Ontological Worlds

Bob Dylan came of age at a time when the one of the largest groups of people in America's history did, the Baby Boomer generation, my father's generation.  During this time in America, especially in New York City, millions of young people began to shed the conventions and conservatism, politically and otherwise, of their parents' generation.  They had wild sex, did drugs, wrote songs, got drunk, played songs, and did other wild and amazingly nostalgic 60s things that are all well documented in Forrest Gump.  Dylan's awakening, and that of all young Americans in 1964, is present deep in the bones of Mr. Tambourine Man.  The song is dug out of the fray of a young man's escapades, his small empires, and his lust for everything that is so new to him. 

The song's form, old and American, simple and timeless, is dusted off and shines brilliantly throughout the lyrical yearns and turns of Dylan's narrator.  The fact that such an old, traditional style of music is set with such abstract, stream of consciousness lyrics is in itself a reflection of the 1960s, when the old guard was upended and left on the sidelines to watch powerless, and make way for the new, the young, and the virile to be the true generation of American culture and the poster children for the country.  Mr Tambourine Man, however, exists far past its beginnings, in that it is not a product solely of its time but of a human, more importantly of a young person reaching out for meaning in the world.  It moves above its ontological world, and becomes a timeless coming-of-age masterpiece that should be put right beside Siddhartha and The Catcher in the Rye.