Hailed as the forerunner of the modern music video, the promotional clip for Bob Dylan’s first Top 40 hit Subterranean Homesick Blues is an iconic piece of film that has been referenced in examples of popular culture from Love Actually to the Bloodhound Gang’s Mope. The shuffling blues composition of the song and quick lyrical cadence is juxtaposed with a satisfyingly simple tableau of Bob standing in the right of the shot and, with a cool deadpan stare, flipping through a series of cue cards displaying choice phrases as they are sung in accompaniment with the video. While the idea was Dylan’s, the cards were written with the help of musician friends Donovan, Bob Neuwirth and the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, with the latter two in cameo just inside the left of the shot. The words that appear are peppered with deliberate misspellings (“suckccess”) and inconsistencies with Bob’s singing (the viewer reads “twenty dollar bills” and hears “eleven”) while the singer stands nonchalantly, at points not keeping up with his own lyrics. In the background is an alley behind London’s Savoy Theatre where Dylan stayed during his 1965 UK tour and the clip originally functioned as the opening sequence of D.A. Pennebaker’s tour documentary Don’t Look Back. The song’s lyrics are charged with the energy of change and protest, on Vietnam, the struggle for Civil Rights and the people’s condition; the video itself paved the way for the now ubiquitous conjunction of song and music video – though the budget was negligible and there’s not a Beats pill in sight.