phenomenon

ON Christmas Eve, 1956, a 15-year-old boy heads due south on a five-hour Greyhound Bus journey from his home in Hibbing, Minnesota.

Arriving in the state capital, Saint Paul, he meets up with two summer camp friends and they go to a shop on Fort Road called Terlinde Music.

Styling themselves as The Jokers, the fledgling trio record a rowdy, rudimentary 36-second rendition of R&B party hit Let The Good Times Roll and a handful of other covers.

The boy, with his chubby cheeks and hint of a rock and roller’s quiff, leads the way on vocals and piano.

Already enthralled by popular sounds of the day from Elvis Presley to Little Richard and the rest, he is now in proud possession of a DIY acetate — his first precious recording.

His name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, Bobby to his family and friends.

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Less than seven years later, on October 26, 1963, as Bob Dylan, he takes to the stage in the manner of his folk hero Woody Guthrie, now adopting an altogether more lean and hungry look.

Acoustic guitar and harmonica are his only props as he holds an audience at New York City’s prestigious Carnegie Hall in the palms of his hands.

He performs his rallying cries that resonate to this day — Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.

He calls out the perpetrators of race-motivated killings with The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll and Only A Pawn In Their Game.

He dwells on matters of the heart by singing Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Boots Of Spanish Leather.

His 1956 schoolboy shindig and the Carnegie Hall concert, presented in full for the first time, bookend the latest instalment in Dylan’s endlessly captivating Bootleg Series.

Titled Through The Open Window, it showcases an artist in a hurry as he sets out on his epic career.

“I did everything fast,” he wrote in his memoir, Chronicles Vol.1, about his rapid transformation. “Thought fast, ate fast, talked fast and walked fast. I even sang my songs fast.”

But, as he continued: “I needed to slow my mind down if I was going to be a composer with anything to say.”

Among the myriad ways he achieved his stated aim, and then some, was by heading to the quiet surroundings of New York Public Library and avidly scouring newspapers on microfilm from the mid-1800s such as the Chicago Tribune and Memphis Daily Eagle, “intrigued by the language and the rhetoric of the times”.

He’d fallen under the spell of country music’s first superstar Hank Williams — “the sound of his voice went through me like an electric rod”.

Dylan affirmed that without hearing the “raw intensity” of songs by German anti-fascist poet-playwright Kurt Weill, most notably Pirate Jenny, he might not have written songs like The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll.

Then there was Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who Dylan likened to “the scorched earth”. “There’s nothing clownish about him or his lyrics,” he said. “I wanted to be like that, too.”

‘Did everything fast’

We’ll hear more later about the man considered to be his primary early influence, Woody Guthrie, the “Dust Bowl Balladeer” who wielded a guitar emblazoned with the slogan “This machine kills fascists”.

And about leading Greenwich Village folkie Dave Van Ronk, known as the “Mayor Of MacDougal Street”, who had Dylan’s back from the moment he first saw him sing.

On two occasions in recent years, I’ve had the privilege of talking to Joan Baez, the unofficial “Queen” to Dylan’s “King” of the American folk scene in the early Sixties.

She championed him as he made his way, frequently bringing him on stage, their duets on his compositions like With God On Our Side revealing rare chemistry.

They also became lovers as Bob’s relationship with Suze Rotolo, the girl on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album, crumbled.

“He was a phenomenon,” Baez told me in typically forthright fashion. “I guess somebody said, ‘There’s this guy you gotta hear, he’s writing these incredible songs.’

“And he was. His talent was so constant that I was in awe.”

A leading figure in the civil rights movement, who marched with Martin Luther King, Baez added: “It was a piece of good luck that his music came along when it did. The songs said the things I wanted to say.”

But she finished that reflection by saying, tellingly: “And then he moved on.”

For Dylan, now 84, has forever been a restless soul, “moving on” to numerous incarnations — rock star, country singer, Born Again evangelist, Sinatra-style crooner, old-time bluesman, you name it.

In the closing paragraph of Chronicles, he admitted: “The folk music scene had been like a paradise that I had to leave, like Adam had to leave the garden.”

But it is that initial whirlwind period, 1956 to 1963, centred on bohemian Greenwich Village and the coffee shops where young performers got their breaks which forms Volume 18 of the Bootleg Series.

Through The Open Window is available in various formats including an eight-CD, 139-track version, and has been painstakingly pieced together by co-producers Sean Wilentz and Steve Berkowitz.

