I saw the Colbert interview with Edward Norton about "A Complete Unknown". It was a wonderful interview ... or monologue if you will, and I have a renewed interest in Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Will be watching the film for sure.

As a non-US millennial I've never had the context of time, space or culture to get Dylan or ever get interested in getting him, he is firmly placed very, very deep in 1960s Americana.

Of Pete Seeger I've only (knowingly) heard the song "If It Can't Be Reduced", and that's only very recently.

I don't know much about Woody Guthrie either. All of these people are historical cultural landmarks that everyone else is referring to, so I've heard their names over and over, but if you didn't grow up in the US, you haven't been served their music through the radio everywhere you went as you grew up.

To US ears that might sound unbelievable, how can you not have heard these songs, but that's like me saying how can you not know the songs of Evert Taube, Cornelis Wreeswijk or Lasse Berghagen, when Swedish music is so internationally famous.

You have heard ABBA, Ace of Base and Roxette, because those are the things that went on export, but there's a load of things that never did, that are deeply Swedish and didn't make the slightest effort to appeal to an international audience.

Dylan, Seeger and Guthrie are not the Madonnas and Michael Jacksons that the record companies fed to Europeans, and which were understandable and consumable without that deep US context. Dylan is the best known of them outside the US, but still niche.

I guess that's why it's called folk music. Pop and rock is mostly global culture, even a lot of country music is, and it's easy to believe that that's the same thing as US culture, but it's not, even though a lot of it is produced there. There's still something that is truly local.