What is the core of Bob Dylan? Inside the new TikTok trend

Sixty years ago, Bob Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo left their West Village apartment, hugging each other against the biting February cold. Standing on the snowy street next to a blue Volkswagen bus, they posed for a series of photos. “Bob put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and leaned toward me,” Rotolo recalled in his excellent 2008 memoir, A Time Off: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. “In some shots it is clear that by then we were frozen; Bob certainly was, with that thin jacket. But the image was everything.”

One of those photographs was used for the 1963 cover. The free Bob Dylan, which contains classics like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” The album cover is iconic, so iconic, in fact, that it inspired the Tik Tok trend known as “Bob Dylan Core,” where teenagers are seen walking the streets, hunched over in thin jackets and looking thoughtfully at the ground while “Don’t Think Twice” plays. The trend started last winter and the hashtag #BobDylanCore It currently has 11.5 million views. There was even what appears to have been a Bob Dylan Core Theme Party at Emerson College last week, with a TikTok that garnered almost 500,000 likes.

Bob Dylan Core began in January 2023, when 25-year-old Andrew Clark stood outside a Trader Joe’s in downtown Brooklyn. “Wait, hold the shopping bags for a second,” he told his girlfriend. “Would you mind filming this?” With the title “Walking in a jacket that is not warm enough”, a trend was born.