And it is from Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University and author of the liner notes accompanying this labour of love, that I have gleaned illuminating insights.

I can’t think of too many modern artists of his stature, if any, who developed that rapidly

Sean Wilentz

He begins with the arc of Dylan’s development, first as a performer, then as a songwriter, during his early years.

Wilentz says: “He came to Greenwich Village in 1961 with infinite ambition and mediocre skills. By the end of that year, he had learned how to enter a song, make it his own, and put it over, brilliantly.

“By the end of 1962, he had written songs that became immortal, above all Blowin’ In The Wind and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.

“By the time of the Carnegie Hall concert in 1963, the capstone to Through The Open Window, his songwriting had reached the level we can recognise, that would eventually lead to the Nobel Prize.

“And his performance style, for the thousands in that hall, was mesmeric. I can’t think of too many modern artists of his stature, if any, who developed that rapidly.”

One of the show’s striking aspects is the lively, often comical, between-song banter. (Yes, Dylan did talk effusively to his audiences back then. Not so much these days.)

In order to assemble Through The Open Window, Wilentz and Berkowitz had “more than 100 hours of material to draw on, maybe two or even three hundred”.

Their chief aim was to find a way to best illuminate “Bob Dylan’s development, mainly in Greenwich Village, as a performer and songwriter”.

But, adds Wilentz: “Several factors came into play — historical significance, rarity, immediacy and, of course, quality of performance.

‘Good taste in R&B’

“We hope, above all, that the collection succeeds at capturing the many overlapping levels — personal, artistic, political and more.”

Though noting Dylan’s inspirations, Woody, Elvis and the rest, Wilentz draws my attention to “a bit of free verse” written by Bob in 1962 called My Life In A Stolen Moment, which suggests nothing was off limits.

“Open up yer eyes an’ ears an’ yer influenced/an’ there’s nothing you can do about it.”

This is our cue to take a deep dive into the mix of unheard home recordings, coffeehouse and nightclub shows as well as studio outtakes from Dylan’s first three albums for Columbia Records — his self-titled debut, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’.

Of the first track, that primitive take on Let The Good Times Roll, Wilentz says: “Dylan and the other two were obviously enthusiastic, and they had good taste in doo-wop and R&B.

“But if you listen closely, you can hear Dylan, on piano, calling things to order and pushing things along, the catalyst, the guy we know from other accounts who was willing to take more risks onstage.”

I ask Wilentz what he considers the most significant previously unreleased discoveries and he replies: “Most obviously Liverpool Gal from 1963, as it’s a song even the most obsessive Dylan aficionados have known existed but had never heard.

“He only recorded it once, at a friend’s party, and it’s stayed locked away on that tape until now.

Dylan was producing so much strong material that some of it was inevitably laid aside

Sean Wilentz

“While not Dylan at his peak, it’s a fine song. It’s significant lyrically, not least as testimony to his stay in London at the end of 1962 and the start of 1963. That stay had a profound effect on his songwriting, and one gets a glimpse of it here.”

Also included is near mythical Dylan song The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan, which he performed as “Bobby” in BBC drama Madhouse On Castle Street during his trip to Britain.

The only copy of the play set in a boarding house was junked by the Beeb in 1968 but this 63-second audio fragment survives.

Of even earlier recordings, Wilentz says: “I’m drawn to Ramblin’ Round.

“Although known (in his own words) as a Woody Guthrie jukebox, Dylan has never released a recording of himself performing a Guthrie song.

“Here he is, in an outtake from his first studio album, handling a Guthrie classic, and with a depth of feeling that shows why his earliest admirers found him so compelling.”

Wilentz considers other treasures: “There’s an entire 20-minute live set from Gerdes Folk City from April, 1962, concluding with Dylan’s first public performance of Blowin’ In The Wind.

“Then there are two tracks of singular historic importance, the first known recordings, both in informal settings, of two masterpieces, The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll and The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

If these versions shed fresh light on classics, let’s not forget the great Dylan songs that didn’t make it on to his albums, so great was the speed he was moving.

Does Wilentz find it staggering that songs like Let Me Die In My Footsteps and Lay Down Your Weary Tune were discarded?

“Yes and no,” he answers. “Yes, because these are powerful songs that were left largely unknown for years.

