Bob Dylan vs. Paul Simon

Two great Jewish folk-rock songwriters were born in 1941: Why is Dylan the legend, not Simon?

Back in 2022, it occurred to me that the rock stars of the second half of the 20th Century were strikingly gentile at a time when Jewish influence on English-speaking culture was otherwise near its zenith. From 1945 through the end of the 20th Century, Jews were prominent in Anglo-American literature, painting, film-making, fashion, and many other fields. And yet, Jews tended to be in decline in popular music, which seems really weird.

I did my usual trick of taking somebody else’s Top Fifty list that was chosen for some other purpose and repurposing it for my own task. I saw that Rolling Stone’s Top 50 rock stars list only had two on it who were wholly Jewish by ancestry — Bob Dylan and Gene Simmons of KISS.

Similarly, here’s somebody’s list of the top 40 Jewish rock stars.

There’s Bob Dylan as the undoubted numero uno.

And there are Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, and Billy Joel. Big talents, but not exactly competing with Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard as the true essence of rock ‘n’ roll.

And there are a lot of Jewish members of important rock bands like Robbie Krieger of The Doors and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan.

And there are a lot of part Jewish band leaders like Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits.

And there are part-Jewish, co-stars of bands like Mick Jones (a Jerry Seinfeld look-alike before he lost his hair) of The Clash, perhaps my favorite band.

But, still … much as Jews loved rock music, they played a surprisingly small role in it.

This is particularly striking because Jews had played such an important role in pre-rock pop music.

For example, I reviewed a history of pre-rock English language pop music called Let’s Do It. A simple measure of importance is how many lines each figure’s index listing takes up. The top 16 ran from Frank Sinatra with 55 lines to Cole Porter with 12. (That seems pretty plausible: Frank Sinatra was the the single most important popular music figure of 1912-1962, and Cole Porter was definitely one of the top two dozen.)

The top 16 included six Jews (or three-eighths) — two performers (Al Jolson and Benny Goodman) and four songwriters (Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin). That sounds about right, although Jolson’s blackface popularity has a lot of explaining to do.

But the rock era featured one Jewish giant, Bob Dylan, and … a whole bunch of contenders.

Maybe Phil Spector would rank up there if he hadn’t given into his demons, which Tom Wolfe was lightly warning about in the mid-1960s and the Ramones more heavily warning about in the late 1970s, and murdered somebody.

Maybe Carole King would rank up there if the ultra-Canadian Joni Mitchell wasn’t obviously the greatest female genius songwriter of the 1960s.

And yet Paul Simon was a huge star in the rock era, both with Art Garfunkel in the 1960s and as a solo performer in the 1970s, and even made his famous Graceland come back in the 1980s.

So, why does Simon tend to get left out of the top ranks of the history of popular music in the second half of the 20th Century, while Dylan gets to play a central role?

Two theories are individual talent (Dylan was simply better than Simon) vs. sociological import (Dylan was better suited to his times than his contemporary Simon).

Which is it?

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