Positively Bob's Tweets

In the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, users have fled Elon Musk’s X platform en masse, heading for greener pastures and bluer skies. The Everything App has, however, gained one notable new user in the midst of the tempest. People are crazy, times are strange, and Bob Dylan is a poster.

This fall, as Dylan, 83, barnstormed across Europe on the final leg of his three-year Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour, the @bobdylan X account sprang to life after years of operation as a bog-standard announcement feed.

The tweets began innocently enough. “Happy Birthday Mary Jo!” Dylan wrote on September 25th, “See you in Frankfort [sic].” Five days later he paid tribute to deceased comic Bob Newhart, who had passed two months earlier. The posts themselves weren’t remarkable, but their existence was. Vulture sought and received confirmation from the Dylan camp that Bob himself was the author. Dylan Twitter (or what remained of it) was in thrall, thrilled that Bob would join them in the muck. It was unbelievable—strange but true.

Since then, Dylan’s posts have only grown more Dylanesque, from replies to Bitcoin enthusiasts to shaggy-dog stories about publishing conventions. Most baffling of all was his October 30th dispatch: “Nick Newman had replied to a tweet a few weeks back asking me what movies I would recommend. I told him to try The Unknown with Lon Chaney and go from there.”

It was the “Tangled Up In Blue” of tweets, a time-shifting narrative taking place in the past and present simultaneously. The syntax of the post implied Dylan and Newman had had an earlier private conversation, one which Dylan was now recounting on X after the fact. Newman, a film critic and programmer, had in fact sought movie recs in Dylan’s replies, but that was as far as their interaction ever went. The first time Dylan told him to watch The Unknown was in this very post—a post which claimed such a conversation had already taken place.

Newman knows as much as anyone else about Dylan’s intentions in calling him out: nothing. “It’s one of those funny wrinkles to the whole thing,” he said. “The way a friend put it is that it's like I had been canonized as a Dylan character, like Gregory Peck in ‘Brownsville Girl,’ or Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Tempest.’ [He] just made me this figure in the Dylan cosmology.”

That cosmology has since grown to include one Cheryl Henry (@cherealstars1), an astrologer, “Gilder/Decorative Painter,” and former stand up comedian (or so her bio claims) who replied to Dylan’s November 19th post. Henry recounted a brief interaction she supposedly had with Dylan at the 1991 Grammys, when she was dismissed as a backup dancer after she “snuck a peek” at Bob while passing him.

“Saw your reply,” Dylan responded the next day. “Just want you to know I’ve never told anybody not to make eye contact with me. That is just ridiculous. And the next time you see me please look straight into my eyes.”

Setting aside the veracity of any of these statements—Dylan’s shambolic “Masters of War” at the ’91 Grammys included precisely zero backup dancers—their greater significance is, well, a complete unknown. Theories abound as to why the greatest American artist of the 20th century would choose this particular moment to take to social media. No one has a satisfying answer, not even those closest to Dylan. “I’ve seen [the posts],” his son Jakob said recently. “I can’t tell you what that’s about.”

That hasn’t stopped Dylanologists from trying to solve the mystery. Like an army of armchair AJs Weberman, eagle-eyed followers have pored through Dylan’s every character in search of hidden messages. User @queerbobdylan theorized that Dylan’s use of the word “new” in various posts was his way of hinting at an upcoming album. A new record would be a welcome conclusion to the saga, but it seems exceedingly unlikely—as unpredictable as Dylan may be, he almost certainly is not “easter egging like Taylor.”

Newman doesn’t detect any sort of perfect finished plan in Bob’s statements. “I think almost anything we do on social media is random,” he said. “It's thoughts that come to us and things we find interesting and funny and provocative and whatever else. So I do wonder if Bob is just opening the door a smidge, and it's about as ordered or logical as anybody else's output would be.”

If the posts do have a precedent in Dylan’s career, it lies outside his music. Some read like an aside he might have delivered between tracks on Theme Time Radio Hour, the cult-favorite radio program he broadcast on SiriusXM during the mid/late aughts. Others have the cadence of a particularly brief chapter from Dylan’s most recent book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. Bob has always been more willing to offer commentary on the world he observes than the world within. In their own cockeyed way, that’s exactly what these tweets are, from endorsements of New Orleans restaurants to appreciations of late-era Nick Cave.

The real A.J. Weberman, infamous in the 1970s for sifting Dylan’s trash for evidence that he’d been compromised by nefarious forces, doesn’t find them particularly interesting. “I don’t see that much there,” he said. “He met this guy and went to a book fair? Am I missing things?” After a lifetime of rummaging through the man’s trash, Dylan’s nonsensical posts seem to be just that: nonsense. For the first time in his life, he may be right.

Garbology may be a discredited practice, but Dylan has a documented history of recording his garbage thoughts for safekeeping. Indeed, Dylan’s mental flotsam formed the skeleton of the script for Masked & Anonymous, the little-known but much-loved film Bob made with director Larry Charles.

“One of the first things he did was show me this beautiful box he had,” Charles recalled, “and he opened the box and he dumped out all these scrap papers with little notes on them… I realized that’s how he writes his songs, he just has these scraps and he slowly synthesizes them into this new thing. That’s what we started doing with the screenplay.” It’s unlikely that a Buffalo Sabres player will appear on the silver screen alongside Uncle Sweetheart or Bobby Cupid, but it’s the same mental process compelling Bob to document both—only this time, he’s blasting it out to some 470,000 followers.

Or maybe this whole thing has just been a canny promotional exercise. As of press time, Dylan’s latest tweet is a pseudo-advertisement for “A Complete Unknown” (what a title!) that endorses the film without implying that he’s seen it, or plans to. The form of the post is different from the marketing boilerplate that used to make up his Twitter feed, but its function is the same—only now he’s drawing twenty times the engagement.

But whatever their ultimate purpose (or whether they even have one), Dylan’s posts may as well be going into a box. The punchline to this whole thing is that Dylan has taken up the habit of tweeting long after its heyday; hell, it’s not even called “tweeting” anymore. Outside of the superhuman crew that remains active on The Everything App, Bob’s posts remain—say it again–a complete unknown.

“Haven’t seen them,” said critic and eminent Dylan scholar Greil Marcus, when reached for comment. “I’m not on Twitter.”