Lectures From The Grave sees Bob Dylan “curate” fictional stories from historical rebels. I think. It’s a headscratcher..
Patreon’s where you go to throw money at your terminally broke mate’s podcast or, at a stretch, down Amanda Palmer’s insatiable gullet, not to cop the historical musings of a genuine legend of American music. There was a time when you could take that as read, but that time is a -changing as Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan, 84, has launched a new project, the odd and extremely AI-coded Lectures from the Grave, on the platform.
Dylan announced the thing on social media on Sunday, May 29, touring it as a way to hear “the dead speak” and “a living archive of lectures from the grave, letters never sent, and original short stories curated by Bob Dylan”It promises such delights as “The Last Testament Of Frank James”, “Aaron Burr On The Art Of Survival”, and “The Life And Death Of Wild Bill”, and for a mere five bucks a month, you can have unlimited access to such edifying wonders. I kind of dig the old school snake oil hucksterism thing they’ve got going on here, I won’t lie.
But it’s worth noting that this is being “curated” by Dylan, not written, and indeed the Patreon attributes pieces to pseudonymous contributors with pen names like Herbert Foster and Marty Lombard. It looks like a lot of the content – if not all – is created with Generative AI – and not too effectively, as Consequence Of Sound noted in their review.
Personally, I just can’t see the point of the whole exercise, except to generate a few thousand Dylan Goes Agentic jokes, but at the time of writing over 2400 Patrons can, so if you too have a strong yen to see what Grandad Harmonica gets out of the hallucination machine, have at it.
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