Bob Dylan Fires Back at Critics and Pundits About His China Shows

If you’ve followed Bob Dylan for any length of time, you know that his Bob-ness is actually a reserved person that never speaks much during his shows and has not been as vocal about issues as most people would like him to be.
Much has been said and written about his adventures playing Beijing over the past 12 months with lots of negative and speculative information. Well, he’s had it apparently and he feels strongly enough about the issue to come out in a rare rare rare letter to the fans:

http://www.bobdylan.com/news/my-fans-and-followers

Of particular interests are these passages:

Allow me to clarify a couple of things about this so-called China controversy which has been going on for over a year. First of all, we were never denied permission to play in China. This was all drummed up by a Chinese promoter who was trying to get me to come there after playing Japan and Korea.

and

As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.

It’s quite a well written and put together post that sheds a lot of light on the situation and put certain speculations and assumptions to rest. and you got it straight from the horse’s mouth