Music

Bob Dylan joins TikTok — just in time for TikTok to be banned

The musician is making the most of the app in what could be its final days

Bob Dylan is on TikTok. Get him while you can. Image by Getty/Canva

By PJ Grisar January 17, 2025

It must be tough being an iconoclast. The temptation to join with the popular taste must be resisted. This could mean you are a visionary, arriving early at an alternative trend, or, to quote Bob Dylan, “too late, too late, too late, etc.” to catch on to the latest thing.

This tension between tradition and forward movement is at the crux of the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, but, even more so, it’s the story of the singer’s relationship with social media. This week, I mean TikTok.

Yes, following Dylan’s strange musings on X (formerly Twitter), the Nobel laureate, perhaps seizing on his new notoriety courtesy of Gen Z matinee idol Timothée Chalamet, joined the short form video app Wednesday, mere days before the Supreme Court upheld a ruling that the app be sold by its Chinese parent company or be banned in the United States.

Dylan’s maiden post included a montage of his various eras set to “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “Hurricane” with a caption that invited scrollers to “explore the world of Bob Dylan, now on TikTok.”

The text may well have read “hear the musical stylings of Robert Zimmerman, now on the bandshell of the Titanic.”

One may be tempted to dismiss this late entry to a doomed medium as the work of an old-timer who’s lost touch (or more likely a younger person who handles his socials). For most artists of a certain age, I would accept that reasoning, but those who know Dylan know better: This is yet another masterpiece by music’s premier troll.

Don’t take my word for it. Dylan has responded to comments on his first video.

To a user who said “you’ve got 30 minutes king,” Dylan replied with footage of himself at a press conference saying “Good God, I must leave right away.”

To another who pleaded “bob dylan save tiktok,” he responded with a clip from his performance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, responding to the crowd “Yes, yes. I hear you well. I think you have the wrong man.”

Dylan may not think he’s the man for the moment, but I’d venture to say that’s not because he’s tardy to the party, but was in fact a founder.

Take a look at the video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and tell me, as Dylan flips through those poster boards, he isn’t inventing the act of scrolling. What are his hits that became standards but the original “sounds” repurposed by so many on TikTok. What were these looks if not a predecessor to Gen Z fashion.

Dylan is right at home on TikTok — it’s just too bad the house is for sale, or, worse, condemned.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO