Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” released in 1965 on Highway 61 Revisited, remains one of popular music’s most electrifying acts of rebellion.

At over six minutes long and driven by a sneering organ riff from Al Kooper, the track shattered the polite conventions of the day. Its subject is “Miss Lonely”, a once-privileged young woman who “dressed so fine” and “threw the bums a dime in your prime.”

Now stripped of status, money and illusion, she must navigate the street without her former safety net.

Dylan’s lyrics drip with biting schadenfreude, yet beneath the mockery lies a strange compassion: the fall is also a liberation. “How does it feel / To be without a home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?” he taunts and celebrates. The phrase nods to the old proverb about a rolling stone gathering no moss; rootlessness, Dylan suggests, can be both punishment and freedom. Many hear autobiography in the song: Dylan himself breaking from folk purism, or even the folk scene’s own fading glamour.

The Rolling Stones have paid fiery tribute to it live. Most memorably, on 5 April 1998 at Buenos Aires’ River Plate Stadium, Mick Jagger invited Dylan onstage for a ragged, joyous jam. Jagger’s rasping swagger met Dylan’s nasal drawl in a cross-generational handshake that felt like history winking at itself.

The band has revisited the song on their own – raw and stripped on the 1995 Stripped tour, and as recently as last year in Las Vegas, each time injecting it with stadium-sized swagger.

Critics have long hailed the original as revolutionary. Rolling Stone magazine crowned it the greatest song ever; Bruce Springsteen called it the moment “a pop song contained the whole world.” It fused folk poetry with rock aggression, proving lyrics could be as dense and literary as any novel.

In my view, the track still crackles with dangerous vitality. Dylan’s voice is half sneer, half sermon; the band sounds like it’s barely holding the reins. It captures that rare thrill when art stops being polite and starts telling uncomfortable truths.

Decades on, the question lingers: how does it feel? For anyone who has ever lost their footing and discovered they rather like the fall, the answer is exhilarating.