knowing the author I'm guessing he's being facetious (he wrote the 33 1/3 for 'It Takes a Nation of Millions') but I hope the article proper answers "nah, but check out Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets and Lightnin' Rod"
This is pretty 😬 but the article as a whole is more like "here are some interesting items where Dylan and hip-hop intersected" than it is about positing a real lineage between the two
Part of Dylan’s genius was to shape-shift and re-interpret. But no, he didn’t invent hip-hop. Shades of Marty McFly (?) inventing Chuck Berry in Back to the Future.
I’ve seen people online, intent on starting a fight, claiming Bob invented rap (not me! Don’t come for me!) however I was amazed recently to have seen a post here of Dylan actually rapping on a song from the 80s and the knowledge of this is sort of haunting me.
I feel like even when the crux of the piece is arguing for the affirmative, the headline formatted as a question is the copy editor's way of saying "no, I disagree with this writer's take"
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A Hard Chain's A-Gonna Ball. Ice Is.
Tangled Up in Blue is a gang song. ☝️