‘My name is literally Joan Baez right now’: Gen Z women identify with Bob Dylan’s toxic situation | Joan Baez

Lynda Saldana saw A Complete Unknown the day it came out – partly because she’s a Bob Dylan fan, and partly because she loves Timothée Chalamet, who plays the folk rock icon during his turtleneck years black. But one supporting character stood out more: folk legend Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro. Saldana had never heard of Baez, but watching Baez and Dylan’s on-screen relationship made her want to know more. What happened between them? Did they end up together? “I had to research their story,” Saldana said.

Saldana, 19 and a sophomore at the University of Arizona, isn’t the only young woman studying Baez’s decades-long career — and particularly where it intersected with Dylan’s . Saldana found TikTok fan montages of the duo performing together at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, as well as clips from a 2023 documentary in which Baez called the romance “totally demoralizing.”

Saldana couldn’t help but understand. “He would be there for her, go see her other girlfriends, then come back,” she said. “She couldn’t let go, even though she knew it wasn’t good for her. It’s so real. This is happening to girls all over the world right now, and this happened in the 60s? »

Baez met Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City, a Greenwich Village venue, in 1961, when she was a bona fide star and he was new to the scene. They became creative partners, with Baez believed to have inspired Dylan classics such as Visions of Johanna and Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan ended their relationship in 1965 as he became a superstar, and Baez has since forgiven him for breaking his heart: “We were stupid and you can’t blame someone forever. I certainly tried but eventually stopped.

As Saldana later posted in a TikTok, Baez and Dylan had “the OG situation.”

Now 84, Baez has become the unlikely hero of A Complete Unknown: yet another woman who has emerged from the shadow of a terrible, guitar-playing alternative boy.

“I love Joan Baez because I, too, had a loser musician who bears a striking resemblance to Timothée Chalamet, who uses our situation as character development and steals parts of my unique and charming personality as content for his career musical”, we read in the caption of one of them. TikTok of a woman lip-syncing to Baez singing Dylan’s It Ain’t Me Babe.

“I love Joan Baez because she said eff this man,” another woman’s post read. “True wicked Latina icon.” (Baez’s father was Mexican-American physicist Albert Baez.)

Another clip analyzes their Newport performance of It Ain’t Me Babe, when Baez and Dylan shared the mic. “Every time I see this video of Bob and Joan it fills me with quiet annoyance,” the creator wrote in a caption. “I always loved her, but ever since I watched the biopic, I’ve been wondering, sir, why are you screaming for her.” (A counterpoint, per comment: “That’s how he sings, I’m afraid.”)

Stephen Petrus, a specialist in 1960s folk music and director of public history programs at LaGuardia Community College, believes that Generation Z is “expressing solidarity” with Baez online. “I think there was a sense of mutual opportunism between the two men,” he said. “But Dylan wasn’t always nice to her, and he wanted to be the dominant one on stage, which is pretty clear both in the film and in some of the performances.”

Baez has long been a lightning rod for projection. With her angelic face, long dark hair and penchant for performing barefoot in her early days, she earned the nickname “Madonna”, becoming one of the best-known voices of the 1960s anti-violence movement. Joan Didion would later lightly criticize Baez’s revolutionary portrayal, calling it superficial: “(Baez) is in a sense the unfortunate victim of what others saw in her, wrote about her, wanted her to be and don’t be not,” Didion wrote in an essay. included in his 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Today’s ratings give more credit to Baez as one of Dylan’s most enduring muses.

Marianne Natoli, a content creator based in New York, released an explainer video describing the history of their relationship in the style of an E! News segment. “She’s a better woman than I could ever be,” Natoli says in the clip. “There’s no way I could date a pre-stardom Bob Dylan, launch his career and then be dirty, cast aside. I will never shut up about this.

Deidre Rodriguez, a 28-year-old singer who fronts the Austin band Red and the Rebels, posted a video accusing Dylan of roughing up Baez: “How do you bag this woman and then ruin her?”

But Rodriguez also thinks Baez’s younger fans, who came of age during the #MeToo movement, are more aware of power imbalances in relationships. “We talk about this relationship seriously now, because they didn’t have the language that we use today to describe these behaviors,” she said. “We know a lot more about the impact of the patriarchal system on women, particularly women of color, and particularly in the music industry. »

Although Baez is not on TikTok, his granddaughter, singer and Baez lookalike Jasmine Harris, is. Harris regularly posts videos with Baez, who appears to be fiery and youthful. In one clip, University of Miami student Harris plays Baez a bad acoustic song that she says a “fraternity boy” wrote for her, while Baez mocks the overwrought lyrics. Baez and Harris also attended a Phoebe Bridgers concert together, posing backstage with the indie superstar.

For Saldana, Baez’s newest fan, learning about the singer’s life on TikTok meant she listened to her music, too. Saldana particularly enjoys her version of It Ain’t Me Babe and Diamonds and Rust, the 1975 confessional Baez wrote about her relationship with Dylan. For a generation accustomed to the drudgery of modern dating, lyrics like “Well, I’ll be damned / here comes your ghost again” always hit.

“I see so many people wondering, ‘Why am I literally Joan Baez right now?'” Saldana said. “I just discovered her and I’m also in exactly the same situation. It’s like watching Sex and the City and realizing you’re Carrie.