Culture Clash & Creativity: How Bob Dylan Inspires FF’s HIX London 2025 Installation

While we’re not quite ready to reveal full details of our installation for this year’s HIX London event, I’m happy to share that it’s inspired by the lyrics from one of Bob Dylan’s most important songs, and wanted to write a little about why his words (and music) still resonate decades later. 

I’ve been a fan of Dylan all my life and have written before about how he approached music-making, immersing himself in the creative process and absorbing influences. He absolutely did things in his own way, but has always taken inspiration from others, from Buddy Holly and Robert Johnson to Woody Guthrie and many more. While he understood the vernacular and the cultural landscape in which the music he loved was made, he wasn’t afraid to challenge the status quo and to do his own thing. That’s something that has always resonated with me and that sits at the heart of our HIX installation this year. 

A Dylan song “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” was the starting point. The song first appeared on the 1965 album, Bringing It All Back Home, his first to feature electric instruments. The album marked Dylan’s transition from folk music to rock’n’roll - a huge creative change for the musician and one that was provocative, controversial and divisive.

Released as the US escalated its military involvement in Vietnam, the song was widely seen as an attack on the ‘perceived hypocrisy, commercialism and war mentality in contemporary American culture’ - themes which remain all too relatable six decades later. Dylan’s voice here is at once very personal and entirely universal - young, rebellious, arrogant and irresistible. I remember being struck by the lyrics when I first played the song - his words were incredibly powerful, challenging, subversive and thought-provoking, perhaps better viewed as poetry. Reading the lyrics again now, so many of the lines are complex, quotable and intriguing - poetry certainly, his love of Rimbaud evident in the attitude that lies beneath the song.

One of the lines that stood out immediately and provoked much discussion with my friends (at the time and over the years since) is “He not busy being born is busy dying”. This was certainly a personal statement from Dylan at a point where he was transforming his own output while redefining what folk and rock music could look like, but it’s also a much wider rallying cry for progress over stagnation, learning and developing, pushing forward and constantly innovating to challenge what’s possible. It’s as attractive today as it was then - the notion of trying something new, approaching a problem from a different angle, thinking ‘what if we do it like this instead?’, or as Dylan says, ‘what else can you show me?’ 

This is Dylan as the original punk - unapologetic, defiant and unfiltered, his fusion of ideas and influences from different perspectives brought something stronger, richer and new. This is more than a standard counter-cultural call full of political clichés. His relentless urge to push boundaries belies the line in the opening verse ‘there is no sense in trying.’ 

It’s an ethos that has always appealed to me. Let’s resist the urge for perfection and sterile purity, let’s try something new even if it feels uncomfortable and celebrate the possibility that brings. There’s a real freedom in embracing the tension of different approaches to creativity and in leaning into a culture clash - truly, there’s always a sense in trying. 

Sam Samuels,
Furniture Fusion