Episode Details

I have mixed feelings after watching Chalamet’s Bob Dylan impersonation in the film A Complete Unknown. It is a superb acting performance. Still, there is an unsurmountable distance between an actor cast solely based on his looks and chameleonic aptitudes, and the real deal that shrines through, which is often disconcerting. The first impression of a successful folk star like Joan Baez was "I was bowled over. I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad."

The biopic tries to portray Robert Allen Zimmerman, a Jewish lad from Minnesota that conquered as Bob Dylan in the early 60s the New York folk scene as a wonderkid. Nobody made it so fast, not even Joan Baez. These two became the protest song duo, performing With God On Our Side in the Newport Folk Festival 1963. That was the summer before President Kennedy was murdered.

Since then, the musician began a singular career. Something between a reluctant prophet that speaks in riddles and an electrifying I-don't-give-a-damn Like a Rolling Stone, roaming around the world on an endless tour, and clearly profitable, still performing at 80 years old with a gravelly whisper for a voice that has made of his once nasal tone a relic from a distant past.

Credit where credit is due. If someone truly deserved a Literature Nobel Prize, it was Bob Dylan. His lyrics certainly were not brainy novels, but rich songs riveted with mighty poetry and strong melodies that stuck deep in the collective imagination of three generations, me included. Fret not, I'm not going to make a list, but surely I'm going to resort to more hyperlinks.

In the Nobel lecture he recorded, I was moved by such common sense, anticipating the backslash of the writers’ guild, who were outraged that a performer, rather than an author, was being awarded. Dylan pointed out that "the words in Shakespeare's plays were meant to be sung, not read on a page."

He was damn right. All those lyrics from a love songs we have listened sometimes had a musical origin that began with wandering poets and performers called troubadours, a word that comes from the Early Middle Ages, during the Islamic expansion that reached the Iberian Peninsula, and it is Arab for "taraba", entertain or just sing for your supper. The roots of those performers are intertwined with the Arab-Andalusian music, brimming with Persian musical instruments like the lute, oud, daf, rebec, and the hypnotic percussion from Isfahan played with on drums like the tombak.

The Arabs valued Persia craftsmen and, above all, Persian music and singers. The Umayyads, both in Damascus and later in Al-Andalus, imported performers from Baghdad in the 8th century by the hand of the emir Abd al-Rahman like Abu al-Hasan, better known for his nickname Ziryab, Persian and Kurdish word for blackbird.

This musical poetry wasn't performed in the streets but in luxurious walled gardens called paradise, from the old Persian "pairi dez", with a profusion of sweet orange trees, water fountains, and exotic Ea