Over the past couple of years, Bob Dylan has embraced the Internet in bizarre and unexpected ways. He’s used his official Twitter account to wish a happy birthday to a mysterious figure named “Mary Jo” he planned on seeing in Frankfort, shouted out Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans, and talked about running into a member of the Buffalo Sabres in an elevator in Prague. His Instagram page is rarely used to promote his music, but is instead a hodgepodge of vintage video clips, including Les Paul’s appearance at a 1988 Van Halen concert, a James Cagney monologue from the 1949 film noir White Heat, and even Machine Gun Kelly freestyle rapping at a record store back in 2016.
But he somehow managed to up the weirdness by a significant margin over the weekend, when he shared a link to an official Bob Dylan Patreon account that offers fans “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan” for $5.00 a month. The initial offerings includes a “letter never sent” between Mark Twain and silent cinema star Rudolph Valentino, claiming to be penned by “Herbert Foster.”
“Dear Mr. Valentino,” it begins. “I take up my pen under circumstances that would puzzle the calendar and embarrass the undertaker, for I am told that both of us have already completed the respectable business of dying. Yet if letters can cross oceans, perhaps they may also cross that lesser boundary which divides the living from the historically inconvenienced.” (It should be noted that Valentino was 14 when Twain died in 1910.)
There’s also a seven-page short story entitled “Bull Rider,” supposedly written by a “Marty Lombard.” “The bus coughed me out somewhere past Amarillo, dust in my teeth and a sky that stretched out so wide it felt like it was laughing at me,” it begins. “I had a duffel bag, two shirts, a paperback of The Sea Wolf with the spine cracked like an old man’s knuckles, and the kind of hunger you don’t fix with food. They said there was a rodeo in town… one of those blinking, half-real places where men go to get thrown and call it glory.”
Audio essays like Last Testament of Frank James and Aaron Burr: On the Art of Survival are also posted, weeks after Dylan posted snippets on his Instagram page. The audio, at least, seems to have been generated by AI.
Needless to say, we have some questions: What exactly does “curated by Bob Dylan” mean here? Is he both Marty Lombard and Herbert Foster? Is there really an audience for a nearly hour-long audio essay in the voice of Wild Bill Hickok? Was AI used to write any of this text? Who are his collaborators on this project? Why isn’t his official website linking to this? Will he ever post something even tangentially related to his actual music? Wouldn’t his rabid fanbase prefer to pay a monthly charge for concert downloads and studio outtakes as opposed to this… esoteric content?
We’ll continue to monitor the Patreon and see if we can answer any of these questions. In the meantime, Dylan is six shows into an extensive United States tour. Early shows were marred by audio problems related to the placement of his microphone, but they finally seem to have been worked out. The set is still built around songs from Dylan’s 2020 LP Rough and Rowdy Ways, but there have been a few surprises, including the 1989 Oh Mercy cut “Man in the Long Black Coat” and Eddie Cochran’s 1958 classic “Nervous Breakdown.” There’s not a single song in the set that pre-dates Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident, but he does play “All Along The Watchtower.”
The tour continues Monday night at the Genesee Theatre in Waukegan, Illinois. During his downtime, maybe Dylan will break out his typewriter, embody the spirit of Marty Lombard, and give us another “unsent letter” between two historical figures who never actually met.
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny in a split image
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny Dealt With Trump Quietly. It’s a Smart Move
Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny are both major superstars — and they’ve shared some parallels in their careers and discographies for several years. Now, they’re even using the same playbook to deal with taunts and baiting from Donald Trump and the White House’s social media teams.
Since Trump took office during his second term, he and his administration have been using social media as part of their communication strategy. The propaganda-like, rage-bait-style clips often lean into internet culture and use popular music to make light of Trump’s most egregious actions, like his immigration policy and war-hungry foreign policy.
Olivia Rodrigo, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, and Noah Kahan are just some of the artists who have had their music used in these videos without their permission — and vehemently spoken out against these actions and against the president. In the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration seems to have wanted to provoke a response from two of the world’s biggest superstars: Bad Bunny and Swift.
