After ignoring it or using it impersonally, at the end of September Bob Dylan surprised everyone by starting to post personal notes on X (formerly Twitter) (we wrote about it here).
In one of his latest posts, Dylan denied the rumor that when you meet him you can't look him in the eye. In another tweet he explained that he went to see Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds at the Accor Arena in Paris on the tour of Wild God: «I was very struck by a song called Joy where he sings: “We have all felt too many sorrows, now is the time for joy”. I thought to myself: “Yes, that's right”.
When asked on the subject by a fan, in his Red Hand Files Nick Cave explained that he didn't know Dylan was present at the concert. «I'm happy to see Bob on X, while many on the left have done a Twitterectomy and gone to Bluesky. It seemed perverse to me, but in an admirable Dylan way. I really think it's a time for joy and not pain. There was such an excess of desperation over the elections that one couldn't help but wonder whether politics had swallowed up everything.”
According to Cave, the obsession with politics and political leaders has meant that “barriers have been erected that have prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely resembling the spirit, the sacred or the transcendent, the holy place where the joy. I am proud to have been on tour with the Bad Seeds and to have offered, with a rock concert, an antidote to this desperation.”
