Maybe you didn’t notice Twitter has become a cesspool of fascism, crypto bros, and Blue Checks profiting off of their manufactured outrage. Amid the chaos, the Twitter/X account of folk music legend Bob Dylan deviated from its usual generic social media manager PR responses.
All of a sudden, beginning at some point at the end of September, the tweets started feeling like they were possibly written by Dylan himself.
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Vulture has since confirmed that the tweets are, in fact, penned by Bob Dylan himself. This tracks, as they are as odd and somewhat meandering as you would expect from the folk legend, with the occasional recommendation tossed in.
The whole thing is so odd that his son, Jakob Dylan, who you might remember as the lead singer of the band the Wallflowers, has no logical explanation for any of it. Jakob was asked by the Boston Globe why his dad suddenly started tweeting random, seemingly inconsequential memories, footnotes, and anecdotes from throughout his life.
Jakob’s response is filled with as much perplexity and mystery as we feel reading his dad’s tweets. “Yeah, like most people, I can’t tell you what’s going on with those,” he told the Globe. “I’ve seen those. I can’t tell you what that’s about. I’m not sure.”
At the time of publication, Bob Dylan has only posted what appears to be seven or so original tweets, including one or two replies to other users asking questions. The most recent was published on October 30. It was a late response to someone named Nick Newman, who was not tagged in the post at all. Nick asked Bob what movies he would recommend, so Bob recommended the 1927 horror film The Unknown starring Lon Chaney.
Before that, on October 23, Bob tweeted something that felt a little bit more in line with how you’d imagine Bob Dylan would Tweet. Bob tells the riveting tale of a time when he was in a hotel in Frankfurt, Germany, at the same time the hotel convention center was hosting a publishing convention. He was trying to find the publisher of a book he liked, titled The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, originally published in 1894, to thank them for publishing one of his favorite books. But he never found them because the convention was too crowded. And that’s the whole story.
Why Bob Dylan decided to start tweeting at all, let alone with these seemingly random asides that almost seem like replies to people just off-screen, is a mystery, kind of like the man himself. It’s one of the few bright spots on contemporary Twitter, so let’s hope he gives us some more little gems.