“No, because Dylan was producing so much strong material that some of it was inevitably laid aside.

‘Literary genius’

“Sometimes intervening factors kicked in. Take the four songs that, for business and censorship reasons, got cut from Freewheelin’ and replaced with four others.

“The album was actually better in its altered form, including songs like Girl From The North Country.

“But that’s how Let Me Die In My Footsteps was lost, along with a lesser-known song I love that we’re happy to include, Gamblin’ Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand, as well as an amazing performance of Rocks And Gravel.”

So, we’ve heard about songs but who were the key figures surrounding Dylan during his formative years?

Wilentz says: “Among the folk singers, Van Ronk most of all, and Mike Seeger, about whom he writes with a kind of awe in Chronicles.

“There was the crowd around Woody Guthrie, including Pete Seeger (‘Mike Seeger’s older brother,’ he calls him at one point) and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.”

He singles out producer John Hammond, “for signing him to Columbia Records and affirming his talent.

“But most important of all there was Suze Rotolo, who was a whole lot more, to Dylan and the rest of the world, than the girl on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”

Finally, I ask Wilentz why the singer felt uncomfortable at being labelled king of the folk movement, “the voice of a generation” if you like.

“People misread Dylan from all sides,” he argues. “Never a protest singer in the mould of Guthrie or Seeger, even though he worshipped Guthrie and admired the left-wing old guard by the time he turned up.

“But Dylan wasn’t one of them, though he sympathised, in a humane way, with victims of injustice.”

Dylan’s work springs from a matrix that is emotional, filtered through his literary genius

Sean Wilentz

Wilentz believes the recent biopic A Complete Unknown, with Timothee Chalamet making a decent fist of portraying the young Dylan, “is a little misleading”.

He says: “It wasn’t Dylan’s ‘going electric’ that pissed off the old guard and their younger equivalent as much as his moving beyond left-wing political pieties.

“Hence the song My Back Pages, from 1964: ‘Ah but I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.’”

Wilentz concludes: “Dylan’s work springs from a matrix that is emotional, filtered through his literary genius.

“It was impossible for someone like him, living through those two years (1962-63), not to respond to the politics in an artistic way.

“How, if you were Bob Dylan, could you not respond to the civil rights struggle, the killing of Medgar Evers (Only A Pawn In Their Game) or Hattie Carroll, as well as the spectre of nuclear annihilation?

“Dylan had a lot to say, but he was never going to be the voice of anyone but himself.”

Maybe he’d already explained himself on Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright:

“When your rooster crows at the break of dawn

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Look out your window and I’ll be gone.”

BOB DYLAN

Through The Open Window
The Bootleg Series Vol.18

★★★★★

SEOUL — It’s a worldwide shift that has taken political scientists and sociologists by surprise: the growing ideological divide between young men and women.

In the recent U.S. presidential election, President Trump won 56% of the vote among men ages 18 to 29, according to an analysis from Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

In Germany, young men are twice as likely as young women to support the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, according to the Pew Research Center. Last year’s European Parliament elections showed a similar trend. According to the European Policy Center, in Portugal, Denmark and Croatia, more than four young men voted for far-right candidates for every young woman who did the same.

But few countries exemplify the trend more than South Korea, where a recent presidential election showed just how polarized its youth has become.

In South Korea, 74.1% of men in their 20s and 60.3% of men in their 30s voted for one of the two conservative candidates compared with 35.6% and 40.5% of their female counterparts, respectively.

Experts say the so-called 2030 male (men in their 20s and 30s) phenomenon, which emerged alongside the mainstreaming of gender equality discourse in South Korea over the last decade, has defied traditional left-right taxonomies.

The “2030 men are difficult to define under standard electoral theory frameworks,” said Kim Yeun-sook, a political scientist at Seoul National University’s Institute of Korean Political Studies.

Having come of age in a world with radically different social contracts than those of their parents, right-leaning 2030 male voters are less likely to focus on North Korea — a defining preoccupation for older conservatives — than on feminism, which for them has become a dirty word that conjures “freeloading” women trying to take more than they are owed.

The men have taken umbrage with visual symbols or hand gestures — such as a pinched forefinger and thumb — that they argue are anti-male dog whistles used by feminists, in some cases succeeding in getting companies to discontinue marketing campaigns featuring such offending content.

South Korean women supporting the #MeToo movement stage a rally to mark the upcoming International Women’s Day in Seoul on March 4, 2018.

(Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press)

In the 2022 presidential election, it was men in their 20s and 30s who helped Yoon Suk Yeol — the conservative candidate who claimed that structural sexism no longer existed — clinch a razor-thin victory over his liberal opponent, Lee Jae-myung, who was elected president in June.

This perception that men — not women — are the true victims of gender discrimination in contemporary society is a defining belief for many young South Korean men, says Chun Gwan-yul, a data journalist and the author of “20-something Male,” a book about the phenomenon that draws on extensive original polling of young South Koreans.

Although male backlash to contemporary feminism is the most visible aspect of the phenomenon, Kim Chang-hwan, a sociologist at the University of Kansas, says that its roots go back to socioeconomic changes that began much earlier.

Among them was a series of government policies three decades earlier that led to a surge in both male and female college enrollment, which soared from around 30% of the general population in 1990 to 75% in 2024. Add to that the increasingly long-term participation of women in the workforce, Kim said, and “the supply of educated labor has ended up outpacing economic growth.”

“The young men of today are now feeling like they are having to compete five times harder than the previous generation,” he said.

(Despite the fact that gender inequality in South Korea’s job market is among the worst in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with women making on average around 65% of their male counterparts and far more likely to be precariously employed, such wage gaps tend to be less prominent for earners in their 20s.)

And although most research has shown that the negative effect of South Korea’s male-only compulsory military service — which lasts up to 21 months — on wages and employment is minimal, anxieties about getting a later start than women in a hypercompetitive job market have also contributed to young South Korean men feeling that they are getting a raw deal.

Chun, the data journalist, points out that the mass entry of women into higher education also led to another tectonic shift being felt by the current crop of young men: the rapid collapse of traditional marriage dynamics.

“Women have been doing the math and are increasingly concluding marriage is a net loss for them,” he said. “South Korea transformed from a society where marriage was universal into a marriage-is-optional one in an incredibly short time frame, especially compared to many Western countries where those changes played out over 60 or 70 years.”

In 2000, just 19% of South Koreans between the ages of 30 and 34 were unmarried, but today that number is 56%, according to government data. Over a third of women between 25 and 49 years old now say they don’t ever want to get married, compared with 13% of men, according to a government survey last year. One in 4 men will now remain unmarried in their 40s.

South Korean women take part in a rally to mark International Women’s Day in downtown Seoul on March 8, 2024.

(Jung Yeon-je/ AFP/Getty Images)

Chun notes that the mismatch in the marriage landscape has bred in many the misogynistic resentment associated with incels, a term for men who identify as involuntarily celibate. A common refrain among young conservative men is the swearing-off of South Korean women, who are often cast as “kimchi women” — gold diggers who are unwilling to pull their weight while demanding too much of men.

“Do you need to only date Korean women just because you’re Korean? No,” said Chul Gu, an online personality popular among young men in a recent stream. “There are Thai women, Russian women, women of all nationalities. There is no need to suffer the stress of dating a Korean kimchi woman.”

Resentment toward South Korean women, Chun says, is inseparable from the generational animus that feeds it.

“In the worldview of young South Korean men, they aren’t just fighting women, they are fighting the older generation that is siding with those women,” he said. “It’s essentially an anti-establishment ethos.”

The “586 generation,” as they are commonly called, are South Koreans in their 50s or 60s who came of age during the high-growth, authoritarian period of the 1980s. Associated with the pro-democracy movements of the time, the 586 generation is one of the most liberal and pro-gender equality demographics in South Korea — and one whose members built much of their wealth through cheap real estate, an avenue no longer available for the majority of young South Koreans accustomed to seeing housing prices in Seoul double in as little as four years.

“Young South Koreans are seeing those homes become worth millions,” Chun said. “Meanwhile, South Korea’s birth rate is falling and life expectancy is rising to 80 or 90, so many young voters are thinking, ‘We’re going to have to be responsible for them for the next 40 to 50 years.’”

Among the candidates in last month’s presidential election, it was Lee Jun-seok, a 40-year-old third-party conservative candidate, who most aggressively targeted these tensions.

During his campaign, Lee promised to segregate South Korea’s fast-depleting national pension by age, a move he said would relieve younger South Koreans of the burden of subsidizing the older generation’s retirement.

Although he finished with just 8% of the total vote, he won the largest share — 37.2% — of the 20-something male vote, and 25.8% from men in their 30s.

