The usually secretive folk poet seems to be late in discovering the social network (formerly Twitter) bought by the ultra-conservative billionaire. Unexpected, but after all the elusive Dylan is no longer a paradox away.
The Nobel Prize for Literature team confirmed that Dylan wrote his tweets himself. Photo Chris Pizzello/AP/SIPA
By Thomas Richet
Published on November 26, 2024 at 4:41 p.m.
C‘is a bit like imagining Jean-Luc Mélenchon at a Medef conference. Bob Dylan, the most secretive of rock stars, has established himself in recent months as a must-have on X, Elon Musk's social network. The official account of the 83-year-old singer has long been the recipient of a series of impersonal promotional messages, which one can easily imagine posted by an intern from Sony, his record company. But on September 26 a mysterious tweet appeared: “Happy birthday Mary Jo!” See you in Frankfurt. » Who is Mary Jo? No idea, but times were changing. What followed, four days later, was a tribute to Bob Newhart, an American comedian who had been dead for several months, then, even more surprisingly, the sponsorship of a restaurant: “On our last visit to New Orleans, we ate at Dooky Chase, on the corner of North Miro and Orleans streets. If you pass by, I highly recommend it. »
The author of Like a Rolling Stone is he really in charge? The man, a tease, is accustomed to counterfeiting and making arrangements with the truth: from the beginning, he had invented from scratch a past of being a celestial tramp. Very recently, he had fun (with Martin Scorsese) sliding, in the documentary Rolling Thunder Revue : A Bob Dylan Story, an improbable meeting with Sharon Stone – among a whole bunch of alternative facts. But no, the Nobel Prize for Literature team confirmed that he was the sole master of his X account.
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Since then, Bob Dylan has tweeted about the Frankfurt Book Fair – “I didn’t know there were so many book publishers in the world” –, advised us to watch The Unknown, by Tod Browning, a 1927 film, and denied a rumor that was circulating about him: no, he doesn't force people to look down when they pass him backstage at his concerts. Recently, we learned that he was at the Nick Cave concert at the Accor Arena in Paris on November 17: “I was struck by this song, Joy, where he sings “We've all had too much sorrow, now it's time for joy.” I was like, yeah, that's pretty much true. » Proof that the musician masters the format, each tweet is taken up and dissected by the specialized online press. And the machine revs up again when the Bad Seeds singer thanks him for a “beautiful pulsation of joy which penetrated [son] state of exhaustion close to zombie”. We have only one criticism to make of the master, a figure in the fight for civil rights in the United States: why stay on X with his far-right packs when the Bluesky alternative is on the rise?
