u/Designer_Reference_2

Level 1

Bob Dylan was a famous and influential songwriter of the past, but his songs are better when someone else is singing them since you find his voice grating, including that awful Guns & Roses cover of Heavens Door.

Level 2

You enjoyed "A Complete Unknown" and have been listening to some of Bob Dylan's most famous songs lately. Perhaps you found out that he's surprisingly still alive and bought tickets to go to one of his concerts, expecting that he's gonna come out with a guitar and sing Times They Are A Changin or Blowin in the Wind in exact same arrangement and voice you heard on record.

Level 3

You love and are familar with Bob Dylan's most acclaimed works from the 60s and 70s, but you haven't done a deep dive beyond those periods yet. In terms of his live performances, either you love his studio work but don't think his live shows are for you these days, or he's been hit or miss at the shows you have seen, with concerts ranging from great to mediocre.

Level 4

You are familar with all of Bob Dylan's studio output and have been digging into the Bootleg Series as well. You might also be getting into learning more about Bob's personal life and career by reading essential books about him like Down the Highway or Chronicles. You generally love Bob Dylan's live performances but there are certain periods of the Never Ending Tour you can't stand (it's early 90s and the Scooby-Do era between 2006 and 2013 for me)

Level 5

You have reached the final phase, spending a lot of time on Expecting Rain and following his tours obsessively to the point where you have seen hundreds of Bob concerts. His Bobness has ruined all other artists for you, it's to the point where you find yourself thinking about Bob constantly, dressing like Bob, imitating the various eras of Bob's voice that you love. You are superior to the other normie fans because Self Portrait, Saved or Down in the Groove is your favorite album. You know every live version of every song he's ever performed and you are outraged to this day that Bob was stupid enough to leave Blind Willie Mctell and Foot of Pride off Infidels. Whenever someone criticizes Bob Dylan or walks out of his show, you chuckle to yourself and think "You know something is happening, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr Jones?"

Reddit is filled with casuals who are endlessly saying that "Bob Dylan is the worst concert I ever saw" and the reasons they cite are that he didn't "play the hits" changed the arrangements and didn't talk to the crowd. Notice how these complaints are never actually about the quality of the music and lyrics being performed, just people outraged that their clueless expectations were not met. As the man himself said, "You know something is happening, but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?"

These criticisms of Dylan concerts are all reasons I enjoy seeing him live. Fans know he has never been an artist to just play the "hits" and if you come to a Dylan show expecting him to play Blowin in the Wind with a guitar, you are hilariously out of touch about what he's been doing for decades and deserve to be disappointed since you were too lazy to check a setlist or look up audio/video of the shows. There are countless dinosaur bands of classic rock who play the same songs year after year to a backing track and while I can acknowledge Bob's approach of changing the arrangements and performance quality can be hit or miss as he plays so many shows, it's certainly a more unique and artistically challenging method that keeps hardcore fans coming back as things change from tour to tour and sometimes even night to night. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with being a conventional touring act btw, but Bob Dylan will never be that guy, and I love him for that.

For my money, it's a beautiful thing that Bob has embraced his age, isn't trying to stay young, pander to nostalgia and recapture a moment in time that's gone forever. He is always punctual about starting on time and either claps, poses or bows at the end of the concert, hardly the attitude of a guy who has hatred for his audience or doesn't want to be there. Saying few words on stage is just his no nonsense attitude that sets a mood for the show. He is an 85 year old living legend who is there to play some music with his excellent band, not tell you what he had for breakfast that morning. There are two types of people at the shows, those who go in with false expectations and those who are the informed fans that know what's going on and enjoy it. Bob Dylan is an artist, not your personal jukebox and if that bothers you, stay home and leave the tickets for the rest of us. He has no shits left to give (if he ever did) and it would be a letdown for me if the legend behaved any other way. I'm looking forward to the upcoming European tour dates, hopefully we get many more years of His Bobness pissing off the Mr. Jones audience members who attend his shows, just like he did to that Judas guy back in 66.

photographer Don Paulson was taking shots of Sonny and Cher in the Atlantic Studios in NYC in 1965. According to later details, Dylan unexpectedly “crashed “ the event because he was eager to meet Cher in particular. Cher included several Dylan songs on her albums for the next few years.  Her first Dylan-written hit “All I Really Want To Do,” was released in June, 1965, and it hit US #15, and UK #9. Her album came out in August of 1965, and also included “Don’t Think Twice,” and “Blowin’ In The Wind.

I remember being convinced to attend a Pussycat Dolls concert by a group of my friends in early 2009 and a relatively unknown pop artist who called herself Lady Gaga was the headliner. Just Dance was starting to really pop off but outside of that I knew nothing about her at all. Needless to say she completely overshadowed the dolls on their own tour and even my friends who were fans of the dolls agreed Gaga was a lot better. Her stage presence was exceptional from the beginning of her career and it's no surprise that she went on to build a reputation as one of the greatest live performers of her generation.

it's weird how England was invaded by the French and Prince Louis was proclaimed king yet this aspect of English history has traditionally received far less attention than it deserves and it's only in recent decades that historians have started to focus a lot more on the events after Runnymede which were far more important to the surival of Magna Carta and the Plantagenet dynasty.

John is perhaps the most despised English king in history but I have noticed this trend of some people blaming his failures on Richard the Lionheart. Is it really true that John inherited a terrible financial and military situation or are these merely scapegoats for those who still try to justify or explain his failures as a king? I keep trying to find evidence to support these arguments in favor of the supposed difficult situation John inherited but never can. The weird thing about John is that nowhere do you get the sense when reading about him that he was some totally incompetent fool and it could be argued he even showed real ability as a military commander at Mirebeau and Siege of Rochester.