On July 30, the official White House TikTok used “La Mudanza” for a particularly tone-deaf video about immigration that celebrated the number of deportations under Trump. A week later, a video with text that said, “mood because it’s August and Donald Trump is your president” set to Swift’s “August” was uploaded by Team Trump, the president’s official campaign account. The caption was an overt provocation: “I’m sure Taylor Swift is going to be super excited we used her song,” it read. Days later, another clip from the same account featured an edited version of Swift’s Red album cover with text that said, “Did you know that Taylor Swift wrote a whole album about the color of the Republican Party?”
Neither musician has released a public statement denouncing the use of their music in Trump’s videos. Instead, two of the world’s biggest superstars quietly removed their songs from videos posted by official accounts linked to the Trump administration. (It’s unclear if there is a TikTok feature that allows selective sound muting on videos or if the respective teams reached out to the social media accounts directly.) The tracks are still available for other TikTok accounts to use in their videos, making their silence a pointed — and smart — approach. Both Bad Bunny and Swift seem to recognize the president and his administration’s tactics for what they are: antagonizing moves that keep the Trump conversation centered on his social media presence, rather than his actual policies and the harm they commit. Why would they add their star power to the conversation and stoke the flames when that’s exactly what the White House appears to want?
Some people argue that celebrities should wield their platform to denounce Trump at any chance if they are truly not politically aligned with his MAGA politics. But because they hold so much influence, these superstars need to be strategic about how they use it.
Benito, in particular, has been incredibly outspoken about his politics. He stood on two of the world’s biggest stages and used them to voice pro-immigration messages, denounce Trump’s policies, and highlight Puerto Rico as it struggles with the effects of U.S. imperialism. “Before I say, ‘Thank God,’ I’m going to say, ‘ICE out,’” the Puerto Rican superstar said at the 2026 Grammys. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” Last summer, Bad Bunny’s music video for “Nuevayol” used a voice that sounds a lot like the president’s to deliver a pro-immigrant message. “I made a mistake. I want to apologize to the immigrants in America. I mean the United States. I know America is the whole continent,” the voice bellows out of a Seventies radio toward the end of the video. “I want to say that this country is nothing without the immigrants.”
Fans were convinced that Benito would speak out against the official White House TikTok account when it used one of his most political songs. But commenting on the video would only blow up the discussion for a wider audience. When Rodrigo, Perry, Grande, and Kahan made public comments, spokespeople for the White House used the opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric. “We’ll say this one last time: what’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous are the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens,” Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Rolling Stone after Grande spoke out. It’s the antithesis of what Benito said during his Grammys speech this year: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Swift, on the other hand, has dealt with Trump and the right-wing’s instigations for years, each one crazier than the last. The TikTok videos from the last week aren’t even the first time that the administration has used the singer’s music for social media videos. Last fall, both the official White House TikTok account and Team Trump used songs from Swift’s then-newly released The Life of a Showgirl in separate videos. One plucked the lyrics “pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes” from “The Fate of Ophelia” to celebrate Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and the first and second ladies. The others boasted about Trump by using “Father Figure” and honored Melania Trump’s Patriot of the Year award with “Opalite.” As of Aug. 10, the audio is not available under all of these specific videos.
The pop superstar has not spoken publicly about these instances. But she has made her disdain for Trump clear. Over the years, Swift has criticized Trump’s autocratic leadership. On X, she wrote “we will vote you out” and endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 and 2024 elections, respectively. In 2019, Swift told Rolling Stone, “There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it.”
Even though she’s shared her liberal viewpoints on issues like abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and racial inequality, Swift has still faced ridiculous claims of being MAGA-aligned and folding in right-wing dog whistles to her music — and that’s without ever naming Trump. If Swift were to make a statement about her music being used by the Trump administration, the attention-seeking president would absolutely revel in it. Getting Swift and Bad Bunny to weigh in is exactly the type of headline grabber he would love to draw attention from his remarkably unpopular presidency.