Over the past few months, Bob Dylan has been baffling fans with surreal posts on his official social media platforms. It started in September when he Tweeted out a birthday message to a mysterious “Mary Jo,” and continued with posts about everything from Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans to Nick Cave’s 2024 song “Joy” and Lon Chaney’s 1927 silent film The Unknown. The fun moved over to Instagram about a month ago when he started uploading vintage clips of artists like Bobby Darin and Les Paul alongside scenes from classic films and TV shows like Elmer Gantry and The Twilight Zone.
But his Instagram posts took a very unexpected turn on Wednesday evening when he left his usual realm of classic works from the middle of the 20th Century and took his 1.1 million Instagram to a Machine Gun Kelly freestyle at an Orlando, Florida, record shop in 2016. Nobody was more surprised to see it than Machine Gun Kelly himself.
“Cool moment that just happened,” MGK said in a video on his Instagram stories. “I’m in my conversation pit in my house having a whole discussion about, ‘Am I doing the right thing? Is this the right direction for this album? I’m questioning it. And in the same breath that I’m questioning it, someone goes, ‘Bob Dylan just posted a video of you.’ And I’m like, ‘There must be another Bob Dylan. Whatever.’ We got to his Instagram, he did post a video. I’m like…Just the originator of doing everything opposite of what people wanted him to do, randomly posting a video of me back in the day rapping in a vinyl shop. I’m just like, ‘What the fuck?’ Just trust the signs, man. That was so cool. I’m so grateful. So random.”
This poses some questions: What exactly is this “conversation pit” in Machine Gun Kelly’s house? Is this a figurative pit or a literal one? How will he learn from Dylan’s example of “doing everything opposite of what people expected?” Might he do his own version of The Basement Tapes now? Will he find Jesus and do his take on Slow Train Coming? Could a Traveling Wilbury’s-style supergroup alongside Jelly Roll, blackbear, Travis Barker, and Yungblud be his next move?
Most of all, we want to know how Dylan stumbled upon this random video of Machine Gun Kelly. Did one of his grandkids show it to him? Now that he’s done with the Frank Sinatra albums, will he move on to the catalog of MGK? Could we get Bloody Valentine: The MGK Sessions, where Dylan puts his spin on “Bad Things,” “Lonely Road,” and “I Think I’m OKAY?”
Dylan resumes his tour on May 25 at the Tulsa Theatre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Maybe MGK can come out for a duet on “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” That obviously feels impossible, but who would have predicted any of this social media activity just a few months ago?
