it made . '' He has n't made it to his own hypocrisies -- that would come later . But the `` us '' and `` them '' are not so clearly defined as earlier albums . Here he bares his teeth at the hipsters , the vanity of that time , the idea that you had a better value system if you were wearing the right pair of boots . For some , the Sixties was a revolution . But there were others who were erecting a guillotine in Greenwich Village not for their political enemies , but rather for the squares . Bob was already turning on that idea , even as he best embodied it , with the corkscrew hair Jimi Hendrix would later admit to imitating . The tumble of words , images , ire and spleen on `` Rolling Stone '' shape-shifts easily into music forms 10 or 20 years away , like punk , grunge or hip-hop . Looking at the character in the lyric , you ask the question `` How quickly could she have plunged from high society to ` scrounging ' for her ` next meal ' ? '' Perhaps it
-LRB- Rolling Stone -RRB- -- `` Like a Rolling Stone '' -LRB- Highway 61 Revisited , 1965 -RRB- By Bono That sneer -- it 's something to behold . Elvis had a sneer , of course . And the Rolling Stones had a sneer that , if you note the title of the song , Bob was n't unaware of . But Bob Dylan 's sneer on `` Like a Rolling Stone '' turns the wine to vinegar . It 's a black eye of a pop song . The verbal pugilism on display here cracks open songwriting for a generation and leaves the listener on the canvas . `` Like a Rolling Stone '' is the birth of an iconoclast that will give the rock era its greatest voice and vandal . This is Bob Dylan as the Jeremiah of the heart , torching romantic verse and `` the girl '' with a firestorm of unforgiving words . Having railed against the hypocrisies of the body politic , he now starts to pick on enemies that are a little more familiar : the scene , high society , the `` pretty people '' who think they 've `` got