For $5 a month, Bob Dylan’s stories on Patreon

Yesterday he appeared on the Instagram profile of Bob Dylan a link to a Patreon account. Not a newsletter, which many colleagues such as Patti Smith and Jeff Tweedy have opened, but an official profile on the platform that many artists use to get financial support from fans in exchange for direct access to exclusive content.

In the case of the Award, the link pointed not to songs, demos, music videos but to “a living archive of lessons from the grave, unsent letters and original short stories edited by Bob Dylan”.
There is an “unsent letter” between Mark Twain and Rudolph Valentino, attributed to Herbert Foster”. The writer and the silent film star were contemporaries, yes, but Valentino was a child when Twain was old. Then there is an imaginary writing by Aaron Burr, an 18th century politician who in recent times has returned to fame as a character in the musical “Hamilton”, in which he is the antagonist of the protagonist. Then a story entitled “Bull Rider”, written by Marty Lombard.
Many of these materials – the images on Instagram, but also the reciting voices of letters and stories – seem to be generated by artificial intelligence.

It is not the first time that Dylan uses social and digital tools in a bizarre way: just read his posts on X/Twitter, which he started using in the period in which many colleagues were fleeing the social network because of Elon Musk. Dylan occasionally posts obituaries, well wishes, concert reviews, always with a language between the poetic and the cryptic. Some of the materials on the Patreon account have already been partially published on Instagram. And in the meantime, at almost 85 years of age, he continues his Never Ending Tour, currently in America…