The stone keeps rolling: an exploration of repetition and authenticity in Bob Dylan’s songs

The present dissertation explores the figure of repetition and the concept of authenticity as meaningful elements of Bob Dylan’s renovated use of songs like distinctive artistic discourses. Albeit described as a member of the American popular music scene, he has been lately awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature due to his restoration of the poetical and the literary in the realm of music processing and the oral tradition. However, literature is not the sole discipline and language Bob Dylan’s songs bring forward. The language of communication, or a middle term use of songs as discourses, makes them a great support for Dylan’s communicative objectives. On the one hand, the musical frame provides them with a great intersubjective power. On the other hand, lyrics imitate and refer to language intercourse, and the voice of the interpreter is related to the voice of the author –a distinct coincidence of songwriters. All these facts add to the way he uses the code of authenticity as understood in the folk community, in the existentialist philosophy, the era of rock ‘n’ roll and the 60s countercultural movements. This aspect of his works help to improve the reliability of his song’s discourse as it is explained in this investigation, and it gives Bob Dylan’s voice a special reliability which could be the reason why his discourses have a lot of pressure meaning something, illuminating people’s minds, because the singersongwriter is more compromised with his speech than any other artist..