“He not busy being born is busy dying.” That’s just one of many gems that originated in this song but have taken on new life in the English language and American culture. Songs like this are the reason Bob Dylan is a Nobel laureate. Strings of metaphors that seem stream-of-consciousness, but are razor-sharp critiques of - well, you name it. This is the nuclear bomb of protest songs (while being much more than a protest song), without the optimism of his earlier work. I’ve read that this is one of Dylan’s favorites of his songs. He said he could never write lyrics like this again.
This song sounds kind of like a folk version of rap, before rap was a thing (this song was written in 1964). What makes it tricky though, is that it’s not as precise as rap. Dylan loves cramming lots of beautiful words into odd spaces, and sometimes it's a very hard thing to cover. I haven’t listened to the song in a while (as is often my habit when learning a cover), so I just kept playing it and found my own way of cramming those words into the guitar rhythms. This is a long song, but it is one of the very best from the absolute master of songwriting.