prior MAGA mavens — have begun to distance themselves from Trump. Senators are resisting his push to end the filibuster (they see a day beyond Trump that Trump couldn’t care less about). The gang at SCOTUS is taking a stand against Trump’s use of tariffs. The signs are all there that things are a-changin’ politically.
But it is the comments of Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang that really slapped me in the face about the changing times we are facing. He warned this week that China will beat the US in the AI race. Boom! Stop and think about that. The Chinese-American CEO of what is now the most valuable company in the world (~ $5 Trillion), an American company at the center of the AI boom … has said that the Chinese will overtake us in the AI war. He says it’s all about American energy and regulatory (global King of the Hill) policies. He feels that because China has boosted energy subsidies for several large data centers run by Chinese tech giants. Huang has previously warned that the latest American AI models were not far ahead of their Chinese rivals. He feels the US needs to open up the market to its chips to keep the rest of the world more, not less, dependent on its technology. But following his meeting with Xi, Trump said that he did not want to let China use Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell chips. The US has not yet adopted the regulations needed to allow such sales. In other words, with the pace of AI change, the political change we are seeing will likely not come fast enough to assure our future in the biggest arena we face in this century. Oops. The times they are a-changin’ and we might get the short end of the change stick this time thanks to our bullying president. “The order is rapidly fadin’ and the first one now will later be last…”
Where is Bob Dylan (or Johnny Cash for that matter) when you need them. I guess that’s just the way of the world. Some days chicken, some days feathers. We are about to get a whole mouthful of AI feathers.