Last week, Jesse Welles, a polemic-writing folk musician, performed a duet with the legendary Joan Baez. Not only did Welles share a microphone with Bob Dylan’s sweetheart of old, the duo also covered Dylan’s iconic “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” 

Welles is undoubtedly aware that a small population has regarded him as “the next Bob Dylan” for some time now, and that, naturally, this recent interaction with Baez would only serve to perpetuate this notion. He sure has a lot of nerve.

Comparisons have been drawn between the two for a couple of not-quite-substantial reasons. Welles, like Dylan, has an unconventional voice. And, more importantly, he uses the medium of folk music to sing protest songs like Dylan did at the very start of his prolific and lengthy career. But, frankly, that’s where the similarities end. 

Welles is a wannabe—an unsuccessful copycat at worst, and a dull, TikTok-shaped Dylan at the very best.

Welles has garnered a large following on Instagram and TikTok by posting short snippets of didactic music. Because these tunes are designed to survive in the vacuum of instant gratification produced by social media algorithms, they must be immediately poignant and explicitly topical. 

The result is lyrically fixed and predictable music. The songs are limited to a specific event or person, and therefore lack the transcendence that is such a vital element of Dylan’s discography.

And it’s not like Dylan didn’t write topical songs. “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” and “Who Killed Davey Moore?” are two early examples. But lyrically, syntactically, and musically, they are simply in a different realm than what Welles is doing. 

Comparing anyone to Dylan lyrically is sure to cause some embarrassment on behalf of the contender, but if you’re like Welles and attempting to replicate young Dylan—in medium, content, and style—you’re asking for it.

It would be especially harsh to compare Welles’ short-form content, made for quick consumption, to Dylan’s complete songs. Luckily, Welles also has real music on platforms like Spotify—it’s worth noting he has a significantly smaller audience there than he does on social media.

Welles’ most recent officially released polemic is “No Kings.” The first verse reads:

“No hatred, no violence / No starvation and no greed / And no kings, no kings / No kings.”

No adjectives, no verbs. No color and no mystery. And, no, Welles, this is no good. 

You don’t even need the first verse—just the first couple lines—of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” to see the difference.

“William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll / With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger,” sings Dylan.

Zantzinger and Carroll were contemporary figures for Dylan in 1963. But six decades later, the song still holds up and is more relevant in our present moment than anything Welles has written. 

Dylan manages this longevity because, in the song, who Zantzinger actually was biographically is irrelevant. All you need to know is that he had a “diamond ring finger” and a cane, which he twirled around it. Ostentatious, smug—an image of the character emerges effortlessly from the words. Dylan’s nasally drawl as he hisses “Zanzinger” also helps paint the picture. 

Dylan is a musician completely unlike anyone before him. He never once looked to imitate. Some of his earliest songs were reminiscent of Woody Guthrie, but he quickly shed these similarities when he went electric and said goodbye to the folk scene. And he has constantly shapeshifted since then: a mystical, musical chameleon. 

It’s particularly germane that when he was labeled “the voice of a generation” for the political and societal critiques in his music, he immediately rejected it, and changed trajectory—he soon decided that a song couldn’t change anything. Conversely, Welles seems to want this title desperately.

Dylan, throughout his career, has been supremely dynamic, refusing to remain in a place where he is understood. So, anyone hoping to capture the feeling of a generation, alter the future of music entirely, and be “the next Bob Dylan,” cannot look or sound anything like him—that’s the most basic prerequisite. And singing in a raspy, faux-Dylan voice while dumbing down the folk protest genre for Instagram Reels and TikTok is definitely not the way to go.

Trying to replicate what Dylan did in the early 1960s is not only uninventive but also anachronistic. The times have changed.

Soon after Dylan emerged in the folk scene, he brought the genre to the peak of its popularity. The musical tradition existed long before him, but he was able to innovate while still revering his predecessors. And once he felt restricted by the medium, he moved on and hasn’t looked back since. Even so, he became the figure we know today by playing in subterranean coffeehouses in Greenwich Village: He is a product of New York’s seedy, folky underbelly. 

But Welles isn’t building on his folk predecessors—in fact, he’s just doing a poor imitation of them. There’s no depth in his music, and certainly no raw, honest underbelly of tradition or invention. Welles has rolled over and allowed the formularized, uniform, and pernicious immediacy of the digital age to define his work.