Bob, actually, has always been a musical genius. People confuse his scratchy voice and less than top skills on various instruments with having no musical education. It almost makes me want to get The New Yorker again after what you posted.
Some president needs to make him the national poet laureate. Bob’s getting up there in years now.
What a fitting tribute that would be, I agree.
The New Yorker panned "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited" in their March 19, 1966 issue. It's actually quite funny. Some excerpts:
His songs range from fairly simple plaints in a familiar folk vein to diatribes in which musical form -- rudimentary in his work at best -- is forced to yield to his pell-mell exhortations...
Before Dylan's emergence as a popular performer in his own right, his pieces depended for their success on the melodious deliveries of folk singers like Peter, Paul & Mary or Joan Baez. The sudden assault of "Like A Rolling Stone" changed all that... he adopted the rock-'n'-roll apparatus, and in the latter recording a sizable combo (amplified guitars, piano, organ, drums, and bass) helps create a considerable racket...
Dylan's protest songs, not to mention those of his imitators, are much less interesting, both musically and lyrically, than such notable songs of the depression days as can be found in, say, Harold Rome's "Needles and Pins" score. They lack, among other things, the artistic detachment and the attendant humor and grace that distinguished the latter.