[wideawake]

It's a great song and as a conservative I like it for the following reasons:

(1) It's by Bob Dylan whose instrumental style is a mix of all that truly great in American music - blues, rock, jazzlike improvisation.

(2) The lyrics are interesting and involved.

(3) The narrative of the song is excellent: it's about a limousine liberal who gets involved in "the scene" to be cool and hip and winds up having reality bite her on the ass.

(4) The viewpoint of the song is also interesting: a bemused and wiser person who observes the protagonist's fall from grace and criticizes her naivete and her arrogance.

(5) It comes from Dylan's post-Fairport phase when he dumped Baez, renounced leftist politics and enraged all the folkie communists by using electric guitar.

(6) It's not about (a) wanting to sleep with someone, (b) sleeping with someone or (c) moaning over someone you used to sleep with. Nor is it about (a) how hard the artist is, (b) how he can or has killed people who have crossed him and (c) how his musical abilities far surpass all his contemporaries. Almost every useless song on today's charts is "written" around the above themes.

(7) It rocks.

[wardaddy]

Nicely put WAW.

[af_vet_1981]

It's not even in Dylan's top twenty songs, much less the greatest song ...

[Luddite Patent Counsel]

See, you're mixing your genres again. To wit:

"It's not about (a) wanting to sleep with someone,"
Arguably, wanting to sleep with someone DEFINES rock-and roll. If it has no sexual component, either lyrically or musically, it's probably just jazz or folk.

"(b) sleeping with someone"
That would be R&B (Barry White et al.)

"or (c) moaning over someone you used to sleep with."
Country & Western (also encompasses moaning over the truck, job, or dog you used to have)

"Nor is it about (a) how hard the artist is,"
Not sure what you mean exactly, but maybe Dylan (hard rain) and Paul Simon (I am an Island) fit

"(b) how he can or has killed people who have crossed him"
Rap, of course

"and (c) how his musical abilities far surpass all his contemporaries."
Barry Manilow (I Write the Songs)?

Now that I've fueled the flames, my own personal favorite Dylan songs: "Never Say Goodbye" from Blood on the Tracks, and "Positively 4th Street" from Greatest Hits.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

Excellent.

Discerning Dylan bump.

[kjam22]

I agree with your post #13 on all counts... !