By far the biggest musician to have joined the membership-based platform, Dylan’s posts have so far been puzzling – and therefore entirely in character
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couple of years back, the august music writer David Hepworth came up with a great line about Bob Dylan. Dylan, he averred, “is like China: we can see what he’s doing, but never quite work out why he’s doing it”. That’s certainly true about the unexpected launch of the 84-year-old singer-songwriter’s Patreon. Everything about it is confusing.
For one, there’s the choice of platform. Plenty of major music stars have flocked to the newsletter provider Substack in recent years to share their thoughts or show their workings and, perhaps, earn a little cash on the side: everyone from Patti Smith and Dolly Parton to Charli xcx and Rosalía. But Patreon, where fans pay monthly subscriptions for exclusive content from all sorts of creators – podcasters, visual artists – has never really taken off with big rock and pop musicians: the biggest name it could boast, until now, was Ben Folds.
Then there’s the fact that no one seems entirely certain if the posts that have thus far appeared on Lectures from the Grave – billed as “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories” – are by Dylan or not. The writing and lectures posted so far on Patreon come without attribution or under pseudonymous names. The description of its contents suggests only that your $5 (£4) a month will get you content “curated by Bob Dylan”, which isn’t the same thing as authorship. The means by which the Patreon was announced – a couple of teaser videos and a flyer posted to Dylan’s Instagram, with no mention of it on his official website – and the fact that the lectures appear to have been voiced using AI have been cause for some consternation among fans, if you take the comments under the Instagram posts at face value. (The Guardian has contacted representatives for Dylan.)