“South Korea is very much locked into a two-party system where it is generally rare to see a third party candidate make much of a difference,” Kim, the political scientist, said. “I think there’s a lot of negative polarization at play — an expression of defeatism or disenfranchisement at the fact that status quo politicians aren’t addressing young men’s problems.”

Data show that disillusionment with democracy too runs deep.

According to a recent survey of 1,514 South Koreans by the East Asia Institute, a Seoul-based think tank, just 62.6% of South Korean men between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that democracy is the best political system — the lowest percentage in any age and gender group — with nearly a quarter believing that a dictatorship can sometimes be more preferable.

Whether the rightward drift of young South Korean men is a temporary deviation or a more serious forecast for South Korea’s democracy is still an open question, according to Kim.

“But now is the time to act,” she said. “There absolutely needs to be a political response to the younger generations’ frustrations.”

A TEAM of scientists claims to have debunked one of Jesus Christ’s most famous miracles — saying the Son of God may not have fed 5,000 people with just five loaves and two fish after all.

Instead, researchers believe it could have been a freak natural event in Israel’s Lake Kinneret — known in the Bible as the Sea of Galilee — that brought a massive haul of fish to the surface for easy collection.

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The story of the “Feeding of the 5,000” is told in all four Gospels, where Jesus is said to have blessed a small amount of food and miraculously distributed it to feed a vast crowd.

But in a 2024 study published in Water Resources Research, scientists monitored oxygen levels, water temperature, and wind speed across Lake Kinneret — and say they discovered evidence of sudden mass fish die-offs caused by unusual weather patterns.

Strong winds sweeping across the lake, they say, can churn the water and cause an “upwelling” of cold, low-oxygen water from the bottom, which kills fish and sends them floating to the surface.

According to the researchers, to anyone watching from the shore, it would look like fish were suddenly appearing by the thousands — creating the illusion of a miracle and allowing them to “be easily collected by a hungry populace”.

The team believes this could explain the Gospel passage where Jesus tells his disciples — after a fruitless night of fishing — to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, suddenly hauling in a bounty.

However, Biblical scholars aren’t buying it.

Critics slammed the theory for missing the point entirely, pointing out that no fish were caught during the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

The article on AnsweringGenesis.org hit back, saying: “Jesus simply took the five loaves and two fish, thanked God, broke the loaves, handed everything to his disciples, and the disciples handed the food out. No fish were caught!”

According to Matthew 14:13–21, Jesus “saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick.”

When his disciples told him to send the people away to find food, he replied: “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

After blessing the five loaves and two fish, the Bible says: “they all ate and were satisfied.

“And they took up 12 baskets full of the broken pieces left over.”

Despite the backlash, the researchers argue that understanding how fish may have mysteriously appeared in huge quantities doesn’t take away from the spiritual message of the event — which many see as symbolic of generosity and faith.

Still, religious sceptics say the study adds weight to theories that Jesus’ wonders may have had natural explanations — while believers insist some things just can’t be explained away by science.

It comes after a stunning AI-generated video claims to reveal the true face of Jesus Christ — using images based on the mysterious Turin Shroud.

Believers say the Shroud of Turin was the burial cloth wrapped around Jesus after his crucifixion.

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Now, photos of the ancient linen have been processed through Midjourney, an AI image generator, to create a realistic image and video of Christ.

The video shows Jesus blinking, smiling, and praying — potentially as he did before his crucifixion around 33AD.

He appears with shoulder-length brown hair, a beard, brown eyes, a straight nose, and high cheekbones.

His skin tone is pale, which has sparked debate among academics and online.

Last year, The Sun also used AI to recreate the Son of God’s appearance.

The Gencraft tool was fed the prompt “face of Jesus based on the Shroud of Turin” and returned images of a man with hazel eyes, a gentle expression, a neat beard, clean eyebrows, and long brown hair.

Under his weary eyes, signs of exhaustion were visible.

Many researchers agree that the man wrapped in the Shroud appeared to be between 5ft 7in and 6ft tall, with sunken eyes and a full beard.

The markings on the cloth also show what some believe to be crucifixion wounds — including injuries to the head, shoulders, arms, and back, consistent with a thorn crown and Roman whips.

The Bible recounts that Jesus was scourged by Roman soldiers, crowned with thorns, and forced to carry his cross before dying in agony.