Bob Dylan Poetically Tells Media People They're All Still Idiots

Bob Dylan does things on his own schedule. For a half century now, newspaper people and other media cretins have regularly parachuted into Bob Dylan Land, taken a confused look around, and then ran back to their typewriters or radio mics or television studios or laptops or, we guess, cell phones with the Twitter, in attempts to stir up some newsstand sales or page views or Facebook likes or other forms of venereal disease of the heart, by claiming Bob Dylan did this or that thing. Innearly every recorded instance, Bob Dylan didn't do whatever people said he did, or he did something that could only be loosely associated with, say, some asinine column by Maureen Dowd, who spends a lot of time lamenting "the greatest generation," meaning, "when she was a young person, in the 1970s."

So, many months after a brief media flurry regarding Dylan's never-ending musical tour making a stop in China, a statement has appeared on BobDylan.com. It is informative, if you care at all about whether or not Chinese government authorities "approved" the set list of a senior citizen and longtime Malibu resident with a long career in show business. But it is also very funny, especially the end:

As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.

Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.

[ BobDylan.com / LA Times ]