I feel like he's one of those larger than life iconic figures so it's hard for some people to judge his reign objectively. My personal opinion is that as a king, he was mostly good by the standards of his time as he successfully defended his continental territories by clowing Philip II at every turn and England was kept well administered thanks to his eye for elevating talented deputies and keeping himself well informed about what was going on. As a warrior and military commander, he was easily the greatest in the history of the monarchy, you put other warrior kings like William the Bastard, Edward I or Henry V up against The Lionheart and they get trounced. However, not fathering an heir was a neglect of royal duty and it's interesting to speculate on what happens had he lived longer. Another criticism could be that his arrogance sometimes caused him avoidable problems, such as pulling down that banner at Acre which played directly into his future imprisonment or carelessly walking around a castle that was about to fall without armor and getting struck by a crossbow bolt.

Blonde on Blonde has been my favorite Dylan album for at least five years now and it was only on my latest listen to the track "Temporary Like Achilles" that I realized it might be the most blatantly sexual song he's ever written. He's "looking at her second door" and "kneeling neath her ceiling" because he's giving oral sex and the lyrics "trying to read you poetry but I'm helpless like a rich mans child" is implying it's hard to dirty talk when you are eating pussy. Other lyrics such as "lean into your hallway, lean against your velvet door" or "he's pointing to the sky" require no explanation. Bob is a massive horndog and there are so many metaphors he uses that make much more sense when you think of them in a sexual context.

1. The Napoleon Comparison

I think of anyone mentioned here, Napoleon has the strongest claim to being on Alexanders level in terms of his impact on history and overall military skill. He changed the face of warfare and won more battles than anyone else. But here's the thing, Napoleon ultimately made colossal blunders that led to his downfall and when you examine his military career, you find he had blindspots that Alexander didn't. Napoleon was straight up incompetent in his understanding of naval warfare, unlike Alexander who made brilliant use of naval elements during the Siege of Tyre. Napoleon abandoned his army two times in Egypt and Russia, unlike Alexander who always led from the front and was there sharing in the hardships of his men every step of the way. Napoleon's greatest victory at Austerlizt had a spectacular impact in the short term but mattered little in the end, unlike Alexander's at Gaugamela that put an end to the greatest empire history had ever seen up to that point. If Napoleon wins at Waterloo, nothing changes and he still loses the war, if Alexander had lived longer, the whole course of human history could look different.

2. The Hannibal Comparison

You could argue that Hannibal was on Alexander's level as a tactician but that's it. He didn't have the same impact on history, he didn't triumph in such a wide array of circumstances and climates, he was very poor at conducting sieges compared to Alexander and like Napoleon, he ultimately lost, though in his case I would argue it has more to do with the inevitablity of Roman power than self inflicted blunders like Napoleon's.

3. The Caesar Comparison

Caesar was undoubtedly a cunning general and skilled politician but I think it's fair to say he was more of a man navigating the climate around him rather than knowingly changing history in his own mind. It's not to say he didn't have an impact or influence future events though and Alesia is a stunning military victory.

Conclusion

No matter how you look at it, Alexander has been famous much longer than Napoleon, Hannibal or Caesar. Each one of them ranked Alexander ahead of themselves in the standing of military commander. Napoleon's empire collapsed in his own lifetime, Caesar helped bring about the end of a republic that was all but dead anyway and Hannibal was just a military commander. Alexander's early death fractured the unity of his empire but the successor states endured for centuries and him living longer means world history could look very different. Napoleon read the campaigns of Alexander and launched a failed invasion of Egypt partially to emulate Alexander. Hannibal ranked Alexander ahead of himself in his conversation with Scipio and Caesar wept at Alexander's statue because he had not achieved anything at an age when Alexander was ruling the known world. Alexander's only hero was Achilles, a demigod of mythology that never existed.

I have my own thoughts on this topic but I'm curious what this sub thinks. Are "great men" the true movers and shakers of historical events and progress or are they merely the biproduct of larger events and shifts in society?

I just wanna specify that I am not a Lady Gaga hater, she is a generational live performer with some very iconic hits and two albums I consider to be pop classics, The Fame Monster and Born This Way. That being said, she has this reputation as some boundary pushing artist and master of high art fashion and reinvention, but when you actually listen to a lot of her discography you find it's just typical pop sounds dressed up with a bit of theatrics and that Gaga was usually a follower of musical trends rather than setting them.

The Fame was deeply rooted in the electropop and synth-pop boom of the late 2000s, it's nothing groundbreaking and her breakout hit "Just Dance" features the typical tacked on rap feature of the time. TFM and Born This Way are great albums and the closest she came to forging a sound that was uniquely her but even then they are far from boundary pushing or avant-guard. ARTPOP got too much hate but it's just basic synth-pop and edm fused with a cringe inducing level of theatre kid energy that already sounded dated at the time of release. You really get the sense Gaga was sniffing her own farts and thought the era was a lot more groundbreaking and edgy than it actually was. Joanne and Chromatica are forgettable albums that are just the most basic and generic attempts at soft-rock/Americana and House. Mayhem is a return to form and definitely her best album since Born This Way but the 70s and 80s influences she pulls from are extremely on the nose and many of the lyrics are painfully cliche, still a good album though.