78 Year Old Bob Dylan Gets His First Billboard #1 With 17 Minute Song. Wait. What???

Trysta Krick 4/10/2020 4:45 PM

Can you imagine being so iconic, so ingrained into the cultural history of music and the nation, have almost every award imaginable, and yet, still not feel completely satiated because there's just one itch left you haven't scratched?

Me neither.

In many circles, Bob Dylan is considered the sound of his generation. Just to rattle it off, he's won an Oscar, A Golden Globe Award, eleven Grammy's, has eight singles in the Grammy Hall of Fame, he's in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, with 5 of his singles listed in the top 500 of most influential songs, most notably, his music won him a NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE.

I repeat. HIS MUSIC WON A NOBEL PRIZE. FOR LITERATURE. Like Toni Morrison, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.

This man has nothing to prove.

But if there was one thing, just one, that eluded him, the itch he was never quite able to scratch, it was a #1 hit record on the Billboard charts. In all of that time, with all of that success, it just never came to fruition. As strange as it seems, such classics as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” just missed the mark, stopping at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. And sure, he WROTE songs that others took to #1 on the Billboard, but none that he performed.

So what is a man to do?

Keep creating. Keep yearning to scratch that elusive itch.

And now... he's done it.

After continuing to record, adapt and innovate through countless different styles of sound, 78-year-old Bob Dylan has shown the youngsters how you do it, achieving his first No. 1 on any Billboard chart with his 17-minute song, “Murder Most Foul.”

GO OFF, KING. GO OFF.

Now, critics might say that Dylan peaked in 1970, his voice hasn't been the same since, and that he achieved the #1 ranking in the incredibly splintered Billboard charts in something called "Rock Digital Song Sales" category with 10k downloads. But that's because they're salty bitches who will probably be drooling on their socks at age 78.

Sure, Bob Dylan might not be quite as good as he once was, but you record a 17-minute song and try to get even your significant other to listen to it the whole way through. The fact that he got 10k people to pay for it, and hit his first number one, is nothing short of remarkable. Play on, Dylan. Ain't no moss growing on his rolling stones.