Abstract:
Bob Dylan, a songwriter, poet and a 2017 Nobel laureate in literature is often portrayed as the guiding spirit of the sixties counterculture. Dylan’s politically committed songs in the 1960’s articulated a vision of society that was radically different from the existing political realities. The paper highlights the cultural resonance of Dylan’s radical lyricism amidst the countercultural era. It depicts the close affiliations that existed between Dylan’s songs and liberation movements of the times.
The counterculture milieu in 19th century Europe included the tradition and the cult of romanticism, bohemian and dandy. The countercultural wave in America got fillip through the creative …show more content…
In his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society. Roszak argued that “the rational, science-based society of the twentieth century alienated men and women, especially the young, and propelled them into a search for meaning in drugs, spirituality, and dissent” (3). Strictly speaking, counterculture can be any confluence of social forces that oppose a “mainstream” culture (3). Roszak parallels the notion of counterculture as “culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion” …show more content…
Its wide participatory bases made the young activist brigades like Students Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the white-led Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party work together. The countercultural idealism was often the source of frustration for the young activists. These activists were looking for the concrete political change. They attempted to draw the elements of counterculture into the orbit of the civil rights and anti-war protest