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Nothing Lasts Forever: The Music of Time, Youth, and Fame

This is a comparative assay about two songs, La Boheme and Like a Rolling Stone. 

They were released in the same year, 1965, one in France and the other in the United States. Same year, totally different political and socioeconomic situations in France and US and yet, both songs carry universal truths about life. 

In 1965, Aznavour released La Bohème, a song that immediately became a hit across France and beyond. At 41, he was old enough to look back on life with both pride and sorrow. The song immerses you in Parisian bohemia—the laughter, music, love, and artistic struggle of Montmartre. You can almost see him walking through its narrow streets, recalling nights of music, romance, and cheap meals, knowing that youth was fleeting but beautiful. There’s warmth in his voice, but also the quiet ache of time passing. It’s almost like a romantasy novel unveiling in front of your eyes or rather in your ears.

In the US, Bob Dylan at merely 24, surprised the world with Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan’s song tells a different story: someone who once had comfort and status is now going down , stripped of everything familiar. At such a young age Dylan’s vision was sharp. His empathy for human fragility, very sharp. Raw, urgent, and almost accusatory, the song captures the shock of falling from privilege. In La Bohème, the fall is natural and inevitable; in Dylan’s world, it’s sudden and cruel. It is harder and harsher as it could potentially be avoided. Falling from young age to old and falling from fame to obscurity is merely devastating. 

Charles Aznavour, born in 1924 in Paris to Armenian parents, grew up among the narrow streets and cafés of Montmartre, enjoying the music and laughter and the struggles of a city of artists. Bob Dylan, born in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, grew up in a quiet American town, with a guitar slung over his shoulder and a notebook full of stories about the world and its injustices. They never met in any official sense, but in a way, their songs met in the spaces where memory, loss, and human vulnerability converge.Their environments shaped them. France in the 1960s was in the midst of the Trente Glorieuses—three decades of postwar growth and optimism. Yet the old bohemian life—cheap cafés, nights spent creating art for little money, love and laughter in tiny rooms—was fading into nostalgia. That longing is the heartbeat of La Bohème. Meanwhile, Dylan’s America was restless: civil-rights marches, Cold War tension, and a rising counterculture made him keenly aware of how fragile social structures could be. His song reflects that upheaval.

Philosophically, the two songs reflect different kinds of truth. Aznavour’s belongs to the Stoics and Aristotelians: aging is natural, melancholy is honest, and meaning comes from reflection. Dylan’s falls closer to Nietzsche and Montaigne: pride is fragile, fortune is fickle, and falling reveals both society’s hypocrisy and our own limits.

Age, too, shaped their emotions and inspiration. At 41, Aznavour could already look back with tenderness. At 24, Dylan looked forward in life with indignation. One mourns what was, the other exposes what is.

Dylan once saw Aznavour perform at Carnegie Hall and said he was “blown away.” He never met him afterward, but it’s easy to imagine the young American recognizing in the older Frenchman a kind soul—someone who sang about loss not as defeat, but as truth.

La Bohème touches anyone who remembers youth, love, or artistic struggle. Like a Rolling Stone stuns audiences with its defiance and length, maybe a protest about complacency, maybe an accusation of how you acted while in fame and what you brought upon yourself. Both endure because they confront the same core experience: losing what once defined us, and finding meaning in the fall.

In the end, what makes these songs unforgettable isn’t just the music or the lyrics. It’s how they capture what it feels like to live, to love, to lose, and to remember. Together they reveal that life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility—that every joy, every stumble, leaves an imprint. Through their songs, memory, and art, we recognise our own shared fall from grace which is imprinted in our human, finite lives.