On the surface, there’s very little in common between Bob Dylan and Donald Trump. One is a revered musician, rock’s poet laureate; the other is a fractious politician, who is just about to start his second term as President of the United States. That said, in this strange world of ours, there are always joins, no matter how spurious.
Take a shared love of Scotland – Bob Dylan owned a hotel in Speyside, while Donald Trump’s portfolio includes a golf course on the Moray coast, not too far away.
Equally, Trump’s first election victory was greeted online by Dylan fans who twisted lines from the songwriter’s work to mock him. A trending topic on Twitter (now known as ‘x’), comments such as “Like A Trolling Stone #dylansongsabouttrump” are still, sadly, all too true.
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To our knowledge, Bob Dylan has only mentioned Donald Trump once – passing reference in his book Chronicles. As ever, the gnomic wisdom of Dylan is perceptive – he wrote:
“I mean, who’s the last individual performer that you can think of – Elton John, maybe? I’m talking about artists with the willpower not to conform to anybody’s reality but their own. Patsy Cline and Billy Lee Riley. Plato and Socrates, Whitman and Emerson. Slim Harpo and Donald Trump. It’s a lost art form. I don’t know who else does it beside myself, to tell you the truth.”
Or perhaps another line from Bob Dylan serves the present occasion: “Steal a little and they throw you in jail / Steal a lot and they make you a king.”
Bob Dylan is currently on tour in the UK, and will play three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall next week.
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