Cher, Dylan, Jagger, McCartney, Streisand
Classics in 2025
Cher: The Memoir, Part One was a major bestseller this holiday season. Her 1965 cover of Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” was her first solo hit.
A Complete Unknown, the new movie starring Timothée Chalamet about Dylan’s ascent, is playing well in theaters. In northern California, I can attest, they are sold out.
Dylan’s folk-rock rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 was considered a turning point in the way music would be heard from then on, because he used electric amplification.
1965. That was sixty years ago!
Cher is seventy-eight years old. Bob Dylan is eighty-three.
And while we’re at it. Mick Jagger is eighty-one. The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” was recorded in 1966 and has been downloaded on Spotify over one billion times, according to its own count.
Paul McCartney is eighty-two. His “Got Back” global tour ended last month in London with a guest appearance by Ringo Starr and total ticket sales estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars. The Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road, was recorded in 1969.
Barbra Streisand is also eighty-two. Her nearly one-thousand-page memoir, My Name Is Barbra, was an Amazon bestseller from the time pre-orders started rolling in, ten months before it was published. Streisand had a number-one album in every decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, and her most recent album, 2022’s Live at the Bon Soir, was recorded in 1962 but not released for sixty years.
What are their genres? Rock, pop, standards, jazz, folk, country, R&B? (Rap not so much.)
How about classical? Not in the way of Beethoven, Mozart, or Chopin. But recording and performing at this level for so long is a tribute to endurance and quality, with an open timeline for the future.
Yes, but their Baby Boomer fans will die out, and in our multicultural world, they are all white.
Oh wait. Cher is the youngest. Dylan, Jagger, and the others are actually older than the Boomers, whose cohort — including Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Madonna, James Taylor, Bono and Stevie Wonder, standing on the revered shoulders of Berry Gordy’s Motown, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles, B. B. King, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley — are all, based on tens of millions of downloads, still superstars.
Their works have transited the eras of radio and television play, singles, LPs, cassettes, CDs, videos, and stadium concerts.
So what, aside from talent, energy, and ambition, accounts for longevity in popular (because that’s what it is) music?
Here is where I veer away from data to opinion. Each of these definable classics has a distinctive persona:
Cher has a particularly notable style in dress, sass, and business instincts. Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift are adorned in finery that evoke Cher’s choices. And whatever her managers may have told her to do, Cher has devised strategies that keep her front and center, feminist and in charge.
Dylan’s presence is especially interesting to me. Critical reviews of A Complete Unknown complain that the mystery of Bob Dylan is not revealed. That is exactly the point. Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota, devised his persona as a form of tribute to Woody Guthrie and his ilk. The album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan , showing him on a Greenwich Village street in1963 with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, set standards for being young and cool that are immutable.
In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He accepted it months later in a private ceremony, having had someone else read his speech at the official ceremony.
In 1967, Mick Jagger was convicted in a British court of possession of four amphetamine tablets and sentenced to three months in prison, later overturned. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll were Rolling Stones signatures. And yet Jagger still defiantly has the bounce and moves of times long past. Whatever Mick Jagger has imbibed over the years, he has taken it in apparent stride.
Of the Beatles, Paul McCartney was the cute one and shared with John Lennon a mastery of song writing. In his group and solo incarnations since the Beatles split up he has never lost the soulful aura of his song “Yesterday,” composed in 1965, which has been covered more than two thousand times but never matched.
When Barbara Streisand dropped the second “a” in her name as a teenager in Brooklyn to become Barbra, she sent a signal of formidable, fierce identity. She has excelled in every way since — tenacious to an extent that exhausted many around her, but not herself. Streisand’s voice was naturally amazing, and it turned out she could act and direct with the same inherent drive.
What makes success on a scale of these eightysomethings possible? You may have read that age has been a subject of political consideration in recent years. The luck of genetic makeup is certainly a factor. A stoutness of heart and mind is essential. As is self-discipline. The sixties greats Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison all died at age twenty-seven in 1970 and 1971, succumbing to the temptations of fame and fortune.
Genius in some measure must be embedded from infancy. Being able to use it for so long and so well, as Cher, Dylan, Jagger, McCartney, and Streisand have done, is inspiring.
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The Simon & Schuster audio of “LBJ and McNamara The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail” including the bonus recordings of editorial sessions with McNamara is available everywhere today and on Sunday, Jan 12 at 5 p.m. Evan Osnos and I will be in conversation about the book at Politics and Prose 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW in Washington D.C.
I didn’t realize that Cher was the youngest. Thanks for this refreshing read.