Say what you will about his aching croak of a singing voice, but at 68 Bob Dylan is still relevant, even on Twitter. For some time now I've been following @BobDylanSays, which delivers his lyrics as hourly one-liners that seem to comment with oracular brilliance on the tweets I receive before or after them.
Consider, for example, this week's juxtaposition of an update on health care reform from Boston.com chief @dabeard with a comment from the bard:
As usual, Bob takes the long view.
Dylan can be concise ("Blowing in the Wind") or verbose ("Desolation Row"), but I would not have predicted him to be at home in the 140-characters-at-a-time format of Twitter. And in fact his official @bobdylan feed has not been updated since Jan. 30.
@BobDylanSays describes its method thusly: "Every Bob Dylan song line-by-line. 1 line/hr until all have been tweeted. After each song, BobDylanSays-bot chooses next one at random." At the moment, it has almost 10,500 followers, compared to 15,200 for @bobdylan.
Like any great artist, Dylan can shine his brilliance on even the most mundane topics, such as the Red Sox and their problems aligning their current corps of position players...
Mostly, though, he does tend to look at weightier matters, such as war and peace...
...or relations between the sexes:
At times, his clairvoyance is almost unsettling, as with this recent tweet from a New York Times media reporter who'd just flown out of California:
Oddly, he seems to spend a lot of time thinking about journalism, or maybe, ahem, that's because of my selection of twitterers to follow...
Cool, right? Sometimes he even seems to tweet in the voices of the people he's talking about, as with this late night TV host:
Once, when Boston music writer @davidgweininger paraphrased a line from one of his songs, @BobDylanSays had already tweeted about his profile picture, in what seems a bit of "Positively 4th Street"-style snark:
Of course, only one out of 20 or so @BobDylanSays tweets works even obliquely in this visionary fashion. I suppose it's possible that this is all coincidence, like a million monkeys with typewriters eventually banging out "Hamlet." But what am I to think when he even knows what weather we are experiencing:
I dropped an email to the creator of @BobDylanSays, and I'll let you know what I hear back.
And of course you can follow me on Twitter @jbnbpt.
Just followed @BobDylan says. 1st juxtaposition:
# BobDylanSays
As I looked across the fields.
# BostonTweet BostonTweet
Roberta Gibb was the first woman to run the full Boston Marathon in 1966 - she did not run officially & hid in the bushes before the race.
Posted by: Mawazz | March 25, 2010 at 10:52 PM
Bob Dylan certainly still is relevant on twitter! Check out this Bob Dylan Twitter Pulse Monitor mini-app I created: http://bit.ly/aUd1rr
Posted by: Gcieslik | March 26, 2010 at 10:06 AM